In a move sure to inspire more film-geek loin-warming than Monica Bellucci, Disney has fired the unbelievably horrible Ben Lyons, who pronounced I Am Legend "one of the greatest movies ever made," and Ben Mankiewicz, as At the Movies co-hosts.

Replacing Lyons and Mankiewicz as hosts of the long-running show, formerly hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, will be A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, two men widely respected in the world of film criticism who have both served as fill-ins on the show in the past.

As the LA Times Patrick Goldstein notes, Ben Mankiewicz wasn't all that bad, but it appears as though he was brought down by the tremendous weight of Lyons' Herculean suckage.

To be fair, Mankiewicz, the scion of a fabled Hollywood family who hosts Turner Classic Movies presentations, was clearly more knowledgeable than his counterpart. As my colleague Chris Lee reported last December, Lyons, son of film critic Jeffrey Lyons, was held in such low esteem in the critical fraternity that others in the profession were lining up, happy to be quoted by name ridiculing his work, with Chicago-based film critic Erik Childress saying of Lyons: "He has no taste. Everyone thinks he's a joke."

So how awful was Ben Lyons? This awful:

You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it's gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don't care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That's all I want from a movie like this.

Film lovers of the America rejoice — your own personal long national nightmare is finally over! But what will now become of the "Stop Ben Lyons" blog?