The rise, fall and strange afterlife of Ain’t It Cool News — and what became of the writers who built film journalism’s first internet empire
There is a generation of people, now somewhere between forty and sixty, who can still recall the small, electric thrill of typing http://www.aintitcool.com into a browser in 1998 and waiting — through dial‑up, through a screech and a hiss — for the orange‑and‑Velma palette to load. There were no embargoes there. No press releases dressed up as news. No PR minder hovering off‑screen. Just a fat, bearded movie obsessive in Austin, Texas, telling you what Batman & Robin was actually like, days before the studio wanted you to know.
For a brief, dizzying stretch — call it 1997 to roughly 2007 — Harry Knowles and his ragtag confederation of pseudonymous “spies” ran the most influential movie site on Earth. Then they ran it into the ground. And then, in September 2017, the whole thing detonated.
This is the story of how it began, how it ended, and what happened to the people who once defined fan culture before fan culture devoured them.
The Bedroom Years
The origin story has been told so many times it has the burnished sheen of folklore. On January 24, 1996, a 24‑year‑old movie‑memorabilia dealer named Harry Jay Knowles tripped over a hose at a collectibles show in Austin and was crushed by a dolly loaded with 1,200 pounds of movie memorabilia. The accident left him partially paralyzed for roughly six months. Confined to bed in his father’s house, he taught himself to navigate the new World Wide Web, lurked in Usenet newsgroups, and — using insurance money he had received earlier from the death of his mother in a fire — bought a computer and started a website.
He named it after a line of dialogue spoken by John Travolta’s villain in John Woo’s Broken Arrow, which had opened in theaters that February. Ain’t It Cool News went live in 1996.
Knowles’ great innovation was almost embarrassingly simple. Hollywood was in the middle of its last era of total information control. Test screenings were sacred. Set visits were curated like state dinners. If you wanted to know whether a movie was good before it opened, you had to wait for Roger Ebert. Knowles, who had no press credentials, no journalism degree, and no particular interest in the conventions of either, simply asked his readers to tell him things. Production assistants did. Test‑audience members did. Studio interns did. Knowles published it all, often without verification, in a profanity‑laced, exclamation‑studded prose style that read like a 14‑year‑old’s diary if the 14‑year‑old had memorized every Roger Corman picture ever made.
The site exploded in the summer of 1997, when negative early reviews of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin leaked through AICN ahead of release. Studio executives blamed Knowles when the picture cratered. (More established critics savaged it just as thoroughly when it opened, but the narrative had been set.) People and Newsweek came calling. The Los Angeles Times ran a David Weddle profile in 1997 that helped make Knowles a national figure. By the early 2000s, AICN was generating roughly $700,000 a year in advertising revenue, according to a 2013 Hollywood Reporter investigation by Hal Espen and Borys Kit that remains the definitive accounting of the site’s finances.
Then came the talkbacks.
To anyone who lived in them, the AICN comment threads were a kind of digital wild west — sprawling, vicious, insular, sometimes brilliant, frequently appalling. They were the petri dish in which much of what we now call “fandom” — the obsessive cataloguing, the canon‑policing, the gleeful brutality toward perceived heretics — was first cultured at scale. A young Damon Lindelof, years before Lost, has spoken publicly about AICN being formative to his early film fandom. Peter Jackson, in the late ’90s, was sending the site dispatches from the New Zealand sets of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Quentin Tarantino wrote the foreword to Knowles’ 2002 memoir.
Knowles’ core staff was small, scattered, and almost entirely pseudonymous — a deliberate choice that, depending on which contributor you asked, was either a charming homage to Knowles’ love of comic‑book secret identities or a way to obscure that he sometimes lifted material from Usenet and repackaged it as insider scoop.
The names became their own minor folklore. Moriarty was a young Los Angeles‑based writer named Drew McWeeny. Quint was a Texas teenager named Eric Vespe, who joined the site at 16. Capone was Steve Prokopy, AICN’s Chicago editor for nearly two decades. Mr. Beaks was Jeremy Smith. Massawyrm was a screenwriter‑in‑waiting named C. Robert Cargill. Hercules the Strong, the site’s TV columnist, was so closely guarded that the New York Post‘s Page Six once ran an item speculating about his identity. (He is James Michael Kozak.) There was Nordling (Alan Cerny), Horrorella, Robogeek (Paul Alvarado‑Dykstra), and a direct‑to‑video action movie obsessive who simply went by Outlaw Vern.
