Anyone paying close attention to the entertainment business will be aware that, over the past decade, toxic fandoms have become increasingly out of control. The supposed “war on woke” has fired up an already combustible sense of entitlement among enthusiasts for white men in leotards, white men on dragons and white men in rocket ships. At the hint of any pesky “diversity” – which is to say hiring a woman or a person of colour – in a franchise movie, the deranged will head to Rotten Tomatoes or the Internet Movie Database and downvote the offending title into the doldrums. This so-called “review bombing” first gained attention when, in 2016, Sony dared to recast Ghostbusters with women.
It has continued. Indeed, the downvoting and discriminatory language have only become more vigorous in the age of franchise streaming shows. Amandla Stenberg, the African-American star of the Star Wars spin-off The Acolyte, has talked about “the hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us”. That show was cancelled at the end of August.
Still, the fanatics remain outside the walls. Right? The Hollywood bureaucrats are not going to hand over the levers of power to a cadre of basement maniacs in gaming chairs and wireless headsets. Not so quick. A recent story in Variety conjured up an image of the jailers at the Bastille upping the portcullis and inviting the hordes outside to enter.
Studio insiders told the trade paper that “the best defence is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place”. The subsequent explanation of strategy sent a chill through grown-up observers. “Studios will assemble a specialised cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project,” Adam B Vary wrote.
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Sorry? What? If I were a less measured person I would imagine a legion of nerds in cardboard Iron Man costumes being invited to drink buckets of diet Mountain Dew and gobble sacks of CheezOs in the commissaries of Burbank. The studios may think they can pay them off with Lego Millennium Falcons, but these folks are not so easily swayed. The fandoms are closer to religions than they are to the amiable enthusiasts who once met on “message boards” to discuss Dr Who or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Though there is no membership card or oath of allegiance, a “fandom” is something you can join or leave. People talk of once being “in” the Harry Potter fandom as others might talk of once being “in” the Church of the Blessed Flying Saucer.
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Consulting fandoms about future directions in franchise entertainment is akin to confectionery companies consulting four-year-olds about what should become of candy bars. Obviously, they are going to make them sweeter, gooier and more enormous. The reliable concept of “Homer Simpson’s car” seems as if it might be relevant, but the current proposal is, if anything, more terrifying. In a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, the paterfamilias finds himself in charge of designing a new motorcar. The monstrous result has a soundproof bubble, shagpile carpets and multiple horns that blare La Cucaracha.
This is, in fact, a useless, analogy for what the fandoms might make of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. These are inherently conservative bodies that want everything to remain as it once was. They approvingly wave the phrase “comics accurate” towards incoming superhero adaptations. A car designed in consultation with “superfans” would end up looking like a 1962 Ford Cortina (in grey).
After coming to and wafting themselves with the copy of Variety that had just caused them to faint, the movie commentariat may have noticed that the proposal suggests the superfans be consulted merely on “marketing materials”. This sounds, in short, more like a PR exercise than a radical shift in production strategies. If the folk behind the upcoming Harry Potter TV series want more diverse casting – and they probably will – then that is what they will get. Aside from anything else, the studios are aware that the toxic contingent is only a small percentage of the wider fandom and a minute percentage of the general audience. People didn’t stay away from The Marvels because it was full of women. They stayed away from that MCU film because they’d heard it was terrible.
Still, it rankles that even this spindly bone has been passed to the baying hordes. All this comes as Todd Phillips, director of Joker: Folie à Deux, sequel to his own Joker, is being criticised for making a film that dumps on the preceding title’s many fans. That’s not quite what happened. There is, rather, implicit criticism of only those more deranged, less thoughtful enthusiasts who saw the protagonist as a tribune of angry resistance. That lot had it coming. Don’t give ’em an inch.
