The Will Leitch Experience

As anyone who has ever read anything I’ve ever produced knows, my career writing about sports was a total accident. I went into writing because I wanted to be a film critic, because I wanted to be Roger Ebert. I stumbled into the sports thing, and Deadspin, because I like sports and sports are endlessly fun to write about. But it wasn’t the initial plan. If you’ve seen my lengthy, wordy and pretentious movie reviews on this site, you know writing about movies has always been my true love.

So, now that word is starting to leak out, I should fess up: I’m going to be writing about movies full-time, daily. Yahoo — I never know whether or not to include the exclamation point; someday I hope to found a company with interjectory punctuation — has hired me to run a movie blog for them. What Yahoo has been doing with their sports blogs and their news blog The Upshot has been exciting for me, as a reader, to watch happen. I’ll be working with Jamie Mottram — his career and my career have been circling each other for years — the estimable (and fellow June 5 bride) Courtney Reimer and the great Mark Lisanti, who honestly might be my favorite blogger of all time. To be able to be a part of that, writing about my favorite topic, was a no-brainer.

Particularly because the blog is going to have a very Mattoon feel: My co-editor on the site is going to be Tim Grierson, the vice president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and my closest friend since we were in the eighth grade. This has been a lifelong dream for the both of us. Plus, he’s light years better than I am at writing about movies, so I’m just going to try to keep up with him.

I am not leaving New York magazine, by the way: I’ll be doing this while still covering sports for them. (It is, after all, my favorite magazine.) I look forward to New York having better film coverage than Yahoo and Yahoo having better sports coverage than New York. It’s not every day you get to take down two media organizations at once.

The site, as it’ll look when we’re fully operational, hasn’t launched yet. We’re still working out the kinks and figuring out how not to make every post about Woody Allen. (Though a couple reviews have sneaked their way onto Yahoo’s site.) When it launches, I promise to let the four-or-five people who can’t wait to find out — all named “Leitch” — know all about it. I can’t wait. It’s very exciting.