For the past five years, YouTube juggernaut Cinema Sins has become one of the major voices in online film discussion. Their main channel, which consists almost exclusively of their patented Sin videos where the team go through a chosen movie scene-by-scene pointing out continuity errors, poor filmmaking decision and otherwise picking it apart, has over 7 million subscribers and new videos (released twice-a-week) typically hit 2 million views in a matter of weeks (and have a very strong like to dislike ratio). What we're saying is, they're big. But are they a good thing? A recent debate about the channel sparked by some major Hollywood names has called their underlying ethos into question.Shortly after their latest video on Kong: Skull Island, which spends a good 18 minutes taking down the MonsterVerse throwback, went live, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts took to Twitter to call out the channel, citing several mistakes and otherwise snide comments before concluding they were bad for film discourse, favoring nitpicking over analysis, and offered little in the way of actual entertainment. He was backed up by several other prominent filmmakers, including Gary Whitta who echoed statements they'll eventually create a barrier for the actual enjoyment of movies.Today we want to take a deep, rational look at this and see what Cinema Sins is trying to do, how they've changed over the past five years, and what their impact on film criticism is.

How Did Cinema Sins Get So Big?

The Cinema Sins channel was created on 11 Dec 2012 and swiftly started uploading videos targeting the latest releases - first up was The Amazing Spider-Man, followed by The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Prometheus, Hunger Games etc. What's immediately noticeable going back this far is the length of these videos; those first five are all under four minutes long and seemingly constructed with time as a factor; the narrator (Jeremy Scott) talks with such speed as if trying to get through the movie in a cheekily defined time limit. They are very, very different from the videos being uploaded today - shorter, leaner, more focused and, above all, openly comedic.

There's no pretense in these early videos that, despite their authoritative "Everything Wrong With" title, Cinemas Sins is a comedy channel. The speed, the dry delivery and above all the writing (many of the long-running gags, like "scene does not contain a lap dance" or "Prometheus school of running away from things" originate in those early videos) are all to ramp up the humor. In Everything Wrong With Cinema Sins In 3 Minutes Or Less (a self-deprecating bonus video released just six months after channel's creation, highlighting their meteoric rise) they even state "We put our videos in the Film & Animation category instead of Comedy because we've already given our full allotment of f*cks about people who don't understand sarcasm." Even the sin counter, which is rarely if ever representative of the creator's opinions of the movie at hand, felt like part of the joke. It put movies of all descriptions against each other without any grounding.

The channel's evolved a lot since then. There have been various other ventures - they started split-screen "Conversations About Movies" and Jeremy has his own, sparsely updated channel, while spinoffs Music Video Sins and Brand Sins all go strong, as does new podcast Sincast - but they're all centered on the main series, which is now a far cry from what it once was. Videos run longer (some have been done in two parts and most brush with 20 minutes) and the sins themselves are delivered with more dialogue and in a slower, more sardonic manner.

Now the videos are longer for several reasons. The simplest is that YouTube's algorithm now favors longer, continuously-viewed content rather than maximizing clicks as a few years prior - it pays to do one ten-minute video rather than ten one-minute vids. Cinema Sins are riding the wave, with their success giving them an audience who will happily sit through longer content. But the tonal changes are separate, and lead us to the complaints at hand.

This is an enterprise built on the direct mocking of movies that took years to make. That open one-sided angling, taking down even the writers' favorite films, is going to rub some directors up the wrong way. And so, to address Vogt-Roberts' complaints, we need to figure out what exactly Cinema Sins is trying to do.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert

Is Cinema Sins Film Criticism?

We don't have the time to have an in-depth discussion on the purpose of art criticism and the difference between commercial and academic writings, so for the sake of simplicity let's begin by defining film criticism as a piece of work reacting to and analyzing a movie.

When it started, Cinema Sins was part of what felt like a new wave of film criticism that moved beyond academic essays and even traditional reviews (written or video) into a sort of internet-defined form. This is why they're so often compared (and mistaken) for Honest Trailers; Screen Junkies' banner series rose to prominence at a similar time (HT a few months earlier) and each boasted a distinct voiceover gimmick. They even did a crossover event for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 where Sins did the Honest Trailer and SJ the Sins.

There is a major difference in the two companies right from inception, though. Whereas Sins is the product of friends chasing a single idea, Screen Junkies is a subsidiary of Defy Media that set out to explicitly build its brand; go back to the start of the channel and you find a slew of playful movie-themed videos attempting to tap into the zeitgeist, with Honest Trailers emerging as a success almost by accident after a single video mocking the 3D re-release of The Phantom Menace. And while SJ has since evolved into a massive network with multiple shows, a second news channel (formerly Clevver Movies) and a paid subscription service, as well as fan meetups and SDCC events, Sins remains at its core the same thing; they actually have more subscribers, but that only highlights the different types of success the pair get.

