Paramount Stupidity
It seems as though Paramount Studios have decided to go out of their way to metaphorically spit in the faces of their movie fans. John Campea, who runs The Movie Blog, had his site shut down for 8 hours recently because Paramount found a picture from the upcoming Transformers Movie on his blog, and proceeded to go behind his back and contact John’s web host about it.
The site is now back up, and words have been exchanged between the various parties involved. To highlight the major issues in this situation, consider the following:
1) John (as well as Doug and I on the podcast) have been giving TONS of free promotion to the Transformers Movie for months, doing nothing but pumping up this movie in the eyes of potential fans. Paramount could not have paid for that kind of word-of-mouth publicity. Many people have commented on the site that they had little or no interest in this movie until John, Doug and I started talking about it. Why would Paramount want to kill that?
2) Going behind someone’s back is a dirty, underhanded way to deal with a problem. If you have something to work out with someone else, you approach them directly, and get it taken care of. This is something most people learn before they’re done highschool. Perhaps Paramount needs to spend some more time in a grade 9 ethics class.
3) This website is currently John’s only means of income. By having it shut down for almost 8 hours, Paramount effectively robbed John of 8 hours’ worth of pay, and thus far have made no offer to compensate him for that loss. I don’t know about you, but if someone took away 8 hours’ worth of my income when I was going out of my way to help out their company FOR FREE, I would be mighty upset.
4) This story has been picked up by hundreds of other web sources in the last 24 hours, and is currently the number one dug story in the Entertainment category at digg.com. Chances are that this move by Paramount will generate far more bad publicity for them then any good publicity that The Movie Blog had generated already. That’s very bad news for Paramount, but potential good news for The Movie Blog, as the site is drawing huge attention from this turn of events.
5) This story has apparently got Doug Nagy very upset. As far as I know, this is one of the signs of the apocalypse. Better say your prayers, kids.
The full story (thus far) can be found at The Movie Blog.
