Nerds are a hard bunch to please. With the hardcore fanboy
and internet forum troll, nothing is either OK or satisfactory: it is either
the greatest thing since Star Trek II,
or else a childhood-destroying monster that haunts their dreams and caused the
deaths of their grandparents.
As everyone knows, virtually every huge blockbuster being
released at the moment has its origins in some kind of comic book. Gone are the
days when being a 22 year old fanzine collector got you beaten up – even
gangster wannabes now proudly sport Superman hats or Marvel hoodies, or Batman
belt-buckles so heavy their jeans end up around their ankles. Just looking at
the grosses for Spider-Man or The Dark Knight will tell you that nerd
culture is now a huge business, and as such movies find themselves pandering to
the kind of demographic who are willing to part with £1000 for a life-size
stormtrooper outfit from Forbidden Planet.
From an objective point of view, it makes perfect business
sense to do this. If you want your movie to make as much money as possible,
release some screenshots of The Lizard in The
Amazing Spider-Man or leak to AintItCool that Cumberbatch is playing Khan
in the nest Star Trek film, and just
sit back and watch the internet forums explode with “this is so leet/this is
tre suxorz” bitch-slapping. It can only end up well for you: everyone will pay
to see the film, just so they can then keep up with the forum comments on it –
after all, no self-respecting nerd would be caught dead being behind on the
current pop-culture talk.
Many, many people went to see Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. Many of those many people will
have been hugely disappointed by it, but of course that didn’t stop those
people from paying to see it in the first place, thereby guaranteeing Michael
Bay license to make another car-crash-in-your-head orgy of dull robot violence.
And yet, those same people will no doubt do exactly the same again when Transformers 4 comes out, because no-one
wants to be the person who hasn’t seen it yet and who can’t join in
conversations about it.
Yet now, Dark of the
Moon has found itself in the unlucky bracket of nerd-hated movies – the pit
of oblivion from which no amount of critical praise or reappraisal can rescue
it, following the equally-despised Revenge
of the Fallen. When nerds decide they hate a film, no one is going to shout
them down, whether they be right or not. Critical consensus or general audience
reaction doesn’t matter to these people: what matters is that it wasn’t the
film they had in their head, and as such deserved nothing but hatred and
mockery. In a way, their loud ranting doesn’t matter: the Star Wars prequels have made a ton of money anyway, who cares if
they were no good? But this is ignoring the influence of the nerd voice – its
sheer power to eventually define the general opinion of a movie is staggering,
and may end up killing your once money-grabbing franchise. I may try to defend Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull or Superman Returns in my ‘Underrated
Classics’ posts, but I am under no illusions that I am going to change the fan
consensus that these films were bad. Any good reaction or critical plaudits
that may have been lent to the films have since disappeared under a mountain of
bile and hatred (just look at the Rotten Tomatoes ‘certified fresh rating of
77% for Crystal Skull) which causes
even people who liked the films to eventually do so secretly, for fear of being
shouted down by loudmouth fanboys who seem unable to comprehend that a person’s
reaction to a film may actually be a subjective experience. Numerous franchises
have found themselves shackled with the weight of the fanboy reaction, blocking
any further attempts at their continuation (Superman and Hulk spring to
mind...).
This is a crowd that can never be fully appeased, and as
such is not worth worrying about the reaction of. Whether they are determined
to hate it or not, a new Superman film will make huge amounts of money simply
because nerds love to vent their spleens. In attempting to pander to their
wishes by putting Sandman, Venom AND Hobgoblin in one movie, you simply end up
ruining a perfectly good franchise, whereas sticking to your guns and following
the story-and-character route ends up in The
Dark Knight being the third most successful film of all time...
No comments:
Post a Comment