At the peak of his popularity in the mid-2000s, Harry Knowles was making $700,000 a year through his self-proclaimed film nerd sanctuary Ain't it Cool News. No critic from now until the end of time will dream of collecting that sort of cash ever again. This astronomical success is, much more than any virtues of his own, a testament to the inestimable value of being in the right place at the right time. When Knowles founded Ain't it Cool in 1996, there was simply no competition; not even fellow early tech adopter Roger Ebert had the same magnitude of online presence that The King of Filmgeekdom commanded. Studios trembled in his shadow - a Knowles pan spelled certain devastation for a film, and his word is credited with the financial failure of such classics as Batman and Robin and Rollerball.
Here's the rub, though: Harry Knowles is a sexist manchild who, even at the height of his powers, was only able to generate dialogue amongst readers half his age. His "films are awesome!" credo holds its own valuable optimistic appeal, but in Knowles' case the awesomeness of a film is generally correlated to how much the studio heads kiss his ass at the junket before he watches it. Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I believe that people of dubious principle can mature with time and reflection. But what happens when you don't develop? What happens when those studios you once cowed grow savvy to how easily bought you are, how derelict your journalistic integrity is? What happens if you've been writing the same crass, nonsensical bullshit for the last seventeen years of your life? Feast upon this juicy morsel from his Blade 2 review, all the while remembering that this is how an actual person felt about Blade 2 (NSFW!):
