The Fandoms That Forgot How to Be Fans

There used to be a useful bargain inside fandom: you loved a world enough to argue about it. You could hate the latest chapter, call your friend, write a thousand words on a message board, and still understand that the point was the world. The thing itself came first.

That bargain is broken in too many corners of the internet. A new trailer can now be treated as evidence in a trial that began before anyone watched the finished work. A casting announcement becomes a referendum on who is allowed to belong. An actor becomes a stand-in for every disappointment a person has carried since childhood. By premiere night, the verdict has been staged, clipped, optimized and fed into the algorithm.

This is not a plea for studios to be spared. Disney’s franchise factory has put out work that feels thin, overextended or improperly finished. Marvel’s post-Endgame expansion asked viewers to keep up with a television syllabus as well as a movie calendar. Star Wars has lurched between competing creative instincts. If people opt out because a story did not earn their time, that is the ordinary and necessary discipline of an audience.

The line is crossed when disappointment becomes an organized effort to make a project fail before it has had a fair chance to meet its audience, or to make people involved in it miserable. That is not consumer power. It is a demand for ownership without the responsibility of making anything.

Social media turns persistence into apparent consensus

One reason these factions look larger than they are is mechanical. Social platforms reward repeatable conflict: the angry reaction, the contemptuous thumbnail, the “explainer” that turns a two-minute trailer into a civilizational emergency. The same accounts can generate a stream of posts, replies and videos that reads like a mass movement to anyone dropped into the feed cold. It may be a committed minority. It may even be a handful of people with time, an audience and a grudge.

That does not mean every negative response is fake. It means volume is a bad proxy for scale. Review scores have especially poor diagnostic value when a coordinated pile-on begins before a title is broadly available. Rotten Tomatoes changed its policy in 2019 so users could not submit audience reviews before a film’s release, citing the problem of organized pre-release attacks.¹ The adjustment did not end the incentive to flood a rating system; it simply acknowledged the obvious weakness.

Trade reporting has documented the cost of this climate on the people who have to sell these shows. In 2024, Variety reported that studios were using superfan groups to test marketing, putting talent through social-media training and, in severe cases, bringing in security firms to protect people from doxxing.² Those are not measures taken because an audience gave a thoughtful note about a third-act problem.

Marvel and Star Wars show the rise, and the harder recovery

Disney’s two biggest modern franchises make an easy story only if we erase half the evidence. Both reached levels of commercial force that few entertainment properties have ever touched. Both then ran into a mix of audience fatigue, uneven execution, pandemic-disrupted moviegoing, streaming-era volume, ballooning costs and a permanent online war over what the franchises should be. Toxicity is one pressure inside that mix. It is not a spreadsheet category.

Star Wars made the argument feel like an inheritance dispute

Star Wars had disagreements long before social media had an algorithm to monetize them. Some people saw Ewoks as a charming end to a fairy tale; others saw a merchandising decision in fur. The prequels brought a different kind of blowback, centered on dialogue, digital effects and George Lucas’ dense political world-building. Those arguments were often sharp, but they still sat inside a fan culture whose members largely agreed that the galaxy was a place worth returning to.

That history matters because it shows how tastes change. The trilogy once treated as the crime scene of modern fandom became a formative text for people who grew up with it. The Clone Wars gave its characters room to breathe and made the prequel period more emotionally legible for a younger audience. Disney brought the animated series back for a final season on Disney+, calling the response to it “tremendous.”⁷ The lesson is not that every unpopular chapter will be redeemed. It is that a franchise can recover when later work adds texture instead of treating the old argument as a reason to erase everything.

Disney’s 2012 acquisition came with a plan to revive theatrical Star Wars on a regular cadence.⁸ The Force Awakens made that bet look effortless, taking in $2.068 billion worldwide.⁶ Then The Last Jedi turned a disagreement about a movie into an argument over stewardship. Its defenders saw a story willing to interrogate hero worship; its angriest opponents saw a repudiation of Luke Skywalker and the rules they believed held the saga together. Both reactions can coexist. The mistake was allowing the most absolutist version of one reaction to define the audience.

No public evidence can cleanly assign the commercial fate of a later Star Wars film or series to that conflict. Release dates, costs, competition, story quality and the changing habits of moviegoers are all part of the calculation. But the fandom’s temperature changed. A faction that had once argued about scenes began to police who could make the stories, who could appear in them and which viewers counted as real fans. The dispute became less about whether a choice worked and more about whether the choice had the right to exist.

The streaming era gave Lucasfilm two reminders of what still works. The Mandalorian arrived with a clean, legible promise, a space western with a new protagonist and an episodic engine. Andor reached for a political thriller rather than another nostalgia parade. Neither needed to settle every old canon argument before earning an audience. That is a better use of a big universe: let different corners breathe.

