With a sense of inevitability, it appears that the legendary internet movie site Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) may be dead. This comes after a multi-year zombie state.
The first signs came via Wikipedia, which declared that:
“Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) was an entertainment news website founded by Harry Knowles…”
It then went on to state:
“As of March 2025, the domain name appears to be dead.”
We were first alerted to this state of affairs by long-time Outposters Theragen Derivative and Tubby Walters.
Our investigatory trip to the likely defunct website showed that, indeed, the last updates were posted nearly one month ago in mid-March.
All recent updates were from contributors other than site founder Harry Knowles or his sidekick Herc. Herc’s last article is, hilariously, more than two years old and features him still defending The Last Jedi and attacking Talkbackers who disagree with him.
The site itself is excruciatingly slow. It appears that rumors of the demise of Ain’t It Cool News may, in fact, be accurate.
The apparent death of AICN is met with mixed feelings across the internet movie community, including at Last Movie Outpost. Why? Because AICN actually played a large part in the creation of this, your favorite online movie community.
In The Beginning
Ain’t It Cool News was launched all the way back in 1996, in the first wave of online movie websites that included Corona Coming Attractions and Dark Horizons. Many of our Outposters are early AICN Talkbackers who remember these heady online times.
The name was attributed to a quote from John Travolta’s character in the film Broken Arrow. Site founder Harry Knowles began surfing the internet while recovering from a debilitating accident, finding an online community in various newsgroups swapping gossip and rumors about upcoming films.
This led to him creating AICN, first driven by his own colorful reviews and then with apparent insider information from studios and direct from movie productions. Knowles would later admit that, in the early days, these “spies” were actually him sourcing gossip from these newsgroups.
It was a very different internet movie landscape back then. Movie productions were not as locked down and shrouded in secrecy. Studios were slow to respond to the rise of the internet movie community and were almost naive in their first attitudes toward it. In this environment, AICN would flourish.
Ascendency
The site expanded rapidly. Alongside his seemingly ever-present sidekick known as Herc, other contributors would the site under pseudonyms, such as Elston Gunn, Capone, and Quint.
The website really hit the big time in 1997. AICN published a barrage of negative reviews from the press-screening of Batman & Robin and, almost overnight, the studio system suddenly woke up to the power of the internet movie community. They could make or break a movie when they had critical mass.
Warner Bros. would would openly whinge, when the film performed poorly at the box office, that it had been sabotaged by the leaks to the Internet. This just added to the aura around this newly powerful lobby, with AICN self-appointed at its center.
The site then exploded in popularity with People and Newsweek interviewing Knowles, and the site even parodied in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back as MoviePoopShoot.com. Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis also stopped by the site to interact with fans around the releases of their new movies.
However, the internet movie community’s very own Icarus was about to fly too close to the sun.
The Downfall
There were some early signs of trouble when other internet movie website owners combined to accuse Knowles of ripping off their sources and publishing their stories without credit.
Then there were the now-infamous reviews of Blade II and the TV series Heroes. In the first, Knowles would liken viewing the movie to eating “chocolate-covered pussy juice” and for the second, he openly fantasized about sex with one of the characters who had regenerative properties because she would always be a virgin.
The community rightly responded by asking “WTF?”
In April 2012, yet more negative notoriety was heaped on Knowles via his YouTube show Ain’t It Cool with Harry Knowles when he reviewed what he claimed was the script for Prometheus. It turned out to be a well-known fake, even attracting comment and scorn from writer Damon Lindelof.
Knowles’ attempts to justify this were met with derision as they were seen as making excuses and a seeming inability to admit he was wrong. This would become a theme, manifesting itself in other ways including his also infamous declaration of Bryan Cox being in Alien and attempting to dismiss this as a joke.
One of the contributors would be banned from Skywalker Ranch over alleged Star Wars leaks during the prequel frenzy.
Meanwhile, accusations of favoritism towards studios and movies that had taken care of AICN through press screenings and “pwesents” began to be made. This would come to a head when a wildly negative review of Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice was hastily reversed into a miracle cure for Knowles’ explosive diarrhea, allegedly after words were handed down from the studio.
The YouTube show Ain’t It Cool with Harry Knowles would again cause some issues. According to an article in The Hollywood Reporter, Knowles’ site had made $700,000 per year in revenue in its early 2000’s prime. Traffic began to dwindle in the early 2010’s and this came at a time when the same trade outlet also reported that Knowles owed $300,000 in back taxes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.
The site was also being overtaken by newer, more modern rivals, and Knowles seeming inability to adapt and develop his site for more than 20 years started to take its toll.
In this environment, Knowles announced a Kickstarter to fund a new series of his YouTube show, setting out a goal to raise $100k to cover the costs of the series. Again, cynical Talkbackers raised their eyebrows over the timing, with the publicized tax issues being so recent.
When the show was released online, and the production values appeared to be way below the amount raised, the comments section of the website exploded.
Making it worse was Knowles sharing images of a recently purchased new car on his social media.
#MeToo
The seeds of the downfall of AICN were already seemingly sown, but the final nail in the coffin would come in September 2017 when it was reported on IndieWire that Knowles had allegedly sexually assaulted a woman named Jasmine Baker on two occasions in 1999 and 2000 at official Alamo Drafthouse events in Austin, Texas, and that when informed of the incidents by Baker, Drafthouse owners took no action. Knowles denied the allegations.
In response to the story, a number of Ain’t It Cool News contributors resigned from the site. Eventually, Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League announced that the company, whose theater had served as home to the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon film fest Knowles organized to commemorate his own birthday, had severed all ties with Knowles as a result of the controversy.
The Austin Film Critics Association voted to remove Knowles as a member of the group.
Then, by September 26, four more women had come forward with accusations of sexual assault and harassment. Knowles announced that he was stepping down from the site for “therapy, detox, and getting to a better place.”
Exodus
On the night that the allegations came to light, again the comments section of the website exploded. Knowles had always adopted the same progressive, left-of-center moralistic tone so accusations of rampant hypocrisy were made by openly hostile Talkbackers.
The response from staff was panic and mass banning, mostly driven by an increasingly hysterical Herc. When a female Talkbacker (who would later go on to become a founder Outposter) asked some pointed questions from a female point of view, the response was a banning.
Just like that, the switch was flicked. On one, single, memorable night the massed ranks of Talkbackers announced they were all leaving the site and Talkback traffic collapsed in 24 hours.
There were many false dawns, with some temporary homes along the way as various groups of AICN diaspora wandered the internet desert for the digital equivalent of forty days and forty nights.
Eventually, a few would band together and Last Movie Outpost was born, collecting quite a few ex-AICN Talkbackers along the way. So, you see, whether we like it or not, AICN actually played an important role in both the eventual foundation of this site, and the whole internet movie community and movement in general.
It is for this reason that there is a slight tinge of sadness at the apparent passing of this touchstone of the internet… if it actually is dead.
Ain’t It Cool News – 1996 to 2025
