George R.R. Martin blogged some time ago about the ascent of the "anti-fan," who rather than discussing their likes and dislikes in book and film, etc., much prefer to "talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped."
However, he had nothing to say of why this is happening (at least, nothing explicit)--of why people are so invested in the commercial failure of other people's work when they will not benefit from that failure. (If a Hollywood studio loses money, what is it to them?)
The obvious answer is the country's "culture wars," and the way that, in the course of swallowing up everything else, they have swallowed pop culture too, and the fan discourse about it. Powerful a force as this has been in itself it has been reinforced by the way the pop culture industry promotes its own products, preoccupying everyone with, in the case of film, studio personalities and politics and finances, with budgets and grosses and profits and losses, with what has been described as "market populism" and "corporate wokeness," as part of the effort to get hold our interest amid the obscene cacophony of the contemporary mediasphere. The result is that success and failure are much on our mind--so much so that a movie fan at least as easily ends up an "armchair movie executive" as a student of cinema, while their political sympathies and antipathies are constantly touched on, agitated, provoked, by many a work even before they see it. And all this comes together as they insist that the public is really thinking what they are thinking, and proving it with their dollars. ("See that movie I don't like because of its politics? Look at how it flopped. Because that's not how the public feels about that.") And on and on it has gone until we seem ever less cognizant of there being anything else worth talking about when we talk about movies.
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I was gonna say I wasn't like this, but then remembered that I cheered when a superhero film or a franchise failed. My excuse is that franchises, remakes, and Marvel dominated Hollywood so much they sidelined everything else and killed the mid-budget film, I can't wait for all such nonsense to die off lol.
I certainly get where you're coming from, and in fact I thought about that when I was writing the piece--that what some people are reacting against is the franchise film, and generally the way Hollywood now does things. In fact, I remember how when film critics for popular publications were capable of actually being critical we'd have a summer, for example, in which there were a lot of flops like that and they'd express the same sentiment publicly and say "Maybe Hollywood will go back to making real movies now." (For whatever reason I remember a lot of this in 2011 in particular.) Of course, it didn't do that, and so here we are.
Still, going by what I have seen recently in the press, online, etc. the "anti-fans" whose objection is to the remake and franchise-obsessed Hollywood that now exists are very much outnumbered by more politically-minded anti-fans--in the U.S., at least.
Incidentally, Daniel Bessner just published a great piece on the situation in Hollywood that has driven the whole remake-franchise dominance in Harper's Magazine just now. Very well-developed, detailed, informative (if, alas, not too optimistic).
Yeah, I'm aware of the politically-minded anti-fans. Have come across a few, including a youtube channel entirely devoted to tearing apart Hollywood franchises, whatever it's called.
Personally I don't understand such a mentality, even though I know some people make money off it.
In my spare time, I prefer to spend my energy on stuff I like.
I too prefer to simply not bother with what I don't like, though it seems to me that the politics explains it. Many regard themselves as in a "culture war," which inflames a lot of people's passions, they see certain things as offending them just by existing (especially when they are fans of, for example, a comic book and Hollywood makes a version of it they dislike in such ways), and frankly the way the media promotes its products and covers itself promotes all this at every opportunity. I do think the money-making aspect is important, though--it has become a whole industry, and one more thing to try for those who want to become rich and famous online.
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