edit: Turns out Scott said no to his Tweet being used. CBS Films' response? THANK ALL THE CRITICS.
Pull quotes are a weird part about the film industry. They're quotes--rarely longer than a sentence, often as much as a single word--that are used to promote films in print, video and online advertising. Often it just comes from a publicist following up after a screening to ask whether you liked the film, if so could they have a sentence and what have you.
They've been weird enough to inspire an bucket under Criticwire 1.0 (Weird Pull Quote Theater) that goes with pull quotes taken out of context (Black Rock) or how former editor Matt Singer once sourced every quote attached to Village Voice reviews. The world of pull quotes is odd and publicists generally dislike fishing for them. Some that suffer from more disturbing world views try to trade seeing a film for promise of a positive quote, which is ranges so many different metaphorical outcomes you may as well just assume it's like a scorpion with a macbook riding on the back of a frog hopped up on Red Bull and Starbucks.
Normally online folks gripe more about being mis-pull quoted. Sometimes it's for valid reasons, other times it's to remind people that you're literally lower than David Manning, a made-up critic created by Columbia Pictures.
And then there's this.
A.O. Scott is on Twitter. You may know him from a paper of record or when he was at the movies that one time. So why did CBS Films use a tweet from a critic that liked Inside Llewyn Davis rather than his review? Gothamist wondered the same thing while curating tweets from around other New Yorkers cracking open their Sunday Times on a frosty Saturday.
The rules of quoting and using Twitter vary from month to month. There's the official way that details almost any question you have about putting a Tweet on a website since 2010. Even though Scott says CBS Films "kind of" asked this isn't exactly leaping into the realm of "stealing content" or even mis-appropriating it!
“Tweets display with expanded media like photos, videos, and article summaries, and also include real-time retweet and favorite counts.”
In the last year the question of ownership about Tweets becomes more of an issue since marketers and developers have realized how they can force eyes onto images and links. There is indeed a "strange loophole" about legally republishing Tweets with the caveat being online only after a photographer successfully sued the Washington Post and Agence-France Post for using his photos when he was contracted under Getty. It gets murkier for people that claim no one can use their tweets, or as Poynter laid out the differences between embedding vs. copying and private accounts.
If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, there's the fact that a writer has to find out their Tweet was sourced without their knowledge for a (in print only!) New York Magazine pull quote. Rather than contact her, I figured I'd just use her Instagram since I follow her on Twitter and spent about ten minutes making sure it was cool through Instagram's API. Then again, before CBS Films bothered with Llewyn Davis, The Book of Mormon printed this Mike Bloomberg tweet as an ad last year.
Marketers have turned to Twitter a lot over the last year because it represents an untapped vein. Rather than waste their time with seeing if critics liked Grudge Match, they can turn to all-media screening reactions or general Twitter responses when most critics were embargoed until December 24th to run. Even now the staunchest supporters of Grudge Match come from Warner Brothers' marketing crawling through results of #GrudgeMatch.
Most of the TV ads running for newer niche releases like Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones use Twitter, which makes sense when the franchise is continually slaughtered for having unoriginal plot devices despite brief moments of creativity tied to marketing (the Microsoft Kinect in Paranormal Activity 4; home security-obsessed technophiles in all of the films).
It was only a matter of time that marketing decided to come after Twitter rather than have to go hunt down a quote from any writer. Most of the savvier PR folks brand the request in bright-red-with-asterix ("Please hold all reactions and reviews for week of release, including on social media.") or state it outright like the embargo on Spike Lee's "creatively re-imagined" Oldboy.
Twitter's perfect when it comes to grabbing a natural reaction. Unlike the classic days of Overheard in New York, it can very quickly be fact checked and pursued by people that know how to type in a search bar.