Scott Mendelson goes to Forbes! A word about the future...

I was going to write this on Thursday, but then Roger Ebert died and I just didn't have it in me.  So I apologize to those who follow this blog but not my social media outlets and have no idea where I've been since Thursday.  Long-story short, I have been hired to write about box office and marketing for Forbes.  It's not a king's ransom, but it's a token amount of extra money to do what I've been doing purely for fun for five years going.  The "bad" news is two-fold.  First of all, the pieces that go on Forbes are exclusive to Forbes for five days, so if you're wondering where my weekend box office column is, it's right here.  Now certain pieces, like the first two I wrote for the site, aren't quite as time-sensitive and thus can be republished here in a week's time.  For those who don't want to go to Forbes to read my work (although I wish you would, since I get extra commission based on traffic), I will do my best to republish the work here in good time.  The other "bad" news is that this means that I will be altering my focus just a bit.


Yes I will do the financial/inside baseball pieces that I've always done.  And yes I'll still do early film reviews, even if I happen to add a footnote regarding potential box office and what-not.  But there will be less time for some of the kind of stuff I'd otherwise like to write, such as the 'films I love more than anyone else' series, or the essays purely focusing on film as it relates to social issues.  Point being, if I only have a limited amount of time to write, it behooves me to write the kind of stuff that I'm being paid for.  I've put five years into this site, with nearly 2,700 pieces to show for it, so I'm not quite willing to just ditch the site entirely.  As I'm sure you noticed, Brandon Peter struck out on his own last week because if worst comes to worst, I didn't want him hanging around a dilapidated shack.

For the moment, I will be writing material on Forbes and then, if it's not uber-timely, re-posting it here about a week later.  I will likely be linking to articles I write there here that are uber-timely, such as box office write-ups and pre-release film reviews.  This is a new and exciting development, but I also don't know and can't predict what will happen to this site in the long term.  I want to keep it alive, if only because so many of you have helped keep it alive for so many years.  But for the moment, the best thing you can do is go to my Forbes page and "follow" me.  And of course, you can read the pieces I've already published and share them as you would the stuff that originates here. Mendelson's Memos will still survive in some form or another.  But for now, hang in there as I figure out what that form happens to be.

My pieces thus far:

Weekend Box Office (04-07-13)...
On the normalization of the $1 billion blockbuster...
The box office legacy of Jurassic Park 20 years later...

And with that, I keep moving forward.  I hope you will too...

Scott Mendelson