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Joe Utichi on Muck Rack

Joe Utichi

Verified
London, Los Angeles
As seen in: Deadline, MSN, MSN Singapore, Yahoo Entertainment, MSN Malaysia, Yahoo Canada, Yahoo News Malaysia, Yahoo News New Zealand, Aol, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes and
Executive Awards Editor @Deadline. It’s an honor just to be caffeinated.
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Joe Utichi’s Biography

e has worked online since 1999, initially as a hobbyist writer and the founder of a fan site dedicated to the Sega Dreamcast console. From 2003 he created and ran FilmFocus.Co.UK, a movie reviews and news site which became one of the most popular in the country, with peak audience numbers of more than 450,000 monthly uniques.

In October 2006 he was invited to launch a localised version of popular film website Rotten Tomatoes for the UK market at the newly-formed Fox Interactive Media UK Ltd. He worked with local and international teams to define the feature set of the site and bring its world-famous Tomatometer to the UK. At the time of the site’s launch in January 2007, 300,000 UK-based film fans were using it. In the following three years, that audience had risen to more than 900,000 UK monthly uniques.

While at Rotten Tomatoes, Joe delivered world-class editorial features for the local and international sites. He secured big exclusives from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Keira Knightley and Kevin Smith, conducted extended interviews with everyone from Ricky Gervais to Guillermo del Toro, and covered three successive Cannes Film Festivals.

Following the site’s acquisition in the US by Flixster Inc. in January 2010, Joe oversaw the handover and centralisation of the international offices and left to pursue a career as a freelance journalist, maintaining an association with the site as a contributing editor.

As a freelance writer Joe has contributed regularly to outlets including Sunday Times Culture, Empire, The Guardian, Yahoo! Movies and The Daily Mirror. He has hosted a regular movie and DVD review show for BFBS Radio and made appearances on BBC Radio 5 Live, Channel 4 and ITV.

Internationally, Joe’s work can be read in Spain in Fotogramas magazine and in the US on AOL’s Cinematical.com and MTV’s NextMovie.com. In addition, he has worked with film distributors including 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures to provide internationally-syndicated interview content for films such as Prometheus, X-Men: First Class, Django Unchained and True Grit.

In 2011 he was accepted as a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).