BlackGeekdom Science-Fiction from a Different Perspective

This is a great article. I think it really gives some insight into “Fanboys”. Now I only wish they would give the Fanboys who tend to look more like Lando than Legolas (if you know what I mean) their props. Translation everybody at your con doesn’t like Heavy Metal or Folk Music. Can we get a little diversity? People do listen to other things besides Metallica, Gwar, or Enya (although the sample used in “Ready or Not’ by the Fugees was tight) to name a few. Can we please get get some Wu Tang (Hell they even have a comic) or some Jay-z at a Con. On second thought. Don’t worry about. I’m just venting. Just read the article its pretty good

Who is Fanboy?

And more importantly, what does he want with Hollywood?

Studio executives know he’s out there, somewhere. Stealing scripts. Pirating films. Firing off reviews before a movie opens. Befriending Snakes on a Plane on the Internet, only to crush it in theaters. Quietly marshaling forces behind 300 to make it the surprise hit of the year.

For all the alter egos and caped conventioneers who will populate this weekend’s Comic-Con gathering in San Diego, only Fanboy’s true identity gnaws at the movie honchos who annually prowl the nation’s largest comic-book convention looking for the next pop hit.

Each year, the suits follow his trail, trying to determine what Fanboy will champion, defend or vanquish. Usually, they come back empty-handed.

“I know he’s real, because he makes my job harder,” says Marvin Levy of DreamWorks, which had the geek smash Transformers. “But trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to see will keep you up at night.”

It could be a long weekend, then, for the execs who will again try to gauge the taste of the fanboy — the moniker of legions of rabid pop-culture consumers devoted to their podcasts, MySpace pages and nerd-friendly movies. Sometimes.

“It’s impossible to really cater to fanboys, because they’re passionate about so many genres,” says Zack Snyder, director of 300. “You have to be really careful making movies for them, because they don’t like the stink of Hollywood on them. And if your movie is bad, you’re dead.”

To be sure, fanboys (and, to a lesser degree, fangirls) are changing the way Hollywood does business.

Studios are hiring marketers just to monitor movie fan sites. If a screenplay is leaked onto the Internet — once an offense that could land the culprit in jail — studios now find themselves asking fans what they think of the stolen goods. And if fanboys still don’t like the script, it gets reworked.

There’s good reason to court — and fear — the elusive demographic. While their full numbers remain unclear, Internet and comic devotees can add $25 million to $50 million to a movie’s box office take, according to some estimates

How’s this for respect: Fanboy is getting his own flick. Fanboys, a comedy about four young men who try to break into the Skywalker Ranch to see an early version of Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, opens next year and will get its push — where else? — at Comic-Con. Other films, including Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, will get early peeks and star appearances to persuade Fanboy to join the cause.

“They’ve created a whole new world for people to be heard,” says comedian and actor Dane Cook, who rose to fame on the shoulders of Internet fans. “But they’re not easy to define, and they’re hard to read. You’re either a god, or you’re scum. If you’re uncertain about who you are or what you’re doing, they’ll screw you up even more.”

Indeed, studio execs concede they’ve made little progress in cracking Fanboy’s identity.

He doesn’t frequent malls much, so he’s impervious to the ultimate studio weapon, the tracking-poll questionnaire. He blogs, texts and instant-messages obsessively but usually under a pseudonym. He is slavishly devoted to his superhero of choice but will turn on him if he goes too Hollywood.

His tastes can be obscure. “You know the movie they quote me most often?” says Matt Damon. “Not the Bourne movies. Not Oceans. But Rounders. I can’t figure it out.”

And Fanboy’s got disposable income. Lots of it. For Xbox, iPhones, comic books — and movies that studio execs still can’t figure out.

Fanboy, says Fantastic Four star Jessica Alba, is a little like pornography. You can’t define him, but you know him when you see him.

