Movie Tome was the sister site for TV Tome, now the CNET website TV.com. Whereas TV Tome had TV shows and people pages, Movie Tome had movie guides. The website was created no later than August 2003 by John Nestoriak III, and was owned by Collaborative Content, LLC which was acquired by CNET in January 2005. Nestoriak continued to manage the site until early 2007, however. Movie Tome had six general forums in addition to a forum for each movie. The forums were About Movie Tome, In Theaters, On Video, In The Art House, Classic Movies and The MovieIndustry. Each movie information page at Movie Tome included cast, crew, synopsis, notes, quotes, goofs, links, and a forum for discussion of the movie. There was also the ability to rate a movie from 1 to 10, the average vote being displayed on the left side of the guide, as well a link to reviews for the movie. Titles were added by users, and an individual user could request data manager status for titles he/she was interested in preserving from error or vandalism. The majority of titles on the site were of recent vintage, however, with a wide smattering of pre-2000 titles, largely American. All members of TV Tome were also members of Movie Tome. They retained their membership at Movie Tome when TV Tome was converted into TV.com. Generally, the editing and submission format was exactly the same as the original TV Tome. However, the site eventually showed interest only in new releases; submitted new titles for older films, even with an offer to serve as editor, were ignored by Nestoriak..
The new MovieTome
On December 7, 2006, CNET launched a new version of the site, changing the name to FilmSpot.com. The Movie Tome domain was permanently redirected to the new site on January 10, 2007. FilmSpot was a sister site to TV.com, GameSpot, and MP3.com. On November 14, 2007, the website name was reverted to MovieTome, after it was discovered that "MovieSpot" was already a registered domain name of MGM. Since the 2006 operational takeover by CNET, the site had been in "beta stage". No information was provided as to how long this stage would last, but all user activities had therewith been frozen. Users may have accessed information already on the site as of the end of 2006, but could add nothing. Even the "Community Forums" were locked, and, unlike other user-driven sections, could not be accessed beyond an index of the forums in operation at the time of the CNET operational takeover. Registered users from the original Movie Tome were still carried, but could not even add to their own profiles. A message at the bottom of each user-specific page claimed that the user was "in a pending, suspended or banned status". This was not further explained. There were no instructions on how to use the site, e.g. that to search for a movie, you had to enter the title in all lower-case letters, each word in the title connected by a _. No "Contact Information" was provided for the site and there was no page identifying any of the site staff. MovieTome was unexpectedly shut down on November 29, 2010, redirecting all MovieTome URLs to the Movies section of Metacritic. The reason for this was a dire lack of visitors and popularity.
Rating system
As it was still in the beta stage, MovieTome had yet to offer its own reviews; however, they used Metacritic's average score. The score was based on a five-star system, similar to other movie review sites. MovieTome staff had made small reviews of movies on their "In Focus" section, but they were not given a score and were not listed on the movie's page, so the reviews were not considered official.
