Besides, these days everybody’s a critic

I’ve been reading for weeks – actually more like the last couple of years – about the death of the film critic . The latest nail in our collective coffin was supposed to be “Snakes on a Plane,” the Samuel L. Jackson action film that was being championed by every 15-year-old on the Internet .

Part of why “Snakes on a Plane” was supposed to be so significant was that the Internet community was expected to have given it built-in marketing. And that encouraged the film’s distributors, New Line , not only to reshoot for more violence, nudity and profanity, to give it a larger opening than first planned and, finally, to hold it back from advance critics’ screenings.

Turns out while that last one might not have hurt the film, the first two didn’t help it nearly as much as the company had hoped. “Snakes on a Plane” played a few 10 p.m. screenings at selected theaters on Thursday, followed by a larger number of midnight showings. When it opened officially on Friday, it did so at 3,555 different theaters.

So how do you explain the fact that it grossed just over $15 million , which averages out to about $4,200 per screen? Compare that to the $4,700 per-screen average scored three weeks ago by “Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby.”

First, I don’t think keeping critics away hurt much, if at all. “Snakes on a Plane” is scoring only a 65 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer . But as has been proven time and again, this summer especially with “The Da Vinci Code” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” critics don’t have that much influence.

We may have been more important back in the day, when the likes of Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, James Agee of Time and even the New York Times’ Vincent Canby roamed the aisles. But bad reviews have never kept the larger audience away from bad movies, just as good reviews have never drawn people to films that they just don’t want to watch.

If that were the case, then Woody Allen would be a billionaire and Michael Bay would be directing music videos.

What’s more likely is that the Internet voices that were so loud in support of the film represent only a narrow segment of the overall audience. And volume has never been a decent substitute for broad appeal.

As New Line’s president of distribution, David Tuckerman, said , “ ‘Snakes on a Plane’ did what tracking said it would, and it basically performed like a regular horror movie. When it was green-lighted, it didn’t have all this hype with it. It was a regular movie that was going to do 35 or 40 million bucks.”

Of course, things could change. The mark of a successful film is fans willing to watch it again and again. “Snakes on a Plane” is instant cult , and therefore over the long run it might yet earn big bucks.

Until then, though, it’s probably fair to say that the death of film critics is highly exaggerated.