Over the past few years, Kevin Smith has waged a very vocal war against film critics. After the poor reception of Cop Out, he vowed to never to allow these “freeloaders” to screen any of his movies again, and when Red State eventually hit theatres, he pretty much stuck to that plan. He has insisted that the only people who deserve to see his movies for free in advance are longtime fans and average joes who will truly appreciate it. While it might seem like he just can’t handle criticism, somehow he has turned it into a class war. Ironically, this week Smith has announced a new movie-related show that he will be hosting on Hulu called Spoilers. The premise? He and fifty other random folks watch a current movie and then discuss it afterward. Does this mean Smith is suddenly becoming a critic himself? Well, according to him, they don’t review movies, they “revere” them. Right… got it!

The new show premieres on June 4th, and the panel of fifty for each episode will be drawn from a group of people who sign up on the SModcast website. For the first season of Spoilers, they will be covering many of the big summer movies starting with Men in Black 3. Each episode will also feature a special guest, and will include other segments such as Movie Goon (featuring Malcolm Ingram), Criterion Corner, Icon Interviews and Let Us Act (where they allow audience members to re-enact a scene with Jason Mewes).

In a recent interview with Wired, here’s what Smith had to say about the state of film criticism:

“Film criticism became very, you know, yes-or-no, black-and-white, thumbs-up-thumbs-down kind of affair. You don’t really see movies handled by ‘professionals’ on TV the way they’re handled on the internet. That’s where you see people just love on a movie. So, I’m like, ‘Let’s do that version.'”

I guess in his mind professionals only say nice things about movies. While part of me thinks there will be a novelty to seeing what the average moviegoer has to say about movies, the problem is that you can already read a billion of these discussions on every other movie website on the internet on any given day. I have also seen Kevin Smith sit in for Roger Ebert on Ebert & Roeper and I don’t have a lot of confidence in his ability to lead the discussion. What do you think? Will you check out Kevin Smith’s new show or does this just sound like a bad idea?