The Cinemassacre podcast was considered a giant failed meme by AVGN (or mostly former/disenchanted) fans.

James Rolfe has been deemed to have jumped the shark long ago after his failed movie around 2013 or so. It's slowly been revealed over the last few years that he's a lazy, incompetent, boring autist that has had zero interest in playing video games personally since the SNES era but accidentally hit it big playing a parody character on proto-YT.

A few years ago, he sold a controlling interest in his channel to a MCN called Screenwave (who is run by a trust fund kid with Daddy's money and who recently came out as a tranny). The channel changed overnight from a passion project starring his college buddies to awkwardly produced content with Rolfe dispassionately reading scripts and begrudgingly falling asleep as a guest star on his own content.

They also introduced a host of new fat uncharismatic neckbeard characters that were portrayed as his friends but were actually Screenwave employees that hate watchers nicknamed "The Slobs". James' actual college buddies disappeared from content one-by-one, usually over resentment that Rolfe had made a career for decades producing slapstick videos with their support but he never offered them a red cent in return.

The final blow was the departure of Mike Matei, James' longtime collaborator from the beginning, from the channel during the pandemic. Mike had helped revive the channel somewhat by creating a well-edited Let's Play series called James and Mike Mondays after James's failed movie attempt and subsequent depression.

J&MM consisted of weekly clips of around 20-30 mins in length of the two playing a couch-coop retro game. It actually gave the supposed gaming channel some supporting content while Rolfe's flagship Angry Video Game Nerd episodes became more sporadic and more cringey.

The series ran successfully for many years. But towards the later years, it changed from friendly banter and nostalgia between two old friends to an obviously completely disinterested James falling asleep on the futon as Mike tried to desperately carry the show with his in-depth retro game skills and knowledge like a young kid trying to win the love of his boomer dad.

James turned full-blown COVIDiot in 2020 and wouldn't leave his house for years or allow people to come to his house to film. The MCN network and Mike tried to keep producing content with an interesting dispassionate and lazy James phoning in performances remotely, to predictably unwatchable results.

James announced in Fall 2020 that Matei would be leaving the channel permanently to stream FT and J&MM would be canceled. It later was revealed that Matei was in fact the IRL "angry video game nerd", having a deep passion for retro games, having been the one to play the games and obtain footage for Rolfe's AVGN moneymaker episodes with Rolfe not having played any vidya for fun since the N64 era. It was also revealed that Mike picked the games, edited the footage, etc for their J&MM Let's Play series that they would film in bulk for 8 hours once a month, but Rolfe was too lazy to show up for this amount of "work" in the end.

TL; DR The Cinemassacre Podcast was another vehicle created to fill gaps and create regular content on Rolfe's channel in between zombified and increasingly sporadic lifeless AVGN episodes, particularly after Matei left.

It featured two neckbeard uncharismatic slobs, Justin and Kieran, MCN Screenwave employees posing as Rolfe's friends. It featured guests like Doug Walker from Channel Awesome, Scott the Woz and members of Rolfe's cringey midlife crisis video game jingle cover band, Rex Viper.

However, lazy Rolfe quickly became disinterested in his own podcast vehicle created for him and started not showing up making excuses that he was working on AVGN episodes or was two degrees separated from a COVID contact and was going into isolation for a month.

The remaining Slobs tried their best to carry the podcast torch, but unfortunately lacked any charisma and also did zero show prep regarding content and topics, even when featuring a relatively big named guest.

After a few months of episodes and Christmas 2021 where Rolfe was pretending to be in COVID isolation, it was formally announced that the podcast would be canceled, the Slobs would be demoted from ever appearing on camera again to back office roles and Rolfe would return to old format solo review videos.

The solo review videos have predictably continued the zombified channel decline with James giving bland reviews of movies and Netflix series with research from Wikipedia and a video of him traveling to Wyoming to climb a mountain from the Rocky series, only for him to chicken out on actually climbing anything because he showed up in running shoes with no climbing gear.