Most of them were not paid. Many got nothing for years of nightly reviews and interviews but the implicit promise that being part of AICN would lead, somewhere, to something.
For some of them, it did.
The Cracks
The trouble began, as it usually does, with money — specifically, the question of who was getting it and from whom.
By 2000, the indie magazine Film Threat had published a multi‑part exposé called “Deconstructing Harry,” which methodically catalogued AICN’s ethical lapses: the studio‑funded set visits that produced wildly favorable reviews, the spectacularly bungled “scoop” of leaked Oscar nominees that turned out to be wrong (Knowles compounded the error by publishing the IP address of the source), and most damningly, an item in which Knowles raved about an unproduced screenplay by “Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan” without disclosing that McWeeny was, in fact, his own contributor Moriarty.
Knowles brushed it off. He told the Washington Post in 2000 that as long as you had clout, there was no fallout — a quote that would age into something close to prophecy.
The site soldiered on. Knowles co‑founded Fantastic Fest, the Austin genre‑film festival, in 2005 with Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League, producer Paul Alvarado‑Dykstra, and screenwriter Tim McCanlies. He launched Butt‑Numb‑a‑Thon, his now‑legendary 24‑hour invitation‑only marathon timed to his December 11 birthday, an event whose attendees would unironically sing “Happy Birthday” to him as he opened presents on stage. He hosted a short‑lived TV/web series in 2012, Ain’t It Cool with Harry Knowles. He spent years in the 2000s as a credited producer on a Paramount adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, which cycled through four directors — Robert Rodriguez, Guillermo del Toro, Kerry Conran, and Jon Favreau — before Sherry Lansing let the option lapse and Disney picked up the rights for Andrew Stanton’s eventual 2012 version (which Knowles, having turned down set visits twice, only saw at Disney’s invitation after the film was finished).
But the digital ground was shifting under him. Slashfilm launched in 2005. Devin Faraci’s Badass Digest (later Birth.Movies.Death) launched in 2010. Collider, ScreenRant, IGN, and a hundred other sites were eating AICN’s lunch with cleaner design, more reliable reporting, and a workforce that was actually paid on time. The Knowles show’s debut episode, in April 2012, reviewed what Knowles claimed was the script for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus — and turned out to be a months‑old fan forgery, a humiliation Damon Lindelof publicly confirmed. The site was running on fumes and nostalgia.
The 2013 Hollywood Reporter piece by Hal Espen and Borys Kit laid the rest bare: ad revenue had collapsed into the low six figures, the site owed roughly $300,000 in back taxes, and Knowles was running a Kickstarter campaign that summer to fund a second season of his web series after Nerdist passed (it raised $128,029, with backers including Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson, Eli Roth, and Edgar Wright; the show eventually aired on the Austin PBS affiliate KLRU in 2015). The same piece quoted McWeeny — by then long since departed for HitFix — describing AICN with brutal precision as a business that had always been run like a really great hobby.
The site limped on. The hobby kept being a hobby. And then, in September 2017, the world finally caught up to what a great many people in Austin had quietly known for two decades.
The Reckoning
It started, as many of these reckonings did that autumn, with a single woman speaking on the record.
On September 23, 2017, IndieWire published Kate Erbland’s report in which a woman named Jasmine Baker alleged that Knowles had sexually assaulted her at Alamo Drafthouse events in 1999 and 2000, and said that when she had raised her concerns with Drafthouse co‑founders Tim and Karrie League at the time, they had advised her to avoid him. Knowles denied the allegations.
The dam broke immediately. The writer who blogged as Horrorella resigned from AICN on September 24. The next day, longtime contributors Eric Vespe and Steve Prokopy publicly resigned as well — Vespe saying he could no longer in good conscience contribute to the brand he had helped build, Prokopy citing the women he had known across his career who had survived harassment and assault.
