It was 20 years ago Performance started out as a passion project, a simple website roughly built by a movie and sci-fi fan who had no experience with web design. This was the era of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the beginning of Battlestar Galactica. That was before Christopher Nolan brought Batman back, before Michael Bay adapted Transformers into live-action, and before Marvel Studios made their own movies. Blockbuster is at its peak!
Launched with tagline “Science Fiction News, TV and Movies Without Sugar Coating,” Screen Rant was an early entrant into the world of film and television blogging from founder Vic Holtreman, envisioned as a place to share his raw thoughts with a few friends. Who could have predicted it would last for decades and become one of the biggest entertainment publications on the planet?
What has made Screen Rant unique since its inception is that it has never just shared “news,” instead, it has shared it with insight, analysis, and an editorial eye from its creators. Writers grow up passionate about the material they cover. There was a real discussion and this is how I – and eventually hundreds of millions of others – discovered screenrant.com, first as a reader when rumors were running rampant about mutants will appear in X-Men 4. Will Lost’s Josh Holloway plays Gambit? Of course he didn’t, but I commented on that article in 2007, engaging in a lively discussion.
A brief history of Screen Rant
Screen Rant first debuted on November 13, 2003
Enjoy Screen Rant’s annual collection of screenshots of homepage designs over the past 20 years!
Before social media became the preferred method of sharing information, thoughts, hype and criticism, Screen Rant had a vibrant comments section for more than a decade. Even actors, producers, directors and others from the industry participated. Sometimes it gets us into trouble, other times it gives us a scoop or an invitation to an event. For me, it provided a forum for me to procrastinate during graduate school. When I should have been finishing up my thesis for my Master’s Degree in Economics, I was instead commenting with other regulars throughout the day on my favorite movie blog, screenrant.com, and this would lead to me being hired as a writer when the site owner emailed me to convince me to join.
I received my Master’s degree and a few days later my writing sample of the trailer for Clive Owen’s The International was published as a live article, much to my surprise. A few months later, I became an editor and co-founded and created a spin-off website gamerant.com. Little did I know that this would become my own career and eventually that of hundreds of others.
“The moment this stops being fun is when we should stop doing this.”
Screen Rant was very small then but was growing month by month and doing what it did best. In 2007, the magazine had several thousand readers per month. “The moment this stops being fun is the moment we should stop doing it,” Vic Holtreman noted in an email to the group about encouraging writing for the right reasons. A year later, my daily posts were in the hundreds of thousands. 2 million users visited screenrant.com in 2008. It tripled the next year and tripled the year after that. This pattern continues and with the growth of the site comes the greatest opportunities for brands, from being invited to visit and the occasional launch to the chance to attend meetings Report and chat with talent in front of the camera.
Screen Rant is becoming a major player, and as its readership and team size grows, its potential cannot be ignored. Some of us left our day jobs in 2011 to focus on Screen Rant. Kofi Outlaw, Screen Rant’s first Editor-in-Chief, came on board and helped redefine reviews and editorial standards. I’m helping run Screen Rant and Game Rant, and focusing on the business and PR side, then jumping in next. Ben Kendrick, Kofi’s schoolmate, joined me on Game Rant and eventually moved to Screen Rant and became Editor-in-Chief, and Anthony Ocasio became the site’s first full-time television staffer.
The four of us also organized Underground Rant screen podcast for many years and the site’s team has grown to include many talented writers. A podcast that inherits the spirit, Total Geekalldebuts with SRU original Rob Keyes and Ben Kendrick alongside Andrew Dyce and Hannah Shaw-Williams.
Screen Rant’s first two podcasts, Screen Rant Underground and Total Geekall
By 2014, Screen Rant and other independent film blogs had taken over the online space from traditional outlets. Valnet, Inc. saw an opportunity and acquired the site in February 2015. “Combining the expertise of the existing Screen Rant team and the resources that Valnet provides will only create great things” , Hassan Youssef, CEO and co-founder of Valnet Inc., at the time. Valnet was able to invest support and resources and drive growth and everything changed. Screen Rant is part of a growing network and has offices, a true base of operations. That same year, I was able to launch a games division, then a comics division in 2016, and Valnet helped launch and properly grow Screen Rant’s video operations, including the series Our favorite Pitch Meet movies.
Screen Rant reached 100 million users in 2014 when it was independent and owned and operated by Valnet, Inc. Since then, it has grown to reach more than half a billion readers each year thanks in large part to its all-star leadership team. For example, Alex Leadbeater took over our features team in 2018 and eventually our entire core content operation, and helped lead the development of the site alongside Simon Gallagher, Molly Freeman , Mansoor Mithaiwala, Andrew Dyce, Lara Jackson, Emily Biondo, James Hunt, to name a few, spent years developing Screen Rant and mentoring hundreds of others along the way. Andrew Dyce first started in 2010 when I recruited him to Game Rant and now runs Screen Rant’s comics team, helping it expand into anime and manga. Simon Gallagher, helped expand our film and TV coverage and really helped us with every aspect of the operation. Lara Jackson, a more recent addition I hired in 2021, heads up all of our gaming teams and is also helping to improve the site’s content operations as a whole. The list goes on and on…
Screen Rant expanded beyond film and television into gaming in 2015 when it spun off Game Rant, followed by comics in 2016. A few years later, Valnet, Inc. also acquired Game Rant while Screen Rant continued to expand into Reality TV and later anime.
Screen Rant has published thousands of reviews and interviews, and shared many wild experiences, including stunt flying for Top Gun: Maverick and racing a McLaren for Hobbs & Shaw. We visited Pixar, Lucasfilm, LAIKA Studios, Wētā Workshop, Skywalker Ranch, Illumination and countless production studios and game developers around the world to provide exclusive and original reporting, and yes, We definitely had some fun along the way.
Arnold Schwarzenegger took us behind the wheel of his tank and we debuted the first footage of the world’s largest great white shark with National Geographic. We picked up Hawkeye’s bow and Captain America’s shield on the set of Civil War and entered the Batjet Hangar on the set of Justice League. We have lunch with Zoe Saldana in her green Gamora costume next to an alien spaceship, talk to Harrison Ford on location in Plaza Blanca, New Mexico for Cowboys & Aliens, hang out with The Rock as he plays GI Joe and watches Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine ride a snowplow with his claws out.
Our reviews can be found on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, OpenCritic and we are judges for The Game Awards. We are quoted every day on TV, online and on every digital video game store. We starred in a Super Bowl commercial, hung a logo in Times Square, and helped organize the Marvel Studios Comic-Con panel where Avengers: Secret Wars was announced. We have so much to be proud of and so much more!
What does the future of Screen Rant look like?
New features and content are on the way!
Twenty years is a long time, and in more ways than we can list here, we’re just getting started. Over the past few weeks, we’ve launched a brand new account system on Screen Rant where readers can log in for an improved experience and exclusive features. We launched a new newsletter alongside this one, which already has over 100,000 users, and as of last week, readers can choose their personal interests and choose the type of content they want directly in your inbox, whether it’s features about anime or gaming, Star Wars content, Marvel or DC news, and anything in between.
Create a Screen Rant account!
We’re producing new and growing types of video content, and new podcasts are coming in the near future. We look forward to continuously improving the screenrant.com experience and look forward to sharing more.
Thank you for reading and watching! Here’s the next big milestone!