Comicbook.com recently ran an article which detailed a viral video in which a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 from The Terminator (1984), is stuck to the back of a car – with the tail-lights fitting into the Gargoyles of the image, to glow red.
Just increased my car value by 1 billion percent pic.twitter.com/YBV4j2dYNn
— Rudy Willingham (@RudyWillingham) July 30, 2020
Though the video in itself is great, and an instantly trending moment on social media for fans of Arnold and Terminator – what I found really interesting was a sentence in the article near the end, which stated:
“Stay tuned for details on the future of the Terminator series.”
comicbook.com
Now, you could take that statement at face value, due to the fact that comicbook.com covers all things pop-culture related – but the disclosure featured at the bottom of the article gives that statement a whole new spin…
The disclosure reads:
“ComicBook is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.”
comicbook.com
This line adds legitimacy to the above statement and suggests that comicbook.com have an inside track on the Terminator franchise, let me explain…
For anyone who doesn’t know; ViacomCBS also owns Paramount Pictures, and Paramount own a share of the Terminator franchise – with that studio being heavily involved with both Terminator Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate.
Why is that interesting? Well, as someone who has visited comicbook.com a good number of times over the years; I can tell you that this disclosure is a fairly recent addition to the website.
It appears that, as of April 2018, ViacomCBS took ownership of comicbook.com, something which, strangely, seemed to go under the radar.
“This morning I noticed that CBS Interactive has taken ownership of many Comic Book related domain names that were owned by ComicBook.com, LLC d/b/a Pop Culture Media. CBS Interactive also took ownership of PopCulture.com, which was owned by Pop Culture Media.”
dotweekly.com
Whether the takeover had been in the works for a long period of time or not, by the time that Paramount Pictures’ Terminator: Dark Fate was released – the change of hands had definitely been finalized.
Meaning? That by the time comicbook.com wrote their glowing review of Terminator: Dark Fate… that website was under ownership of Viacom, and, by extension, by Paramount Pictures.
So, comicbook.com was writing reviews for movies that its parent company also owned…
ViacomCBS also owns Metacritic (formerly owned by CNET – and funnily enough, CNET was also acquired by ViacomCBS) – Metacritic is a website which claims to be a review aggregator, though the reviews for Terminator: Dark Fate seemed (at least in the first few months) to tip the balance of opinion in favour of positive, with middling or neutral reviews being added to the positive ratio for outcome – regardless of the actual content of the review – good, bad or indifferent.
As Fans (and customers), can we really trust websites which clearly have vested interests?
With ViacomCBS (and therefore Paramount) owning comicbook.com and Metacritic – are the reviews ever really going to be honest and unbiased?
Does this make you see comicbook.com and Metacritic differently?
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