A Fair Fight?

Big budget, high profile films like SUPERGIRL now face a problem such films have never faced in the past. It’s called YouTube. If you released a blockbuster 20 years ago, sure, word of mouth spread fast via text and voice, and that would affect the film’s performance. 40 years ago, word would have spread face to face and via voice over static phone lines. If the film was bad, it would have not been negatively affected by word of mouth anywhere near as quickly as 20 years ago, let alone now, when people hit social as they leave the cinema and destroy or endorse a film according to their tastes and the film’s relative merits – or not.

Fair enough, you might say. Ultimately a film’s destiny should always be decided by audiences, and people can make up their own independent minds, right? Not really.

Audiences are, after all, the consumers of the product. Films are made for us and no one else – not film producers, not directors, not film stars, and certainly not film critics.

But influencers on YouTube are not the audience. They are the shapers of audience opinion. And now that influence is on a huge scale, and available 24/7 anywhere there's internet.

If influencers’ opinions are moulded by their biases and agendas (which of course they are), films that might otherwise have made a profit can now fail even before release. SUPERGIRL is such a film, whereas DISCLOSURE DAY failed (relative term) after its release.

Don’t get me wrong: I think that if films are not well crafted, they don’t deserve success. Success should be based on merit. But all films deserve a chance of finding success without being chopped off at the knees by YouTube influencers with an axe to grind before they are released, or shortly afterwards. Audiences should be free to go see a film with no expectations. They should be able to receive the film with an open mind.

But influencers like YouTube’s nerdrotic and The Critical Drinker – and hundreds of others – have a huge effect on their viewers’ opinions. The Critical Drinker has 2.47 million subscribers, and nerdrotic 1.28 million subscribers. YouTube channel subscribers are a small fraction of the channel’s viewers. The Critical Drinker’s video ‘Supergirl - A Total Cinematic Calamity’ (25 Jun 2026) has had 2,639,298 views as of today (30/06/26). That’s some reach.

While I’m a big fan of free speech, perhaps writing off films (and yes, most big budget films these days are generally dreadful) before they’ve had a chance to speak for themselves is questionable. Yes, we can all take influencers’ opinions with a pinch of salt, but there isn’t enough salt to go around: we are all influenced subconsciously without being aware of it. Our opinions of things is tribal – which brings us to the subject of politics in modern films.

Let’s not even go there.

So YouTube movie influencers. Is it propaganda or free speech? Is it a bit of both?

Of course it is.

Is destroying films that once might have had a fighting chance before the internet became a thing fair? Or is it deserved because if film makers made good films and screenwriters wrote good screenplays, influencers would pass that quality on to those they influence?

Let me know what you think.