What: CherryPicks, a movie review site from a female point of view.
Who: Miranda Bailey and Rebecca Odes.
Why we care: Although women consume half of the world’s media, “the voices that tell us what to watch and listen to are overwhelmingly male,” reads the CherryPicks site. The new platform–which will include film reviews, interviews, and a newsletter–plans to take on Rotten Tomatoes, but from a female perspective. That doesn’t mean it will be solely dedicated to art about women; rather, it will highlight pop culture through a female lens. The project already boasts top critics such as NPR’s Ann Powers and Claudia Puig and will launch in the fall.
Bailey, a producer whose credits include The Squid and The Whale and The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, dreamed up CherryPicks with Rebecca Odes, co-creator of WIFEY.TV. At SXSW this month, Bailey offered an example as to how the gender difference affects film consumption. In an interview with Vulture, she explained:
The Zookeeper’s Wife, predominantly male critics did not like that film, and all the women that I talked to did, and the female critics did like that film, so there was a real difference there. There are so many women that were not able to go out and see that movie because there’s just a splat and their husbands don’t want to go with them because they’re like, “Oh, look, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t like it.”
CherryPicks is already garnering high-profile fans, with New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor calling it “sorta like Rotten Tomatoes but emphasizing the female gaze.” Oscar winner and producer Reese Witherspoon, meanwhile, hailed it a necessity, tweeting “The world needs this!”
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