The Acolyte shows the other side of the problem. Its writing and execution were available for ordinary criticism. Its cast and creative team were also caught in an online campaign that included review-bombing and bigoted abuse, according to reporting by Variety and comments by lead actor Amandla Stenberg.² The show’s cancellation after one season cannot be reduced to the abuse. Renewal decisions include costs and viewership that the public cannot fully see. Still, a hostile pre-release environment creates its own loss: it crowds out useful criticism, makes performers absorb a dispute they did not create, and teaches executives to mistake angry activity for a map of the whole audience.

Marvel’s contract was built on payoff, not purity

Marvel’s rise worked on a different agreement. The MCU did not ask its audience to protect a single creator’s canon. It asked them to keep showing up, because the threads would eventually meet. Iron Man, Captain America and Thor could be different kinds of movies while still feeding a larger event. Online fandom became a theory engine, eager to connect a post-credits scene to the next installment. The system rewarded attention.

Avengers: Endgame was the payoff in its purest form, a conclusion built from a decade of accumulating character investment that earned $2.799 billion worldwide.³ That success also created a dangerous business temptation. If one interconnected universe can reward patient viewing, then more connections must be better. A movie calendar became a film-and-streaming calendar, and casual viewers began to ask a reasonable question: how much of this is required reading?

The first Disney+ experiments had real energy because they made room for different shapes of story. The problem came when connective tissue started to feel more important than the individual work. A franchise can ask people to remember an earlier movie. It loses people when a theatrical ticket feels like admission to a course they have not had time to take.

The resulting backlash has often been structural rather than theological. Fans may dislike an underwritten character or a flat digital environment, but the larger complaint is frequently about volume, unfinished-feeling effects and stories that postpone their own endings in order to advertise the next release. The Marvels ended its theatrical run with $206.1 million worldwide, a sharp contrast with the franchise’s high-water marks.⁴ A hostile online campaign can pollute a conversation around a title. It cannot account for all of the distance between those two numbers.

Disney’s response has been a correction in the direction the criticism pointed. Bob Iger said in March 2024 that Marvel had reduced both its film and television output because the company had to focus and “can’t make too much.”⁵ That is not capitulation to trolls. It is an acknowledgment that access and quality are part of the product. A franchise that turns every release into homework has already created the conditions for its own detractors to sound persuasive.

Two fandoms, two kinds of influence

Star Wars fights are often fights over authorship: Who gets to define the soul of the universe, and how far can a new story move from the version a fan first loved? Marvel’s recent fights are more often fights over delivery: Is the next chapter coherent, distinct and worth the time it demands? Those are broad tendencies, not rules. Both franchises contain canon obsessives, casual viewers, generous critics and people who simply want to watch something good on a Friday night.

The contrast explains why fandom influence has limits. The loudest Star Wars faction cannot appoint itself Lucasfilm’s board. The most committed Marvel completionist cannot make a crowded release schedule feel inviting to everyone else. Fans can signal a problem, organize a boycott, amplify a review or make a performer’s life harder. They cannot substitute their own preferred blueprint for a creative strategy, and they cannot buy back the trust lost by weak work. Studios still own the larger obligation: make things that deserve an audience, then refuse to let a small, punitive faction decide who belongs in one.

Criticism asks for better work. Fandom fundamentalism asks for obedience.

The best case for the angry fan is strong enough to state plainly. A corporation bought a beloved mythology, multiplied it across formats, and sometimes used nostalgia as a substitute for a finished idea. People who spent money, time and feeling on these stories do not owe a studio applause. They are allowed to say a plot is incoherent, a character is mishandled, or a series is not worth another season.

All true. None of it entitles a fan to dictate the only valid version of a shared universe. No franchise survives if every new creator has to treat the loudest existing sub-group as a licensing board. That standard turns the audience into a collection of veto players, each convinced that its preferred canon, casting or tone is the actual property and every other person is an intruder.

Studios make this worse when they answer every flare-up with anxious calibration. A superfan focus group can catch an honest mistake; it cannot decide what a story is for. Nor is a creative team repaired by treating online sentiment as a live referendum. The cleaner answer is slow, demanding and unfashionable: make fewer things, give them time, let them be distinct, and accept that a franchise is not owed an uninterrupted content pipeline.

The old mass-market fandom is not entirely gone. It is still there whenever people argue about a scene because they saw something in it, whenever a family takes three generations to a movie, whenever fans build a community around curiosity rather than possession. But it has been crowded by a business of grievance, where the performance of disgust is more valuable than the experience of enjoying, or honestly criticizing, the work.

That business can keep shouting. The rest of us do not have to confuse it with love.