Issue Date: November 24, 2002
Sneak peeks
These sites satisfy the ultimate movie fan who just can't wait.
My son and I are big Harry Potter fans. He has worn his Harry Potter costume almost every day since Halloween. Online, we followed the making of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" as closely as we followed the plot of the movie when we saw it on opening day last week. We watched video clip interviews with actor Rupert Grint, viewed photos of the young cast at London press conferences and on "Oprah", and read how Richard Harris' recent death will affect future films in the series -- much of it back before director Peter Jackson yelled "That's a wrap!"
But it turns out our rabid obsession doesn't even get an "alpha fan" rating.
Alpha fan is the name that someone in Hollywood came up with for the growing number of people who track a film months (sometimes years) before its theatrical release. They are a fervent Internet fan base that nitpicks about casting choices and script changes, exchanges insider knowledge and gossip, and downloads screen savers. The group first gained attention in 1999 with "The Blair Witch Project"; that movie's success was due in part to pre-release Web buzz. As more emphasis is placed on opening weekend box office returns, this cybercommunity is gaining power.
That includes ex-library science expert Greg Dean Schmitz, the man behind Upcomingmovies.com. His site has logged 8 million hits so far this year. Yahoo Movies recently started hosting his site, but it's Schmitz's unique viewpoint that makes him so popular -- that, and the fact that you can search for future releases by title, genre, actor, director, screenwriter, distributor and release date. Each preview includes commentary on what the movie might be like.
Started in 1998 by three film geeks who thought the world needed a resource to help anticipate new releases, CountingDown.com was bought by the Dreamworks studio in 2000. But the site maintains its independence. "We get fans to go to press junkets, conferences or set visits and write it up," says co-founder Philip Nakov. The site includes a Web cam that field operatives hide in the bagels on movie sets. You can check out Jennifer Love Hewitt flashing a shot of her sexy backless dress on the set of "The Tuxedo" by searching for "bagel cam" from the main page.
When Senh V. Duong introduced rottentomatoes.com four years ago, he set out to create a system "that would link to all available reviews for each movie, attach a rating and quote to each and offer an aggregated rating." Click on the Tomato Picker to sort through more than 80,000 movies by telling it what genre, era, MPAA rating and Tomatometer rating you want.
DarkHorizons.com, founded by Garth Franklin, has been operating in Australia since 1996. You can follow links to a German-language site that has photos of the new Bond movie and read gossip about the upcoming "Star Trek" movie, "Nemesis". "One time, on the same day I got a scoop about the same movie from two different sources," Franklin says. "One was the janitor in a production company; the other was the president of the same company!"
-- Christina Wood
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