The State of the Movie Fan Union

Yesterday was a watershed day in the movie world, a day like a heart rate monitor that beeps even louder if we’re not paying close attention. It may not have felt like it, but it was the kind of day that clearly defined cinephile culture. Two events let us know exactly where fandom stands, and both happened far away from any studio lot.

After hanging out with him at Comic-Con, Alex Pappademas published his feature on Umberto “El Mayimbe” Gonzalez’s alpha superhero scooping skills within hours of Devin Faraci’s wild, mystery Twitter feed speculation about what 1mm of the new Spider-Man might look like.

In both situations you have prominent cinema culture writers predicting the far future of the biggest tentpole franchises because that’s the professional activity that brings sub-cultural prominence. Consider these articles’ appearance just weeks after the dissolution of The Dissolve, and the message in the crystal ball becomes clearer.

Now, there’s no use pretending like there was ever a critical golden age or that dissections of all kinds of cinema have ever been more than a niche crew rowing in the sea of a populist art, but there’s also little point in denying that the movie fandom of 2015 is one of rampant, gleeful sleuthing and prognostication. We are more about 2018 than we do 2015.

Over the past few years, movie fandom has broadened enough to support a dozen major film websites and a dozen more dinky sites like ours who only pull in a few million readers a month, and it has also become deeply fascinated by the siren-sweet ululations of The Possible. The Possible is unblemished by production realities. The Possible is shiny and chrome. The Possible is a blank slate for us on which to write our fantasies. What might happen in cinema is now more broadly important than what happened on screens over the weekend, let alone two weekends ago or (gasp) a year or fifty ago.

I understand why. There are a lot of reasons. Loving something involves curiosity and the explosion of mainstream movie sites has allowed even hobbyist curiosity to flourish, which has proven itself to mean gigantic traffic for sites that depend on gigantic traffic, which has led to even more movie news, which has led to even greater consolidation of what gets to be news. At the end of that rope, there’s no surprise that the movies that rate highest on the anticipation scale and ultimately bring in the most box office tend to bring in the most web traffic, too.

The funny thing about movie news is that it doesn’t really exist in the same sense that traditional news does — where something happens and someone on the scene reports on how the something happened. Most of what happens in filmmaking has been purposefully kept secret to protect information, protect careers, protect deals and protect the magic until it’s ready to be delivered to fans. That’s no longer the case, as studios wrestle yet again with how much information they’re willing to give out and when. The spy network scoops of Aint It Cool took a long aught nap before reawakening with a vengeance with the new culture site boom. Now, even J.J. Abrams is delivering metric tons of imagery and information about his latest, which makes me wonder how Cloverfield (not based on a comic book, shrouded in mystery) would fare just seven short years after its release. Would the mystery pique interest or earn apathy? It’s hard to say.

 

For what it’s worth, Mayimbe is smartly and shrewdly responding to the marketplace — one that practically aches for even the tiniest bit of information about properties they know. Make no mistake. Like V chiding Dystopic Londoners for letting England succumb to fascism, it is Fans who have given studios the keys to the franchise-mobile, joyously erupting every time A Thing We’ve Heard About makes its way onto screens. We are the reason everything is getting a 16th minute of fame.

That goes in both directions — whether trumpeting Han and Chewie returning home or forehead-slapping their way through a comments section on an Emoji movie (whatever that could even be), Fans are more than readily happy to offer an opinion. That instantaneous connection to the news, whether scooped by Mayimbe as Marvel shakes its fist or announced on a Hall H stage in front of thousands, is vital to the way modern Fandom relates to movies.

That’s because, in order to have an opinion, you have to have at least a passing knowledge of the thing being reported on, and we want to have opinions years in advance of seeing the thing. Thus, studios keep pinging back to recognizable names in order to avoid the uphill battle of selling A Thing We Haven’t Heard About to a crowd thirsty to debate which shades of red and blue Spider-Man’s newest newest newest costume should be.

Maybe this isn’t you. Maybe it’s only sometimes you. If so, you’re in the minority. The majority has spoken, and it wants any crumb of potential information about the Possible that it can get.

Spider-Man’s new goggles or A movie most people have never heard of?

 

That’s why Mayimbe is currently thriving. He’s one of the few writers out there who actively seeks out news to break in a crowd of aggregators who refresh the front page of Reddit and the trades for hints of news, pleased to copy and paste without any added value while watching the traffic dial spin.

Faraci may be an even more interesting story. Where years ago he made a name as a fierce and insightful critic, he’s mostly relegated himself within the walls of Birth Movies Death to the role of superhero scrap news filter while other BMD writers like Meredith Borders, FILM CRIT HULK, Evan Saathoff and Scott Wampler focus on the thoughtful editorial side of things. Faraci only occasionally pops up to write about topics that take cinema into the larger socio-political landscape. The balance is important, though.

Depending on where you’re sitting, his question mark-filled article questioning whether a little-followed Twitter account may be The Russo Brothers sending out obtuse images from Captain America: Civil War is either the pinnacle or nadir of movie culture writing. It has every element of get-out-of-thinking-free prognostication. There’s a puzzle to be solved, but there’s no incentive to really solve it or even pretend to have lifted a finger to solve it. It potentially involves an upcoming Marvel blockbuster where a popular Marvel character will appear in the MCU for the first time, so even if it’s all a smoke screen, it allows Fans their daily opportunity to weigh in on the minutia that acts as Shibboleth for true believers.

The golden footnote is that, if this Twitter account turns out to be some high school student in Ohio trolling the internet, there’s no consequence for anyone on any movie site for having explored it. If it turns out to truly be The Russo Brothers being playful, then Faraci was ahead of the coolness curve. There is no downside to spending five minutes to post it.

It’s mysterious, but it’s also about a famous property. This is a perfect recipe for rampant speculation. The key question is, if this turns out to be real, and the directors of a huge property are sharing enigmatic “first looks,” what have we — as movie fans — really gained from it?

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