Fade to black: IMDb planning to shut down its message boards
February 12, 2017 at 5:05PM
The Internet Movie Database announced that it was axing its message boards. That's right, film nerds, you'll no longer be able to argue about who played the best Orc in "Lord of the Rings" on IMDb's site.
For some (the people still using message boards), this is a dagger in the heart. Dagger. In. The. Heart.
For IMDb, it's a nod to the future. Or maybe the present. The site says many of its users have migrated their movie chitchat (aka arguments) to Twitter and Facebook and other social platforms. True indeed, IMDb has a combined 9 million followers on those two networks alone.
Film commentators lamented this week that the death of such message boards is an ongoing trend. And it's a sad one. Message boards like IMDb's were a safe haven for film fans to corner one another and wax poetically or angrily (the latter more often than not) with impassioned film analysis. By comparison, social networks such as Twitter just feel like the Wild West.
Pay your respects to IMDb's message boards by Feb. 20. After that, they're being tossed into Mount Doom.
The mega Marvel hit did not just bring back Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman but also quite a few familiar faces.
