My latest AdAge column is my thinking-out-loud about the fascination the Hollywood trade press (and the blogs that riff off them) with writing postmortems on those movies that fail to live up to the expectations that have been set out for them.

One point I didn’t make in the column is that many of the movies that get Monday-morning-quarterbacked seem to be those that have accumulated a fair amount of positive buzz from the movie geek crowd and taken on something akin to the role of a cause for them. Scott Pilgrim, Kick-Ass, Buried…these are all movies that have become much beloved through their production cycles and subsequent festival appearances but, after failing to find a mainstream audience, had their obituaries written by the press.

I’m not sure what to make of that, but it does seem to say to me that the influence of these professional opinion-havers and aspiring tastemakers isn’t as widely felt as conventional wisdom might dictate. So even if these guys all rally behind a movie it isn’t enough to push it into mainstream success because their reach isn’t broad enough and the movie winds up not living up specifically to the amount of hype that has come to surround it.