Tuesday, June 12, 2007

On the Fanboy

I am a fanboy. I have a stash of 500 comic books. I've seen each Spider-man movie at least three times in the theater and I intend to buy Spider-Man 3 on original DVD when it comes out. When I have spare time I like to look over message boards (to which I do not contribute anything) and am alternately amused and infuriated by how stupid my fellow fanboys can be.

All this said, I found myself scratching my head at an article in a recent issue of Time magazine about how Hollywood is now striving to pander to fanboys in order to ensure the profitability of their products, be they movies or TV series. There was also a little sidebar addressing the opinion that mainstream movie reviews are useless and obsolete.

I much preferred the article about movie reviewers, which was written by Richard Corliss (a man I have taken the time to bludgeon in this very blog) because in no uncertain terms Corliss comes clean and says that reviewers have never pretended to matter as far as a movie's box-office popularity is concerned and that if anything, their real purpose is to champion movies that would otherwise get swept away in the tide of summer and winter blockbusters. He gave really good examples like Little Miss Sunshine and Pan's Labyrinth, both great movies which might have been neglected were it not for critics calling attention to how good they were. I acquired a new respect for Corliss then, though I still hope he doesn't ever go back to making box-office predictions.

I found myself floored, however, but how influential the article seemed to suggest fanboys, especially the noisy, opinionated variety that infests message boards, have become to the extent that a movie can rise or fall on their support or lack of it, because to my mind this is complete and utter bullshit.

I will rattle off my long list of media products (not just limited to movies) the success of which angry fanboys could not stop, as well as the products their ardor could not save. I'll actually limit my discussion to online fanboys, who tend to opine most viciously and are apparently the most closed-minded to any form of disagreement.

Marvel's recent event miniseries Civil War sold about 2.2 million copies in the United States and Canada (not even counting all the tie-ins or the international orders) and is still racking up the reorders. It is, hands down, the most successful American comic book of the new millenium in terms of sales and yet if the online fanboy community is to be believed, it is the worst comic book ever published. I'm not here to debate the artistic merits of this particular piece of work, but the sales figures, juxtaposed against the vitriol spewed online by people who profess to be its core audience can be intepreted two ways: online fanboys are idiots who complain about something and then buy it anyway or online fanboys are a lot less influential than they think they are.

This year's summer movie showdown is another good example: Spider-Man 3 received a widespread thrashing from online fanboys, with all but one of aintitcoolnews.com's reviewers bashing it (that one being uberfanboy and AICN co-founder Harry Knowles), while Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, received glowing praise from all of them (the AICN reviewers), as well as snarky predictions (from AICN's "talkbackers") of its box-office supremacy over the web-slinger. Well, while both films are seeing their daily grosses eroding faster than the topsoil in Ormoc, it seems there's a very real chance POTC:AWE won't even hurdle the $300 million mark in the U.S. and Canada, a figure once taken as a given. SM3, in contrast, appears to be a lock for at least $335 million in the same location. Again, I won't go into the artistic merit of either of these movies, but it just seems painfully obvious to me that fanboys don't matter nearly as much as they think they do.

Probably my favorite example of how meaningless fanboy bitching truly is, however, would have to be the recent James Bond sequel. There was an online campaign to get Daniel Craig sacked from the job of playing Ian Flemings' spy, the ultimate male fantasy role model (on a site called craignotbond.com or something like that) as well as a couple of really nasty gossip tidbits about how he couldn't even drive his Aston Martin. None of this prevented Casino Royale from becoming the highest grossing Bond movie ever (not counting inflation) and one of the best-reviewed releases of 2006. In short, the fanboys were wrong on both counts. Craig, as if to rub salt on the collective fanboy wound, won a British Academy of Film and Television Award for his portrayal.

We can also go into the many fanboy-geared products their love couldn't save. For example, the 1997 film Starship Troopers generated a following of Heinlein disciples, video-game nuts, fans of extreme post-modernism and sadists in general that justified a TV spin-off and a direct-to-video sequel, but for all of that the movie couldn't even gross more than $55 million in the U.S. and Canada and barely even hurdled $120 million internationally.

