When Marvel Studios was founded in the summer of 1996, superheroes were close to irrelevant. Comic book sales were in decline, Marvel’s initially popular Saturday morning cartoons were waning, and the company’s attempts over the previous decades to break through in Hollywood had gone nowhere, with movies based on Daredevil, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man all having been optioned without any film being made. Backs against the wall, Marvel’s executives realized that their only chance of getting traction in La La Land was by doing the legwork themselves.
The company’s fortunes hardly turned around overnight. Marvel was forced to fire a third of its employees and declare bankruptcy a few months after launching its film studio, and the movie rights to Spider-Man—then the company’s most valuable piece of intellectual property—were sold off in the ensuing years in a frantic attempt to raise cash. It wasn’t until 2008 that Marvel Studios finally released an Iron Man movie—the choice of protagonist having less to do with that hero’s particular following than the ease with which the toy company that had taken control of Marvel during its bankruptcy could market action figure tie-ins. Against all expectations, Iron Man made half a billion dollars worldwide. Just over a year later, Disney purchased Marvel Studios for $4 billion. A decade after that, Avengers: Endgame would break the weekend box-office record—set by the previous Avengers installment—and net over $2 billion in less than two weeks.
New York magazine’s Vulture vertical was launched the year before Iron Man’s release, promising “a serious take on lowbrow culture.” A few months later, Chris Hardwick began a blog called “The Nerdist,” which quickly pivoted from its original raison d’etre of “palatable tech” to dispatches on ephemera from the original Transformers movie and guest posts about DC’s Silver Age reboot. Today, each site serves as a lodestar for overlapping fandoms, with Vulture hosting Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and The Bachelor content, while Nerdist continues to concentrate on legacy franchises like Star Wars and Marvel. As their staffs crank out daily updates, prognostications, and YouTube clips on these and many other television and movie series, their success has pressured older outlets to shift from a more traditional, criticism-centric format to a menu of recaps and listicles, as well as inspiring newer, general interest sites like The Ringer and Vox to integrate fan-pleasing deeply into their pop culture coverage.
As the fandom press has risen, culture has been reorganized around a cluster of franchises that would have been dismissed by the critics of previous generations as the province of children, nerds, or—most especially—nerdy children. Success in Hollywood now has as much to do with the number of people who see a particular film or TV show as with how easily its intellectual property can be franchised. Why settle for one Iron Man when you could have over a decade of Avengers movies? For both Hollywood and the digital newsrooms of Vulture, Nerdist, and their imitators, the logic is obvious: cater to a readymade fanbase, and the dollars will take care of themselves.
Fishing for Eyeballs
In a 2016 Variety guest column, Hollywood’s shift from chasing viewers to pursuing fans was convincingly attributed to “digital empowerment” by the cultural anthropologist-cum-industry consultant Susan Kresnicka. Including herself among the new legions of fans, she writes that combining a capability for “consuming, connecting and creating on our own terms” with “access to multitudes of others who share our passion for a show, movie, book, story, character, sport, band, artist, video game, brand, product, hobby, etc.” galvanizes mere interest into a commercial force that drives enthusiasts to “watch more, share more, buy more, evangelize more, participate more, help more.”
“Marketing strategies are increasingly crafted to drive not just breadth but depth of engagement,” Kresnicka notes. “And the conversation has in large part moved from how to ‘manage’ fans to how to ‘relate’ to fans.” A classic example of this shift is the slow-drip of news that precedes every new Star Wars or superhero film, a process that typically begins more than two years ahead of a theatrical release. First comes the announcement about the movie itself. Next, rumors swirl about who will direct and star. In front of a ballroom of cosplayers at San Diego Comic Con, a teaser will ramp up speculation even further. The proper trailer will arrive months later, dropped online with no advance warning to incite delirium on social media. All the while, an armada of YouTube speculators cultivate theories, half-baked or coolly rational, about how this latest installment will fit into a sometimes branching, sometimes ouroborosian plot arc that spans decades.
Studios have come to understand that by lengthening each film’s advance publicity cycle, fans are given more opportunities to demonstrate their fandom, amplifying the FOMO of casual viewers such that they, too, are driven to see what all the fuss is about. Each new crumb of information becomes a reason to post on Facebook, a kernel of brand awareness to drive the decision to buy an overpriced hoodie at the mall. Multiplying that effect is the fact that the lead times for these films are now so long that there is never not a new movie to talk about. Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t live up to your expectations? Good news, the cast for Episode IX has just been announced! (...)
Such mining of the smallest news drops for content is everywhere in the fandom press. But what really sets these outlets apart from buttoned-up operations like the New York Times and CNN—each more than happy to crib a few clicks by throwing a link to the newest Star Wars teaser up on their website—is the length to which they’ll go to dissect the utterly banal. The release of the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker trailer merited not only a quick embedded video post from Vulture but also a thousand-word follow-up analyzing its title.
