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YouTube To Follow Amazon By Screening Its Movies Inside Theaters (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Following YouTube's announcement last month that it intends to spend "hundreds of millions" on original content for Red, it's just unveiled plans for a YouTube-made movie that'll also be released in theaters. And unlike its previous effort, 2016's widely-regarded flop Lazer Team, this project has a serious name attached to it: Susan Sarandon. The film, Vulture Club, is already in post-production. It stars Oscar-winning Susan Sarandon as an emergency room nurse whose son has been kidnapped by terrorists, and after being abandoned by the government, finds help in the unlikeliest of places. The thriller also stars Edie Falco of The Sopranos and Matt Bomer of Magic Mike, and is directed by Iranian-American Maryam Keshavarz, of Circumstance fame. Despite being slated for theatrical release, details on YouTube's plans to actually get the movie into theaters are scarce.
I know that it's difficult to discuss some stories without mentioning companies and products, but this just reads like regurgitated product marketing. It's definitely advertising on Engadget's part, though Slashdot seems to be happy to be enough of a useful idiot to play party to it as well. The summary contains a whole lot of information about this particular movie, but very little about what should be the real focus of the story, YouTube and other new media content platforms starting to get into the production business. The summary even points out how useless this is a story by stating "details on YouTube's plans to actually get the movie into theaters are scarce." Isn't it a journalists job to dig for that kind of information instead of just pushing thinly veiled ads on their readers?