Another movie made solely on the clamour of fanboy demand was Joss Whedon's Serenity, a film based on the extremely short-lived Firefly series. The film's final box-office gross? $25.5 million in the U.S. and Canada. Fanboys seemed happy with it, but apparently it just wasn't enough.

And let's not forget all of the Kevin Smith movies that fanboys couldn't even elevate past domestic U.S. grosses of $31 million (his biggest, I think, being Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back). One has to wonder if that's the sum total of the fanboy community's contribution to any movie's box office.

Fortunately, the Time article featured a quote from someone who said that if fanboys were as powerful as some studios think they are, then the recent Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse would have been a big hit, which it wasn't.

Still, the message is clear that Hollywood seems to think fanboys, highlighted by their obnoxious online self-proclaimed spokespersons are a lot more important than they actually are. Of course, at the end of the day, it's all about money, and in their never-ending quest to find the foolproof formula, studio heads are turning to the latest fad in money-making: appeasing the 15-35 year old demographic.

I'd like to give my own personal news flash to the studios: Spider-Man 1 and 2 raked in huge amounts of money and garnerned stellar reviews because Sam Raimi, a very talented filmmaker (and admittedly also a fanboy) was allowed to bring his own, uncompromised vision of Spidey to the screen. He didn't buckle under to fanboy outrage about the organic webs or any of the other crap they loved to sling at the two movies. These two movies, in my opinion, will stand the test of time, for all their flaws, as work with artistic integrity. And you know what? As much as I loathe a great many of them, I have to hand one thing to fanboys: they respect vision. Fanboys came to respect Sam Raimi because, as much as they reviled him when he first got the unenviable task of bringing the web slinger to the big screen, he stood his ground and let his vision prevail.

Spider-Man 3, while entertaining in its own right, will, by contrast, be remembered as the movie where Raimi was forced to give in to fanboys who were screaming for the appearance of one of the objects of their affection: the shallow, two-dimensional villain known as Venom. It's not really the diminished grosses or the harsher reviews that's the problem; these were just the consequences of a bigger transgression, which was that the studio tried too hard to appease the fanboys and deviated too much from the extremely tight, character-centered approach that had made the first two films both box-office smashes and critical darlings. Fanboys, especially the ones Raimi won over, will allege that this was one the studio fucked up, but to my mind a lot of them have no one to blame but themselves for forcing, through their messageboards and online noise, upon Raimi a character with whom he had no affinity whatsoever.

Batman Begins was also successful because director Chris Nolan, a talented individual, was likewise allowed free rein in how to bring Bruce Wayne and his caped alter-ego to life. Fanboys respected that, too.

At the end of the day, there is no fool-proof formula for making a hit. None. The best bet of any studio is to put the most talented people possible on a film, get the most skilled marketers plugging it, and hope for the best. Fanboy buzz will only get a movie so far.

Please, Hollywood, stop deifying these self-important, contempt-filled, syntax-and-spelling-impaired morons whose opinions will only get more vociferous and obnoxious once they realize how much power is being artificially bestowed upon them. Just try to make good movies by using talented directors, scriptwriters and actors.

Think about people like Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi and Chris Nolan who, unfettered in their vision, can come up with hits whose artistic merit no one can really question. These are people who, when given material to adapt, understand that material and what makes it work in its original incarnation. Raimi understands Peter Parker's guilt and sense of responsibility. Nolan understands that underneath Batman's cowl is a tortured soul. Jackson understands...well, that the LOTR trilogy is all about people and their frailty before anything else. It's not about fanboys barking at these guys what they want.

Sure, fanboys matter on some level, but if we're the only audience whom the Hollywood execs try to please when making their comic-book/action/sci-fi/fantasy movies, they'll have a lot more Grindhouse sized flops than Spider-Man sized hits. And you can take that to the bank.

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