The same day, Tim League announced that the Alamo Drafthouse — Knowles’ second home, the venue for Butt‑Numb‑a‑Thon, a corporate cousin to AICN through a thousand tangled threads — was severing all ties. The Austin Film Critics Association voted Knowles out by a substantial majority.
By September 26, IndieWire had reported additional accusers coming forward. Knowles, who continued to deny the allegations, announced on social media that he was stepping away from the site and handing it to his sister Dannie, who had written for it for years under the name Pekosa Peligrosa.
There was a particular cruelty to the timing. The Knowles allegations broke just weeks after Tim League had publicly acknowledged that he had quietly rehired Devin Faraci, the former Birth.Movies.Death editor‑in‑chief, after Faraci’s own 2016 departure under similar allegations. The Austin film community — that unique ecosystem where a movie site, a movie theater, a movie festival, and a movie distributor were all run by the same circle of friends — was being asked to look at itself in a way it had spent two decades avoiding. Twelve days later, Harvey Weinstein would be on the front page of the New York Times, and the conversation would expand to swallow the entire industry.
Knowles never really came back. On March 11, 2020 — the same day the World Health Organization declared COVID‑19 a pandemic — he posted an item on AICN titled “AN APOLOGY,” acknowledging that he had hurt people and saying his event‑hosting days were behind him. The pandemic obliterated whatever attention the post might otherwise have received.
In a 2022 Slate retrospective, Jason Bailey returned to Knowles’ published 2002 review of Blade II and called it possibly the worst movie review ever published in an outlet of any consequence — a portrait, Bailey suggested, of how a kind of unfiltered, juvenile, leering male enthusiasm got mistaken, for a long time, for revolutionary criticism.
The Diaspora
The most fascinating part of the AICN story, and the part its obituary writers consistently shortchange, is what happened next to the writers themselves. They scattered, and where they landed says something not just about them but about what online film journalism did and didn’t manage to become.
Drew McWeeny — Moriarty — announced in a December 2008 review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that he was leaving AICN for the newly launched HitFix.com, where he ran the Motion/Captured column and finally got paid like a professional. When HitFix folded into Uproxx in 2016, he stayed briefly, then departed in September of that year. He co‑created the criminally underrated film‑history podcast 80s All Over with Scott Weinberg. He wrote on Netflix’s Voirdocumentary series. In late 2019 he launched a Substack newsletter called Formerly Dangerous, plus a sister publication, The Last ’80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need), in which he is methodically writing what he intends to be a definitive multi‑volume history of ’80s cinema, year by year. In October 2025, citing what he characterized as Substack’s drift toward platforming unsavory content, he migrated everything to Ghost at drewmcweeny.com. McWeeny, now 55, has been remarkably candid about what working for websites taught him to unlearn: chasing access, gaming SEO, treating early embargo screenings as the primary metric of importance. He has more or less sworn off writing negative reviews of contemporary films — life is too short, the air is too poisoned.
Eric Vespe — Quint, who joined AICN as a high‑school sophomore — landed first at Rooster Teeth’s geek‑news arm The Know shortly after his 2017 resignation. He freelanced widely (Slashfilm, Collider, Fangoria, Syfy Wire) and then, in May 2020, launched The Kingcast, a weekly podcast devoted to the work of Stephen King. Co‑hosted with the late Scott Wampler — and now, after Wampler’s death, with Vanity Fair‘s Anthony Breznican — The Kingcast became improbably enormous, its guest list a roll call of King obsessives that includes Stephen King himself, Mike Flanagan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elijah Wood, Bill Hader, and Rian Johnson. Vespe is now a regular contributor at /Film and at Fangoria, where he and Breznican recently produced an episode‑by‑episode companion podcast for the HBO series It: Welcome to Derry.
Steve Prokopy — Capone — went home to Chicago. He is now the chief film critic at the local arts site Third Coast Review, the vice president of the Chicago Film Critics Association, a programmer at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, and the public‑relations manager for the storied Music Box Theatre. He still files regularly for /Film. In a low‑drama, high‑output way, he may have built the most enviable post‑AICN life of any of them — a working critic embedded in the actual, physical, brick‑and‑mortar machinery of a city’s film culture.
