The Dissolve

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

~ the goodbye ~

the dissolve sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember reading at the time. its run was two years long, all of it during a period when my browsing tabs were technical and turkish rather than american film criticism. i was not the kind of reader the dissolve was built for, and that is fine. the people it was built for read it loyally and then watched it close.

keith phipps and scott tobias launched the site on 10 july 2013, with most of the founding staff coming over from the av club where they had been the film team. pitchfork media, then still independent and known mostly for music coverage, was the publisher. the editorial pitch was long-form criticism of both new releases and the classics, sort of an internet version of film comment with a weekly retrospective and a regular podcast.

two years and one day later, on 8 july 2015, phipps posted that it was the last day the site would publish. the stated reason was the obvious one for any small independent publication in the post-2012 web ad market. the math did not work. the dissolve had built a reader cohort that respected its taste. it had not built a reader cohort big enough to keep the lights on.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

the staff were former av club hands: nathan rabin, genevieve koski, tasha robinson, noel murray, alongside phipps and tobias. they wrote with the slow seriousness of people who had spent the previous decade being squeezed into shorter and shorter web reviews and were finally allowed to write at length again. one metacritic analysis later found that the dissolve's scores averaged about 8.9 points lower than the metacritic norm across roughly fifteen hundred reviews. it was a tough room.

~ the long tail ~

after the site closed the same group started a podcast called the next picture show, structured around pairing a classic film with a current release and discussing how the two talked to each other. it ran for years past the dissolve itself and felt like the obvious continuation of the editorial voice. phipps and tobias kept writing elsewhere. pitchfork was sold to conde nast in 2015, the same year the dissolve closed, then folded into gq in 2024. the dissolve outlasted nobody, but the way it wrote about movies became a quiet reference point for the next generation of film newsletters.

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