We've made such a point of the Honest Trailer parallels because despite being disconnected, in the early days they each elevated the other, creating this new brand of criticism infused with humor and a balance of traditional film theory observations and more nitpicky, nerd-focused ideas; the sort of things that movie fans would notice and mock incessantly yet never allowed to take away from the film. Take the obvious stunt double in Terminator 2: Judgement Day - it's clearly not Arnie but that doesn't take away from the film (although, perhaps in reaction to this culture, James Cameron has fixed it for the 3D re-release).

What Cinema Sins (Or Its Viewers) May Be Missing

And here's where the problems with Cinema Sins come in. The way they're presented is as complete, pure criticism but they only do the first step of our definition - react to the films. There's no analysis - the best we get is an interesting comment that reduces the Sin count - and so by itself never goes beyond basic, often empty observations.

This is where the length changes have had a concerted impact. A two-minute video mocking the silly moments of Marc Webb's Spider-Man reboot - essentially an energized version of IMDb's goof list - is fun but when it's ten times the length and the substance is the same we get a contradiction. It's too long to justify the lightness, so appears to be attempting to be of more worth than it perhaps is. The Sin counter doesn't help either; as already established, it's intentionally broken, but in an age of film fandom dominated by quantifying quality (see the prevalence of Rotten Tomatoes despite everyone knowing its failings) gets more onus that it deserves.

If not criticism, then what is Cinema Sins? As Vogt-Roberts has stated it's hard to call satire as there's nothing to be satirizing except the concept of obsessive fandom, and if that is the goal then it's a far too involved joke that misses the point of dissection. At best it's still in that firm light comedy arena - a nerd-inspired nitpick orgy - taking us back to their "people who don't understand sarcasm" defense from 2013. With that in mind, they're delivering on their promise.

The danger, then, is that the form suggests something more. And so we must ask, is it a funny joke?

The Danger of Nitpicking

Cinema Sins on Star Wars The Force Awakens

Vogt-Roberts and his responders raised another point - how it influences the vernacular. And here is where the confusion over criticism really matters; it is possible audiences will start thinking that finding continuity errors and minor flubs are comparable to analyzing the movie-making process. The things Cinema Sins are raising individually are minor, but in certain cases can add up to a bigger problem - if every action sequence is done in thirteen cuts a la Taken 3 you have a limp thriller. However, they never take their evidence and make a conclusion, meaning you're getting half-hearted criticism presented as a full take.

And it's already seeping into and dominate the cultural discussion. We're seeing nitpicky concerns - those that aren't movie breaking - increasingly treated as such; it's true of many, many movies, but in particular every new Star Wars gets lambasted for "oversights" that are just as prevalent in the original trilogy. It's not all Cinema Sins' fault - they're to some degree just a product of this way of thinking - but they've become the poster child.

Let's use Spider-Man: Homecoming as a counter-example. That film slots right into the MCU yet in its opening moments creates a major timeline plot hole (it's set eight years after The Avengers, despite only four having passed in-universe). We wrote an in-depth exploration of this quirk in the continuity-obsessed franchise, but never leveled it as a major flaw with the film itself; across our varied coverage of Homecoming we took in a variety of other aspects and even revisited the plot hole to drawn attention how even something seemingly obsessive could help get to the core of a creative argument. That is criticism and analysis because it acknowledges the full scope and assesses importance.

A good comparison point here is Cinema Wins. What at first looks like a thinly veiled ripoff of Sins is, in fact, one of the strongest outlets for real, in-depth film criticism on YouTube. They take the same approach as Sins, but focus on the positives, finding examples of strong concept, director delivery and more no matter the movie, and then tie everything together in an eloquent, measured conclusion. It's a positive spin on the typical internet discussion and shows how the format can be used to make real statements - it just needs that ability to tie it all together with an understanding of what each minor point represents.

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Cinema Sins isn't an inherently bad idea, in part proven by its initial and continued success. And there's no way that any of the people behind it aren't intense movie fans (their response to this controversy sums it up) However, there is a danger that its one-track focus even as it continues to expand loses it the original endearing snark and damages the notion of in-depth analysis. It's like the ever-present misreading of Rotten Tomatoes; they have a powerful platform, and both them and we need to make sure it's used right.