Titles, as it turns out, are irresistible to the fandom press. Last December, Netflix released a clip that did nothing beyond reveal the names of each episode in the third season of Stranger Things, which flashed briefly onscreen while spooky music played. The one-minute video merited a blog post on Vulture. And Nerdist. And Entertainment Weekly. And Variety. Once a fandom has been identified, every piece of content, no matter how inconsequential, becomes an excuse to go fishing for eyeballs.
by Kyle Paoletta, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Zoë van Dijk
The company’s fortunes hardly turned around overnight. Marvel was forced to fire a third of its employees and declare bankruptcy a few months after launching its film studio, and the movie rights to Spider-Man—then the company’s most valuable piece of intellectual property—were sold off in the ensuing years in a frantic attempt to raise cash. It wasn’t until 2008 that Marvel Studios finally released an Iron Man movie—the choice of protagonist having less to do with that hero’s particular following than the ease with which the toy company that had taken control of Marvel during its bankruptcy could market action figure tie-ins. Against all expectations, Iron Man made half a billion dollars worldwide. Just over a year later, Disney purchased Marvel Studios for $4 billion. A decade after that, Avengers: Endgame would break the weekend box-office record—set by the previous Avengers installment—and net over $2 billion in less than two weeks.
New York magazine’s Vulture vertical was launched the year before Iron Man’s release, promising “a serious take on lowbrow culture.” A few months later, Chris Hardwick began a blog called “The Nerdist,” which quickly pivoted from its original raison d’etre of “palatable tech” to dispatches on ephemera from the original Transformers movie and guest posts about DC’s Silver Age reboot. Today, each site serves as a lodestar for overlapping fandoms, with Vulture hosting Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and The Bachelor content, while Nerdist continues to concentrate on legacy franchises like Star Wars and Marvel. As their staffs crank out daily updates, prognostications, and YouTube clips on these and many other television and movie series, their success has pressured older outlets to shift from a more traditional, criticism-centric format to a menu of recaps and listicles, as well as inspiring newer, general interest sites like The Ringer and Vox to integrate fan-pleasing deeply into their pop culture coverage.As the fandom press has risen, culture has been reorganized around a cluster of franchises that would have been dismissed by the critics of previous generations as the province of children, nerds, or—most especially—nerdy children. Success in Hollywood now has as much to do with the number of people who see a particular film or TV show as with how easily its intellectual property can be franchised. Why settle for one Iron Man when you could have over a decade of Avengers movies? For both Hollywood and the digital newsrooms of Vulture, Nerdist, and their imitators, the logic is obvious: cater to a readymade fanbase, and the dollars will take care of themselves.
Fishing for Eyeballs
In a 2016 Variety guest column, Hollywood’s shift from chasing viewers to pursuing fans was convincingly attributed to “digital empowerment” by the cultural anthropologist-cum-industry consultant Susan Kresnicka. Including herself among the new legions of fans, she writes that combining a capability for “consuming, connecting and creating on our own terms” with “access to multitudes of others who share our passion for a show, movie, book, story, character, sport, band, artist, video game, brand, product, hobby, etc.” galvanizes mere interest into a commercial force that drives enthusiasts to “watch more, share more, buy more, evangelize more, participate more, help more.”
“Marketing strategies are increasingly crafted to drive not just breadth but depth of engagement,” Kresnicka notes. “And the conversation has in large part moved from how to ‘manage’ fans to how to ‘relate’ to fans.” A classic example of this shift is the slow-drip of news that precedes every new Star Wars or superhero film, a process that typically begins more than two years ahead of a theatrical release. First comes the announcement about the movie itself. Next, rumors swirl about who will direct and star. In front of a ballroom of cosplayers at San Diego Comic Con, a teaser will ramp up speculation even further. The proper trailer will arrive months later, dropped online with no advance warning to incite delirium on social media. All the while, an armada of YouTube speculators cultivate theories, half-baked or coolly rational, about how this latest installment will fit into a sometimes branching, sometimes ouroborosian plot arc that spans decades.
Studios have come to understand that by lengthening each film’s advance publicity cycle, fans are given more opportunities to demonstrate their fandom, amplifying the FOMO of casual viewers such that they, too, are driven to see what all the fuss is about. Each new crumb of information becomes a reason to post on Facebook, a kernel of brand awareness to drive the decision to buy an overpriced hoodie at the mall. Multiplying that effect is the fact that the lead times for these films are now so long that there is never not a new movie to talk about. Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t live up to your expectations? Good news, the cast for Episode IX has just been announced! (...)
Such mining of the smallest news drops for content is everywhere in the fandom press. But what really sets these outlets apart from buttoned-up operations like the New York Times and CNN—each more than happy to crib a few clicks by throwing a link to the newest Star Wars teaser up on their website—is the length to which they’ll go to dissect the utterly banal. The release of the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker trailer merited not only a quick embedded video post from Vulture but also a thousand-word follow-up analyzing its title.
Titles, as it turns out, are irresistible to the fandom press. Last December, Netflix released a clip that did nothing beyond reveal the names of each episode in the third season of Stranger Things, which flashed briefly onscreen while spooky music played. The one-minute video merited a blog post on Vulture. And Nerdist. And Entertainment Weekly. And Variety. Once a fandom has been identified, every piece of content, no matter how inconsequential, becomes an excuse to go fishing for eyeballs.
by Kyle Paoletta, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Zoë van Dijk
