Spill.com

» see spill.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

spill.com answers today. There is a social app behind it, launched in 2023, with a waitlist form and an animated wave running across the bottom of the page. It has nothing to do with what is buried here, and there is no notice anywhere on it that something used to live at this address.

The Spill.com in this grave was a movie site out of Austin, assembled in 2006 by Korey Coleman from a cable-access show called The Reel Deal. Coleman's own description of the show was ten years of goofing around, like a poker night that happened on Wednesdays. The format that came out of it is the thing worth remembering: the crew reviewed films as animated cartoon versions of themselves, under aliases, and then put the unedited argument out as a podcast.

The cartoons were the front door and the audio was the actual product. It won best film podcast at the Podcast Awards in 2009 and again in 2012, and by the middle of 2013 it was carrying over fifty thousand registered members. There was an annual convention as well, called Spill Dot Con.

This one needed an American release calendar to be worth following and I did not have one. In 2008 I was on TTNet at home in Ankara and the films these people were shouting about opened in Turkey weeks later, when they opened at all. An English-language film podcast as a weekly habit was never something I picked up, and by the time podcasts were a normal thing to have a habit about, this site had already been switched off.

~ the record ~

~ the crew ~

Five people did the reviews and everybody except Coleman worked under an alias: Chris Cox as Cyrus, Martin Thomas as Leon, Tony Guerrero as Co-Host 3000, C. Robert Cargill as Carlyle. Cargill is the one whose later career is easiest to point at, because he went on to co-write Sinister and then Doctor Strange. That reads strangely against the day job, which was a cartoon avatar arguing about summer releases.

MIVA Inc financed the site in 2007 and Hollywood.com bought it in 2009, under R&S Investments. What the acquisition purchased was five personalities and a microphone, which is not a thing a media holding company knows how to keep hold of.

~ what it became ~

On 6 December 2013 Coleman announced the site was closing and said Hollywood.com had made the call. On 20 December spill.com started redirecting to the Hollywood.com homepage, which is how most acquisitions on this site finish. Martin Thomas put the reason plainly afterwards: unless they could make a lot of money, there was only ever going to be so long that an owner would pay them to tell jokes on the internet. Coleman said he had gotten eight good years out of the company and had no bitterness about any of it.

What happened next is the unusual part. In July 2014, seven months after the redirect, the same people were back as Double Toasted, funded by a Kickstarter that took $133,860 against a thirty thousand dollar goal. Chris Cox went off and built OneOfUs.net. The Double Toasted channel was still running in 2026 with more than three hundred thousand subscribers, which means the audience outlived the website by over a decade. Hollywood.com bought a domain, and the thing it wanted had never been in the domain.

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