Fin: Memo to studios: Stop pandering to the "superfans"

Plus: Robbie Williams monkey confusion, the deaths of two great athletes and both dads from Coming to America, and more in this week’s notes column.

Variety ran a story this week about how Hollywood studios are dealing with disgruntled superfans in response to how they’re dealing with “toxic fandom.” 

“In a franchise economy increasingly dependent upon established audience devotion to drive the bottom line, the threat of toxic fandoms poisoning that enthusiasm has become a seemingly intractable headache for almost every studio,” the piece says. “And it’s only getting worse.” 

How are they responding? Mostly, by validating the toxic fans and giving them what they want. 

Those who talked to Variety all agreed that “the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.” 

They should not do this.

For the past 15 years or so, angry male nerds have had the vast majority of popular culture pitched directly to them. Their loudest reaction has been to respond to this with anger, hostility, racism, and sexism. 

The response from Hollywood to their unhappiness has been to pander to them even harder. 

If a person is legitimately mad that a Star Wars project has Black women in it, to the point where they make an angry three-hour YouTube about it, there should be no reaction form the studios other than derision and contempt. 

“Why is he a monkey?” 

Robbie Williams was a pretty big pop/rock star in the ‘90s, and the thing I remember most about him was that he was super-popular in Britain but less so in the United States, at least compared to the Spice Girls and other Cool Britannia-era cultural exports. He had that “I’m loving angels instead” song, but that’s all I remember of his music.