Is fandom now controlling Hollywood’s biggest franchises? (original) (raw)
If a new report’s accurate, then studios are placing more and more value on the opinions of a small group of fans. A few words on toxic fandom and Hollywood’s response to it:
On the 3rd October, Variety published a story about toxic fandom and how Hollywood is now at the mercy of so-called fans, who are not opposed to tearing down anything they see unfit for the franchises they claim to love.
Variety spoke to several industry insiders for the piece and the outlet reports that studios are putting together focus groups consisting of hardcore fans in order to see if their planned plots will spark an outrage. One studio executive told Variety that these groups “will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.’”
They then added: “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.” Yikes.
In a perfect world, a screenwriter creates the story which a director will then bring to life together with a huge team of collaborators. The studio, ideally, would stay out of the creative decisions, but we’re not naive enough to say studios don’t have power over those. But we will say that they shouldn’t alter a narrative or veto casting decisions based on how fans might feel about them.
Fandom has been getting increasingly toxic over the last decade or so. Star Wars has been particularly affected as we saw with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. A noisy subset of fans found the portrayal of an older, more jaded Luke Skywalker particularly lacking; meanwhile, the entire sequel trilogy now focused on a woman (Daisy Ridley’s Rey) and a man of colour (John Boyega’s Finn).
The Last Jedi. Credit: Lucasfilm / Disney
Star Wars’ The Acolyte, which was cancelled after one season, also faced a strong backlash from a vocal group of people. Amandla Stenberg addressed it over on Instagram in an eight-minute video, telling her followers that she wasn’t surprised that The Acolyte wouldn’t see another season. She noted that ever since the show was announced in 2020, “we started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.”
There’s a clear pattern here. A lot of the abuse is directed towards women and people of colour. Studios aren’t doing enough to protect or defend their casts either. The Variety piece mentions that studios are now training the casts in social media management or in some cases, their teams will handle their social media accounts for them. This only shifts the responsibility of guarding their wellbeing to the actors themselves, which seems a little backwards.
In these situations, it’s always easy to tell people to just ignore it. It’s a small, but very vocal group airing out their racist, misogynistic views when their favourite franchises are threatening to become what they often call “woke” (usually, this means the creators have taken steps towards making a story vaguely representative of reality). But should we really be asking people to ignore it? Let it go unchallenged? Shouldn’t we fight against this? Where’s the duty of care when it comes to online abuse?
It’s not just Star Wars that’s been affected, either. The cast of Prime Video’s The Rings Of Power season one were the subject of horrendous racial abuse, and Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel has been the target of some Marvel fans across two films. The films have been review bombed on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, which at first didn’t seem to make much of a difference – at least from an outside perspective.
Credit: Marvel Entertainment
However, if studios are now listening to a somewhat small group of individuals – who, by the way, do not represent fandom as a whole – and making changes to not just their marketing but the projects themselves, we’re in trouble.
HBO is getting ready to release The Last Of Us season two, based on Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part II. Kaitlyn Dever was cast as Abby in the new season and we finally got a first look at her in the first proper trailer for the series. The character was portrayed by Laura Bailey in the game and fans reacted strongly (negatively) to her. Bailey was sent several, serious death threats and this writer can’t help but wonder if Dever will have enough support around her and from HBO to cope if the response to her take on the character is anything like Bailey’s.
If studios are indeed afraid to upset fans, we, the audience, are ultimately the ones losing out. We’re far more likely to be robbed of interesting stories with something to say if studios buckle at the slightest threat of a backlash. Films and TV shows will play it safe, and we’ll never see any variations of story or character, especially if it’s something based on a comic book, a book or a game. Imagine if all the future superheroes were white men – the upcoming Captain America film with Anthony Mackie is garnering a lot of criticism already – or if Star Wars only focused on Luke Skywalker analogues for all eternity? Does anyone actually want that?
All of the above isn’t to say that you can’t criticise films and TV shows. But criticism and hatred are two very different things, and Hollywood shouldn’t be condoning the latter.