'Kong: Skull Island' Director Torches Snarky YouTube Critics

With over seven million subscribers, CinemaSins is one of the largest movie-related networks on YouTube. Its videos, which delight in pointing out mistakes both real and perceived in major motion pictures, rack up millions of views. The channel also attracts the ire of some of its targets, including Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who shredded the channel in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

CinemaSins creators Jeremy Scott and Chris Atkinson messed with the wrong monster when it uploaded a 20-minute video that pointed out nearly 150 alleged sins in the March blockbuster. Soon after, Vogt-Roberts posted a lengthy rebuttal to both the specific points raised by the video and the entire premise of CinemaSins’ work.

“These videos are now the length of TV pilots - where people tell actual stories,” he wrote, adding to a tweet that Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson wrote in response to the CinemaSins video about his 2012 film Looper. Notably, the old CinemaSins videos were less than three minutes, and now have expanded in both scope and snark.

Vogt-Roberts took exception to a number of points made by the video, pointing out their lapse in logic and lack of context:

For the most part, film critics agreed with him. Many chimed in with their own articles arguing against the sins of CinemaSins, and journalist-turned-screenwriter Gary Whitta called them bullies:

CinemaSins tried to downplay the criticism; thus far, this is its only response:

The video about Kong: Skull Island is below: