As far as running a media company goes, fandom is extremely profitable, increasingly so in an age where enormous sci-fi/fantasy franchises drive everything. And there’s been huge overlap between fandom communities and social justice politics for a long time.
It’s definitely in Disney’s interest to appeal to Marvel superfans who write fanfiction and cosplay and buy tons of merchandise, and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
Like, nothing is being forced on this audience—there are large numbers of people who get sincerely excited when a new character is introduced that gives representation for the first time to a new minority group, or something like that.
As with so many businesses, the superfans are worth quite a few normies who might be put off by this. I think this is the main explanation.
…and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
I guess this is the part that’s not so clear to me. I see lots of people like this. I also see lots of people who are groaning about being repeatedly lectured and about their characters and franchises getting deconstructed. It’s hard for me to find a vantage point that doesn’t bubble me in one sphere or the other in a way that makes one side look overwhelmingly larger than the other. So I just can’t tell what the actual demographics are here. But the revealed behavior of these companies gives me the impression that they do find it crystal clear. That’s what I find a bit bewildering.
So I just can’t tell what the actual demographics are here.
Your mistake is thinking that demographics matter, without considering intensity of support.
Let’s ignore wokism for minute, and look farther afield, at Japan. Japan’s demographics are well known to be kind of disaster. Their population has been declining for some years now. And yet, we find very little willingness among Japanese media franchises to market their wares abroad. Instead, what we find is intense specialization. Japanese media companies have understood for years that getting a lot of money from a few fans is just as profitable as, and in some ways more sustainable than, getting a small or moderate amount of money from a lot of people. As a result, Japanese media is intensely fandom oriented, with many franchises being nigh-incomprehensible unless you’ve bought in to the toys, the video games, the anime and the various manga spin-offs. .hack is a notable example of this, as is Pretty Cure.
I see American media going down the same road. Star Wars, for example, has been a notable example of this, with every movie after the original trilogy increasingly pandering to the fandom, and focusing on maximizing the amount of profit extracted from people who base their entire identity around Star Wars. Marvel is the same way, featuring deeply interlocking plots requiring the viewer to have watched a dozen preceding movies, a 7 season television series, and god knows what else, in order to really understand what’s going, who these people are, and why any of this matters.
In the US, for whatever reason, the people who get really invested in these sorts of things tend to be woke. The people who complain tend not to be as invested, and go do other things with their lives. So what ends up occurring is a process of evaporative cooling, where the people who complain about increasing wokism wander away from the franchise, and those who remain (and spend money) are woke.
In the US, for whatever reason, the people who get really invested in these sorts of things tend to be woke. The people who complain tend not to be as invested, and go do other things with their lives.
I… don’t think that’s true. There have been a lot of complaints from the woke-supporting media about “toxic fans”, not to mention “gatekeeping” by uber-dedicated fans who have memorized lots of stuff and demand that others prove their knowledge or else they’re not real fans.
It is true that, eventually, the wokeness drives away those who don’t like it. Certainly you’ll get there after long enough. Not sure how far that has progressed. And not sure how much of the fanbase will be left.
every movie after the original trilogy increasingly pandering to the fandom
I think The Last Jedi is one of the clearer counterexamples here. Among the list of complaints by some dedicated fans:
The beloved character of Luke Skywalker, who believed that even Darth Vader could be redeemed, shown as deciding (even briefly) to kill his own nephew for starting down a dark path, and then to waste the rest of his own life. There are interviews with Mark Hamill himself saying he didn’t like what was done with Luke.
Various other things that can be described as screwing with the audience, like having several paths of interest from the first movie (the big new villain Snoke, the mystery of Rey’s parentage) be cut off as “Nope, that’s not a thing, that’s not happening”. “Subverting the audience’s expectations” became a meme.
Dialogue literally saying “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” (Of the three heroes Han, Luke, and Leia from the original trilogy, the second one is killed in this movie.) One wonders whether it was meant for fans.
An entire subplot where the heroes go on some “crazy adventure with a desperate plan to save everyone”—classic Star Wars—and then are chastised because actually some vice-admiral, who looked like her plan was to just wait for everyone to die, turns out to have had a real escape plan, and you heroes were making things worse all along. (Why she didn’t explain this, even privately to the ringleader of the heroes—even when they mutinied and started off on their crazy plan that endangered her plan, she watched and kept her mouth shut—is unclear, but might be chalked up to bad writing, which is unfortunately common.)
Incidentally, the whole pattern of interaction between Poe and Holdo and Leia seems like a feminist wish-fulfillment thing: toxic-masculinity male, disrespecting female superiors, mansplaining (telling Holdo about the situation—which she already knows), disregarding their orders; the female superiors reacting with sarcasm, then being vindicated in the end and chastising him repeatedly (and stun-gunning him). It’s hard to imagine this as being meant to appeal to anyone except the woke; the only incomplete thing is that Poe’s actor is Latino rather than “white”.
There is a kind of attitude that comes across as actively hostile to a preexisting fanbase:
We’re changing things you loved.
If you complain about this, then (a) the thing you’re complaining about isn’t happening, your biases are showing; (b) of course that thing is happening and that’s normal and good; (c) either way you’re a bigot for complaining.
Good riddance to you. Also you’re in a tiny minority, so no one should support you or care that you’re leaving. Though we will complain about all the toxicity we get from people like you.
And this attitude seems to have taken hold in a bunch of places. Seems like a recipe for driving away existing customers. The question in this thread is, is it rational? Do they actually end up selling more product this way?
At least judging by box office numbers, The Force Awakens (which was a fan-pandering mostly-copy of the original Star Wars) made $2B, while The Last Jedi made $1.3B. Now, people can claim alternate explanations like sequel fatigue, so are there better ways to see whether the fans liked it? Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are 85% and 42% respectively. Well, a woke talking point is that negative Rotten Tomatoes audience scores on woke movies come from organized trolls, so what else? IMDB gives 7.8 and 6.9 respectively, and it also shows a histogram of those who rated it anything from 1 to 10, where even if we ignore the lowest ratings, we can see that, normalizing against the number of 8-votes, on The Last Jedi there are fewer 9- and 10-votes and more 7- and 6-votes; I doubt the trolls are coordinated and restrained enough to arrange that.
Of course, that’s just one data point. Another franchise to look at would be Ghostbusters, though this post is long enough already.
Generally speaking, the demographic that, as an adult, spends lots of money on toys, games, and other paraphernalia for your franchise is probably the exact “basement-dwelling male nerd” demographic that the woke tend to pick fights with. Maybe lots of them are so spineless that they’ll keep buying your product even after you insult them and tell them to go away, but even if that turns out to be true, I don’t think sane businessmen would have predicted that in advance and consciously bet their profits on it. I do believe it’s in large part a principal-agent problem: writers, directors, and some executives push for wokeness, and others generally don’t push back (among other reasons, it’s a principal-agent problem for them too: why risk your career for company profits?).
Fandom people on Tumblr, AO3, etc. really responded to The Last Jedi (because it was targeted to them). Huge phenomenon. There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction. Everything worked just like it does for the Marvel movies, very profitably.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
That kind of fan doesn’t organically exist for most things outside of Star Wars though. For most things, you only get superfans in this network of fan communities which skew towards social justice. And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase, there’s an opportunity to get fandom people excited about it, which is very valuable.
Wow, Rian Johnson actually has a Tumblr account. That statement is plausible. And explains a decent amount.
There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction.
Does that mean revenue for Disney? I googled and it looks like you mean “The Love Hypothesis”, which is being adapted by Netflix. Though I doubt Disney anticipated that particular result in any case.
Remember that the ultimate question here is whether what Disney did made business sense, knowing what they knew at the time.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
“An additional group of Star Wars superfans”, as in, the group of people that were fans of Star Wars, buying Star Wars toys and games and attending Star Wars Celebration, since before Tumblr was created (2007)? Their preexisting repeat customer group, in other words? (I haven’t been able to find e.g. statistics on what percentage of Star Wars Celebration attendees were male, but I’d be surprised if, as of 2016, it were less than 80%, and 90% would not surprise me. I expect similar numbers for “people who’ve seen more than one Star Wars movie”, “people who have bought a Star Wars video game”, etc.)
You seem to be saying that Disney treated that preexisting customer group as an afterthought, instead targeting the Tumblr/AO3/etc. fandom group. (In fact, as I say, TLJ looks to be somewhat actively hostile to the first group—having characters criticize them by proxy for liking classic Star Wars stuff.) I’m not saying that’s an incorrect description of what they did, but, given what I expect the revenue numbers from the two groups were at the time TLJ was being created… I think this can be accurately described as “the decisionmakers for TLJ [most importantly Rian Johnson, but also any higher-ups who didn’t countermand him] were acting in a way that any profit-maximizer in their position should have recognized as expected-to-lose-profit”. Which was to be demonstrated.
And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase
So, for franchises with pre-existing fanbases… is the recommendation to go full woke, cater to the Tumblr fandom, and alienate some portion of the pre-existing fanbase? Does the recommendation depend on the relative sizes of the two?
As far as running a media company goes, fandom is extremely profitable, increasingly so in an age where enormous sci-fi/fantasy franchises drive everything. And there’s been huge overlap between fandom communities and social justice politics for a long time.
It’s definitely in Disney’s interest to appeal to Marvel superfans who write fanfiction and cosplay and buy tons of merchandise, and those people tend to also be supporters of social justice politics.
Like, nothing is being forced on this audience—there are large numbers of people who get sincerely excited when a new character is introduced that gives representation for the first time to a new minority group, or something like that.
As with so many businesses, the superfans are worth quite a few normies who might be put off by this. I think this is the main explanation.
I guess this is the part that’s not so clear to me. I see lots of people like this. I also see lots of people who are groaning about being repeatedly lectured and about their characters and franchises getting deconstructed. It’s hard for me to find a vantage point that doesn’t bubble me in one sphere or the other in a way that makes one side look overwhelmingly larger than the other. So I just can’t tell what the actual demographics are here. But the revealed behavior of these companies gives me the impression that they do find it crystal clear. That’s what I find a bit bewildering.
Your mistake is thinking that demographics matter, without considering intensity of support.
Let’s ignore wokism for minute, and look farther afield, at Japan. Japan’s demographics are well known to be kind of disaster. Their population has been declining for some years now. And yet, we find very little willingness among Japanese media franchises to market their wares abroad. Instead, what we find is intense specialization. Japanese media companies have understood for years that getting a lot of money from a few fans is just as profitable as, and in some ways more sustainable than, getting a small or moderate amount of money from a lot of people. As a result, Japanese media is intensely fandom oriented, with many franchises being nigh-incomprehensible unless you’ve bought in to the toys, the video games, the anime and the various manga spin-offs. .hack is a notable example of this, as is Pretty Cure.
I see American media going down the same road. Star Wars, for example, has been a notable example of this, with every movie after the original trilogy increasingly pandering to the fandom, and focusing on maximizing the amount of profit extracted from people who base their entire identity around Star Wars. Marvel is the same way, featuring deeply interlocking plots requiring the viewer to have watched a dozen preceding movies, a 7 season television series, and god knows what else, in order to really understand what’s going, who these people are, and why any of this matters.
In the US, for whatever reason, the people who get really invested in these sorts of things tend to be woke. The people who complain tend not to be as invested, and go do other things with their lives. So what ends up occurring is a process of evaporative cooling, where the people who complain about increasing wokism wander away from the franchise, and those who remain (and spend money) are woke.
I… don’t think that’s true. There have been a lot of complaints from the woke-supporting media about “toxic fans”, not to mention “gatekeeping” by uber-dedicated fans who have memorized lots of stuff and demand that others prove their knowledge or else they’re not real fans.
It is true that, eventually, the wokeness drives away those who don’t like it. Certainly you’ll get there after long enough. Not sure how far that has progressed. And not sure how much of the fanbase will be left.
I think The Last Jedi is one of the clearer counterexamples here. Among the list of complaints by some dedicated fans:
The beloved character of Luke Skywalker, who believed that even Darth Vader could be redeemed, shown as deciding (even briefly) to kill his own nephew for starting down a dark path, and then to waste the rest of his own life. There are interviews with Mark Hamill himself saying he didn’t like what was done with Luke.
Various other things that can be described as screwing with the audience, like having several paths of interest from the first movie (the big new villain Snoke, the mystery of Rey’s parentage) be cut off as “Nope, that’s not a thing, that’s not happening”. “Subverting the audience’s expectations” became a meme.
Dialogue literally saying “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” (Of the three heroes Han, Luke, and Leia from the original trilogy, the second one is killed in this movie.) One wonders whether it was meant for fans.
An entire subplot where the heroes go on some “crazy adventure with a desperate plan to save everyone”—classic Star Wars—and then are chastised because actually some vice-admiral, who looked like her plan was to just wait for everyone to die, turns out to have had a real escape plan, and you heroes were making things worse all along. (Why she didn’t explain this, even privately to the ringleader of the heroes—even when they mutinied and started off on their crazy plan that endangered her plan, she watched and kept her mouth shut—is unclear, but might be chalked up to bad writing, which is unfortunately common.)
Incidentally, the whole pattern of interaction between Poe and Holdo and Leia seems like a feminist wish-fulfillment thing: toxic-masculinity male, disrespecting female superiors, mansplaining (telling Holdo about the situation—which she already knows), disregarding their orders; the female superiors reacting with sarcasm, then being vindicated in the end and chastising him repeatedly (and stun-gunning him). It’s hard to imagine this as being meant to appeal to anyone except the woke; the only incomplete thing is that Poe’s actor is Latino rather than “white”.
There is a kind of attitude that comes across as actively hostile to a preexisting fanbase:
We’re changing things you loved.
If you complain about this, then (a) the thing you’re complaining about isn’t happening, your biases are showing; (b) of course that thing is happening and that’s normal and good; (c) either way you’re a bigot for complaining.
Good riddance to you. Also you’re in a tiny minority, so no one should support you or care that you’re leaving. Though we will complain about all the toxicity we get from people like you.
And this attitude seems to have taken hold in a bunch of places. Seems like a recipe for driving away existing customers. The question in this thread is, is it rational? Do they actually end up selling more product this way?
At least judging by box office numbers, The Force Awakens (which was a fan-pandering mostly-copy of the original Star Wars) made $2B, while The Last Jedi made $1.3B. Now, people can claim alternate explanations like sequel fatigue, so are there better ways to see whether the fans liked it? Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are 85% and 42% respectively. Well, a woke talking point is that negative Rotten Tomatoes audience scores on woke movies come from organized trolls, so what else? IMDB gives 7.8 and 6.9 respectively, and it also shows a histogram of those who rated it anything from 1 to 10, where even if we ignore the lowest ratings, we can see that, normalizing against the number of 8-votes, on The Last Jedi there are fewer 9- and 10-votes and more 7- and 6-votes; I doubt the trolls are coordinated and restrained enough to arrange that.
Of course, that’s just one data point. Another franchise to look at would be Ghostbusters, though this post is long enough already.
Generally speaking, the demographic that, as an adult, spends lots of money on toys, games, and other paraphernalia for your franchise is probably the exact “basement-dwelling male nerd” demographic that the woke tend to pick fights with. Maybe lots of them are so spineless that they’ll keep buying your product even after you insult them and tell them to go away, but even if that turns out to be true, I don’t think sane businessmen would have predicted that in advance and consciously bet their profits on it. I do believe it’s in large part a principal-agent problem: writers, directors, and some executives push for wokeness, and others generally don’t push back (among other reasons, it’s a principal-agent problem for them too: why risk your career for company profits?).
Fandom people on Tumblr, AO3, etc. really responded to The Last Jedi (because it was targeted to them). Huge phenomenon. There are now bestselling romance novels that started life as TLJ fanfiction. Everything worked just like it does for the Marvel movies, very profitably.
However there was an additional group of Star Wars superfans outside of fandom, who wanted something very different, hence the backlash. This group is somewhat more male and conservative, and then everything polarized on social media so this somehow became a real culture war issue. Of course, Disney did not like the backlash, and tried to make the 3rd movie more palatable to this group.
That kind of fan doesn’t organically exist for most things outside of Star Wars though. For most things, you only get superfans in this network of fan communities which skew towards social justice. And for any new genre story without a pre-existing fanbase, there’s an opportunity to get fandom people excited about it, which is very valuable.
Wow, Rian Johnson actually has a Tumblr account. That statement is plausible. And explains a decent amount.
Does that mean revenue for Disney? I googled and it looks like you mean “The Love Hypothesis”, which is being adapted by Netflix. Though I doubt Disney anticipated that particular result in any case.
Remember that the ultimate question here is whether what Disney did made business sense, knowing what they knew at the time.
“An additional group of Star Wars superfans”, as in, the group of people that were fans of Star Wars, buying Star Wars toys and games and attending Star Wars Celebration, since before Tumblr was created (2007)? Their preexisting repeat customer group, in other words? (I haven’t been able to find e.g. statistics on what percentage of Star Wars Celebration attendees were male, but I’d be surprised if, as of 2016, it were less than 80%, and 90% would not surprise me. I expect similar numbers for “people who’ve seen more than one Star Wars movie”, “people who have bought a Star Wars video game”, etc.)
You seem to be saying that Disney treated that preexisting customer group as an afterthought, instead targeting the Tumblr/AO3/etc. fandom group. (In fact, as I say, TLJ looks to be somewhat actively hostile to the first group—having characters criticize them by proxy for liking classic Star Wars stuff.) I’m not saying that’s an incorrect description of what they did, but, given what I expect the revenue numbers from the two groups were at the time TLJ was being created… I think this can be accurately described as “the decisionmakers for TLJ [most importantly Rian Johnson, but also any higher-ups who didn’t countermand him] were acting in a way that any profit-maximizer in their position should have recognized as expected-to-lose-profit”. Which was to be demonstrated.
So, for franchises with pre-existing fanbases… is the recommendation to go full woke, cater to the Tumblr fandom, and alienate some portion of the pre-existing fanbase? Does the recommendation depend on the relative sizes of the two?