Criterion Predicts Your Year-End List Before Critics See the Film
The hot hand fallacy gets rehabilitated every few years because we desperately want streaks to mean something.
What's happening with 'Blue Heron' is the same mechanism applied to critical authority, except nobody's calling it fallacy.
Criterion's streaming platform lives in a market where Netflix, Apple, Max, and Disney Plus all claim to be curators. The only real differentiation is that Criterion positions itself as the arbiter of what's already important, not the investor betting on what could be.
When Criterion puts a film on the platform, subscribers interpret it as a pre-validated critical choice. And IndieWire, which survives on being first to declare winners, reports this placement as near-certain year-end inclusion. Other outlets, not wanting to miss a consensus that's forming, start mentioning the film. By December, the film shows up on lists not because critics independently believed it was great. Because the prediction created the conditions that made ignoring it professionally risky.
Criterion doesn't curate taste. Criterion manufactures the conditions under which taste becomes profitable for everyone except the audience.
”The missing piece that matters most — has the film actually screened for critics? Nobody's answering that question because answering it breaks the machinery. The year-end list prediction is the real product being sold here, not the film itself.