C. Robert Cargill — Massawyrm — won the lottery. Cargill’s breakout 2000 review of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragonfor Anghus Houvouras’s Guerilla‑Film.com drew 50,000 hits in a day, which led Eric Vespe to recruit him onto AICN’s dormant “Indie Indie” column in May 2001 (his first AICN review was Jon Favreau’s Made). A decade later, after a years‑long friendship that had started when Derrickson — already a fan of his AICN reviews — wrote him a letter about Bug and invited him to a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Cargill ran into Derrickson at a Las Vegas bar around 2010‑2011 and pitched him a horror movie idea. That movie became Sinister (2012), a $3 million Blumhouse production that grossed roughly $87 million. Cargill and Derrickson then wrote Sinister 2, Marvel’s Doctor Strange (2016), and The Black Phone (2021), an adaptation of a Joe Hill short story that grossed over $160 million worldwide. The Black Phone 2arrived in 2025. Cargill, now 50 and based in Austin, is also a working novelist (Dreams and Shadows, Sea of Rust) and a co‑host of the podcast Junkfood Cinema. He still tweets, still goes to SXSW, still writes about movies as a fan when the spirit moves him. In a 2018 Austin Chronicle profile, he described the strangeness of running into directors who remembered his Massawyrm reviews — and the surreal, freeing realization that his old life and his new one were now considered separate continents.
Jeremy Smith — Mr. Beaks — wrote a serious book on George Clooney for the Cahiers du cinema “Anatomy of an Actor” series in 2016, and has spent the years since freelancing for /Film, Polygon, Vice, Variety, Thrillist, and more. He is reportedly still at work on a memoir titled When It Was Cool — an account, exactly as the title suggests, of two decades inside online film journalism.
Alan Cerny — Nordling — has largely stepped back from the byline grind, but surfaced in 2022 to give one of the more searching interviews on Joe Scott’s exhaustive nine‑episode podcast Downlow.d: The Rise and Fall of Harry Knowles and Ain’t It Cool News, which remains the most thorough oral history of the site that exists.
Outlaw Vern, the direct‑to‑video action savant, never left. He still runs outlawvern.com, still publishes his Seagalogy‑and‑Yippee Ki‑Yay Moviegoer style of cult‑film exegesis, still answers his own e‑mails. He is, in a way that feels almost defiantly unironic, the last true keeper of the old AICN flame: one writer, his obsessions, and the open web.
And James Michael Kozak — Hercules the Strong — is, somehow, still posting on AICN itself. Mostly Marvel and Star Wars television write‑ups. The most recent, as of this writing, is an enthusiastic notice on James Gunn’s Superman from July 2025, signed off with the byline he has used for a quarter of a century: I am — Hercules!!
A Detour Through the Ruins of Adjacent Empires
It is impossible to tell the AICN story without touching the ruins of the kingdoms it spawned and overlapped with — because the same Austin ecosystem that built it was busy collapsing on every other front.
Birth.Movies.Death., the Alamo Drafthouse–owned site that spent the late 2010s as AICN’s slicker, more political successor, lost its editor‑in‑chief Devin Faraci in October 2016 after sexual‑assault allegations surfaced — a story that bled directly into the Knowles reckoning a year later when Tim League’s quiet rehiring of Faraci was exposed. BMD was sold to the Dallas company Cinestate in 2019, only for Cinestate to face its own scandal months later when The Daily Beast documented a culture of harassment around the producer Adam Donaghey. The BMD and Fangoria editorial staffs walked off in protest. The site has been functionally dormant since.
Scott Wampler, BMD’s brilliantly profane managing editor and one of the most beloved figures in the post‑AICN diaspora, died suddenly at his Austin home on May 31, 2024, in his early forties. Wampler had co‑founded The Kingcastwith Eric Vespe in 2020; the outpouring on the day of his death — from Stephen King, Mike Flanagan, Bryan Fuller, Elijah Wood, Cargill — was a kind of unintended census of how much of the modern horror world had been touched by the same scattered group of Austin geeks.
