The (in)famous film website Ain’t It Cool News goes offline, 29 years after it first launched. More on the story here.
One of the original movie websites, and certainly the highest profile, was Ain’t It Cool News, often shortened to AICN. Launched all the way back in the mid-1990s, there was a brief window of time where it became a huge thing in Hollywood, at a point where movie studios were failing to understand the internet.
It attracted some really good writers, not least including screenwriter C Robert Cargill, although it was ultimately built around the personality of its founder, Harry Knowles. His style of writing went very much against that of the time, as did reports of test screenings, giving the first hints that movies such as Batman & Robin and Speed 2: Cruise Control were not on the good side.
Knowles became something of a Hollywood celebrity, although as it turns out, not a very pleasant one. In recent times, serious allegations of sexual assault have been levelled against Knowles. He didn’t do the finding Jesus and opening up a Patreon thing in response to that, but did write an apology in 2020 that did not read the room very well. You can see an archived version of it here.
Having eventually stepped back from the site in favour of his sister taking charge, but as of March 2025, updates have stopped and there’s now a holding page where the site itself used to be. Material is no longer available online, at least for the time being. There’s been no formal statement that the site is gone, but what was a curious monument to 1990s film reporting at best looks to be on very weak ground.
The website URL is still registered, but there’s little sign of new material and there’s little sign of an actual site. 29 years on from when it first sparked into the world, Ain’t It Cool News – at least for now – appears to be no more.
