by Chris MaGeeI get up at 5:00 every morning and check a couple dozen websites for the daily news on Japanese cinema, and one of those websites has always been Variety Asia Online, so when I started hearing rumors on Friday that this valued purveyor of Asian film news may have closed up shop I was obviously shocked and very curious to know if the rumor was true.
Well, no final confirmation has come yet, but Todd Brown at Twitch is reporting that both Variety Asia's editor-in-chief Patrick Frater and web editor Marcus Lim have been let go which would mean that the site would essentially be shut down. And here I thought that they hadn't been updating because of the Chinese New Year.
If Variety Asia Online has indeed shut down then that would also most likely spell the end of Grady Hendrix's popular Kaiju Shakedown blog, at least for the time being.
Hope fully there will be some official word one way or the other soon, but until then it looks like Variety Asia Online may be the first casualty of these hard economic times so far this year.
UPDATE: As it's been pointed out in the comments final verification that Variety Asia Online is no more came today. Check out the press release here. Hopefully we'll see Patrick Frater, Marcus Lim and of course Grady Hendrix and his Kaiju Shakedown blog going onto better opportunities in the near future.
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2 comments:
Sadly, final confirmation did come today:
http://varietyasiaonline.com/content/view/7929/1/
As Grady mentioned n the comments thread over at Twitch film, he's not sure what his next move is, but fans of his smart and funny writing will be waiting eagerly.
Damn....
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