And the Alamo Drafthouse itself — the theater that gave Knowles a stage, that gave BMD a paymaster, that served as the literal center of gravity for two decades of Texas film culture — was sold to Sony Pictures Entertainment in June 2024, the first major Hollywood studio’s film and television division to directly acquire a theater chain since the 1948 Paramount Decrees were allowed to sunset in 2020. Tim and Karrie League founded Alamo as a single‑screen repertory house in 1997. It is now a division called Sony Pictures Experiences.
Everything that touched AICN, in other words, has become something else.
What’s Left
The site is still there. That itself is worth saying.
For most of the late 2010s and early 2020s, aintitcool.com existed in what one British outlet called a “zombie state” — slow to load, sporadically updated, mostly running interview content from a writer credited as Barbarella, with the occasional Hercules TV review. In March 2025, Film Stories reported that the site appeared to have gone dark altogether, replaced by a holding page, and the obituaries (mine included, very nearly) were drafted.
But as of this writing, in late April 2026, the site is back. There are reviews of new films from 2026 — Mother Mary, The Christophers, Pillion — alongside SXSW 2023 interviews still floating in the cool‑news column like fossils. Dannie Knowles is still listed as the operator. Harry Knowles, technically, returned as a writer in March 2020 and never quite left.
There is something both touching and Twin Peaks–ish about clicking through. The dinky, animated GIF logos. The Velma‑orange palette. The 1996 architecture, untouched. The site looks the way it has always looked: like a message in a bottle from the era before fan culture became a marketing department.
A Coda
Roger Ebert — who became, late in life, an unlikely defender of online film criticism — wrote a much‑remembered post in 2010 titled “Okay, kids, play on my lawn.” He was responding to critics of his generation who sneered at the Knowleses and the McWeenys and the Vespes. Ebert’s argument, in essence, was that the kids were doing what he had done in 1967: writing about the movies because they could not bear not to.
Knowles did not invent that impulse. But for a strange, vivid window, he was its loudest amplifier. He showed the studios that the audience was not, in fact, a passive demographic to be managed by trailer drops and embargo dates. He showed an entire generation of would‑be writers that they did not need a press credential to begin. He helped create the conditions for the Marvel decade, the Star Wars renaissance, the rise of “fan service” as both a creative mode and a commercial strategy. He also, by his own apology, hurt people. The two facts coexist.
Almost everyone who got their start at AICN has built something better since. McWeeny is publishing the most considered film writing of his career. Vespe is producing the most popular Stephen King podcast in the world. Cargill is a Marvel screenwriter. Prokopy is running a city’s worth of film culture from the Music Box. The Knowles era ended, and the people it discovered carried on, more thoughtful, more accountable, with their own bylines.
What did not survive — what no one has rebuilt and no one really can — is the cultural condition AICN was born into. A web before social media. A studio system that did not yet understand it. An audience small enough to feel like a club, big enough to matter. A moment when telling people what a movie was actually like, the day after a test screening, before any publicist had spun a single line, felt like a small revolutionary act.
It is, at the very least, cool — the word, in its old sense, the way Travolta meant it in Broken Arrow — that some of the people who lived through it are still here, still writing, still watching every movie with the same idiotic, undimmed hope that the next one might be the one.
Ain’t it.
Sources and notes on reporting
This piece draws on contemporary reporting from The Hollywood Reporter (Hal Espen and Borys Kit’s 2013 investigation; the 2024 Sony‑Alamo acquisition coverage), Variety (the 2017 resignation and leave‑of‑absence reporting; Eric Vespe’s Rooster Teeth hire; the 2024 Sony‑Alamo deal), IndieWire (Kate Erbland’s September 2017 reporting on the Knowles allegations and Scott Wampler’s 2024 obituary), TheWrap (Tim Molloy’s 2017 “Inside the Fall of Harry Knowles” feature), The Austin Chronicle (Richard Whittaker’s 2018 C. Robert Cargill profile, the Wampler obituary, and the Alamo sale coverage), Slate (Jason Bailey’s 2022 Blade II‑review retrospective), Film Stories (the March 2025 reporting on the site’s apparent collapse), Joe Scott’s Downlow.d podcast, archival pieces on legacy.aintitcool.com, the current public bios of the writers named above, and Harry Knowles’s 2020 “AN APOLOGY” post on AICN. Direct quotations have been kept to a minimum and paraphrased throughout.
