Is the Charge of "Fan Entitlement" a Red Herring?

When we speak of an adaptation of, for example, a play by William Shakespeare or a novel by Jane Austen it is considered eminently respectable for observers knowledgeable of the original material to judge an adaptation at least in part by its makers' evident respect for the original--and their complaint about any lapses in such eminently respectable. This is in spite of those authors' work being so far removed from that of our own time in authorship, and outlook, as to make appraisals of faithfulness relatively difficult. (I, for one, incline not only to the view that at least some of the playscripts by which we know Shakespeare's play are less complete than they might be, but more importantly to the view that Shakespeare was a Medieval rather than a modern in the ways that count most, with all that means for our experience of his work.)

By contrast those who would comment on the faithfulness of adaptations of superhero comic books are dismissed contemptuously for doing so at all--for caring about faithfulness at all, which brings forth a charge of "fan entitlement" such as would never be leveled against Bardolators or Janeites.

One can see this as a result of how the conventional-minded adhere to a hierarchical view of cultural production that puts Shakespeare and Austen on one plane and comics on another much lower plane, far less worthy of the reverence and passions of a purist--all as there is a profound difference in cultural standing between the person who reads Shakespeare and Austen and the person who goes to a comic book convention (the more in as fans have, in recent years, come to be so demonized in so many quarters politically). However, what one can fairly call that snobbery would seem to me to just make the dismissal easier, rather than entirely account for it, because one can easily see the discussion of "fan entitlement" rather than "respect for the original" as changing the subject from respect for the content of the original to the presumably pernicious attitude of those who would ask for respect for that content.

The (rather cynical) intent in doing so where the big superhero movies and other films like them is concerned is shutting down the critics who would undermine the efforts of producers as crass as they are illiterate to wring as much money as possible out of the movies they make, art be damned--and I think it may be said that there is far more incentive to do so in the case of the comic book fans, with the career of Michael Fassbender exemplary. Fassbender starred in a film adaptation of Macbeth which made a whole $16 million worldwide, with the modest figure not really surprising to anyone. By contrast the four films in which Mr. Fassbender played Erik Lensherr (aka Magneto) made $1.9 billion--over a hundred times as much. Were adaptations of Shakespeare and Austen doing nearly as well as X-Men movies I suspect we would be hearing the equivalent of accusations of "fan entitlement" directed at those who criticize the adaptations for offenses to purism--and that we ought to remember that during the inevitable next round of cheap fan-bashing by the elite's courtiers in the media.