Studios are apparently consulting with superfans before the movie pisses anyone off

If you need further evidence that online fan culture has gotten out of control, look no further than the fact that “several studios” wouldn’t even speak to Variety—not even on background!— on the topic for fear of triggering their audiences’ ire. “It’s just a lose-lose,” a representative lamented to the outlet. This is the level of deference Hollywood now affords to the impassioned, dare we say angry, fan. And that’s despite the fact that the vocally angry ones are a “really, really tiny subset of that already smaller subset of fandom” of die-hards, Star Trek’s VP of brand development John Van Citters observed to the outlet.

But that tiny subset is so threatening to major Hollywood studios that they’ve begun crafting entire strategies around these jabronis. Going a step beyond focus group testing, studios will now “assemble specialized [clusters] of superfans” just to cater their franchise marketing materials to them. “They’re very vocal,” a studio exec told Variety. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.'” The opinion of these small groups is so powerful that “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”

So if you’ve been feeling like a lot of big studio output lately is pure, shameless fanservice, that’s why! Of course, a way around this problem of intense and active fandom would be to create original stories with no pre-existing canon, but then what would the poor companies do with all their precious intellectual property? Instead, franchise teams have to develop other coping mechanisms, like giving actors “social media boot camp” or strategically elevating positive feedback or, yes, obeying the whims of the superfan focus groups. “It comes with the territory, but it’s gotten incredibly loud in the last couple years,” an anonymous “veteran marketing executive” at a major studio said of toxic fandom. “It’s just much easier to see it now,” Citters opined. “I don’t know that it’s really that much broader than where things were in 1995—it’s just that the bullhorn wasn’t there.”