It’s a common refrain from franchise movie directors when a film fails to set the critical world on fire that they have, in fact, not made it for those elitist critics in their metropolitan bubble of exclusive screenings and free canapes, but “for the fans”. But what happens when the fans decide they don’t want a particular project either?
Ron Howard, the director of Solo: A Star Wars Story, recently suggested that a fan backlash against the Star Wars saga as a whole, primarily driven by negative reaction to the preceding film The Last Jedi, was responsible for his own movie’s mediocre performance at the box office. Howard pointed to a concerted campaign to drive down “audience reaction” scores on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, arguing that Solo may have earned more than its $393m box office take had such “aggressive trolling” not occurred.
The director may have a point, but to blame angry internet fans alone for the film’s performance overlooks a number of other factors that will probably have contributed to its underwhelming reception. The critical press reaction was hardly much more enthusiastic (indeed, while Solo’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 64%, the critical consensus only puts it marginally higher at 70%); Howard himself, while undoubtedly a talented filmmaker, was parachuted in to rework the film after the original team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were let go due to “creative differences”; and Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger has even admitted that yet another Star Wars release so soon after the previous instalment may have contributed to audience fatigue with the saga.
Fans, particularly the ones more inclined to get aggrieved at the slightest hint of a property not being made in the exact way they want it, would certainly like to believe that they have that kind of power over the mass cinema-going audience. But you only have to look at Captain Marvel, which earned well over $1n despite concerted boycott campaigning from “anti-social justice warrior” figureheads on YouTube and social media, to see that a good film is perfectly capable of rising above such petty trolling.
Whether successful or not, what these campaigns had in common was that they weren’t based on the quality of the products themselves – but on pre-emptive assumptions made by fans who had already decided they weren’t going to like it. It’s been a different story in the aftermath of the final season of Game of Thrones, where a widespread sense of disappointment with the quality and character direction – one that, it should be stressed, wasn’t universally shared by all the fans – manifested itself, in the most extreme quarters, in the shape of petitions for HBO to actually remake the episodes in a fashion more in line with fan expectations.
What’s at the root of these types of campaigns? In recent years we’ve seen a growth in entitled attitudes among some fans – a feeling that has always bubbled under the surface, but which has risen as the internet has given more and more amplification to their voices. As far as these fans are concerned, their beloved characters and universes are not “owned” by their makers – but by those who spend their hard-earned on going to watch them. And so criticism moves out of the realm of simply being a reaction, into something that drives a cause – the injustice will not stand, the wrong must be addressed.
But just as an author cannot claim complete ownership of a work once it’s been given to the world, so too an audience has no right to claim ownership while it’s being created. The only duty that a filmmaker has is to deliver the work as they see fit – and to deliver commercial success, of course, if that’s what they’ve been hired to do. In general, if the work is good, it has a chance of succeeding – even if it might make decisions that not every viewer would have made in the process.
Fandom has, and always will have, an important role to play in art and culture. To consume, to engage, to enjoy, to criticise, to analyse, to adapt. But demanding to have a say in the work itself isn’t part of the deal. It fails to take into account that not every other fan may even agree with one’s criticisms; not to mention that, frankly, fans don’t always know best what they actually want. And the time and effort that some groups expend campaigning against works they don’t like would surely be better spent encouraging, or even creating more of, ones that they do.
• Seb Patrick co-hosts Cinematic Universe, a podcast about comic book movies, and is a contributor to Empire and Den of Geek