“A fanboy doesn’t ask me for a picture or for a date,” Alba says. “He wants to know what it’s like to meet Victor Von Doom. It’s a little strange, but cute.”

The force of Fanboy

Fanboy, say those who know him, was born in the mid-1970s in Marin County near San Francisco.

Conceived by George Lucas, the fanboy emerged from the fringe of basement comic-book swap meets and poorly attended sci-fi conventions to become a force at the box office when Star Wars hit the big screen in 1977.

“They became part of the mainstream then,” says Fanboys director Kyle Newman. “There had been Star Trek fans, but Star Wars made studios respect sci-fi and showed them that the community wasn’t as small as they thought.”

More fantasy and science-fiction fare followed: Blade Runner, the Alien franchise.

But it wasn’t until the Internet that fanboys began exercising clout.

“I think the Internet galvanized the community,” says Amy Powell, a vice president of interactive marketing for Paramount. “Fanboys tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves, and the Web allowed them to communicate, rally behind a movie, see how big their numbers clearly were.”

But if the numbers are clear, fanboys’ tastes are not. Where studios once went to shopping malls and made blind phone calls, they now are monitoring a half-dozen movie fan sites that get as much traffic as mainstream news sites.

Powell says a handful of film sites have become the new tastemakers in Hollywood, including DarkHorizons.com, ComingSoon.net, joblo.com and, of course, AintItCoolNews.com, which she calls “the grandfather of the movie sites.”

“If you can get a sense of what’s happening on those sites, you’ll know if your movie has buzz,” she says. “Usually. Sometimes.”

Ain’tItCool’s Harry Knowles says he understands the studios’ frustration in identifying fanboys. (He sometimes acts as a consultant for film executives.)

But he says some studios still aren’t beyond the stereotype of Fanboy: a kid who lives at home and whose social circle consists of Dungeons & Dragons opponents.

Nor have studios learned the language of fanboys, he says.

“They didn’t realize that the fanboys were making fun of Snakes on a Plane, not saying they’d go see it,” Knowles says of last year’s camp film that was considered a box office flop with $34 million.

“Just because the Net is talking about your movie doesn’t mean it’s good,” he says. “You have to pay attention to what’s being said, and who is saying it.”

So who is saying it?

Knowles and others offer a rough sketch of Fanboy:

•Male. Typically 18 to 36. “He has a 9-to-5 job,” Knowles says. “Maybe a family. He’s a stable guy.”

•A gamer. “He still likes his toys, video games, computers,” 300’s Snyder says. “He may be an adult, but he hasn’t completely grown up.”

•An “early adopter.” “He’s on iTunes on Tuesday, the comic book store on Wednesday and the movies on Friday,” Knowles says. “He’s first in line for the new thing.”

•A skeptic. “He’s enthusiastic at the mere prospect of something he loves being brought to the screen,” says Kevin Feige, head of production for Marvel Studios, which has translated dozens of comic books to movies. “But he’s cynical until he sees the goods. He’s been burned the past 20 years with movies that aren’t faithful to the source material he loves.”

Fanboy is a thief, Knowles says.

Despite protestations from most movie fan sites not to leak scripts or pirate films, “the truth is they will read a script early,” Knowles says. “They’ll watch a movie once in theaters, then get their hands on a pirated DVD to watch at home. Fanboy likes to get his toys first.”

Transformers was a hot property. Last year, after the first 70 pages of Transformers leaked onto the Internet, fanboys were livid. Their beef: The movie included humans.

Instead of making an example of the pirate who leaked the movie (no one has been identified), Paramount Pictures made the risky decision to host a question-and-answer session on the Transformers website so the writers could bargain with fans.

‘Like a hostage negotiation’

“It was like a hostage negotiation,” says co-writer Roberto Orci. “There were certain things we couldn’t mention on the Web, like that any decision was a marketing one. That would have made them angry. The script was already out there, so we weren’t getting it back. All we could do was explain ourselves and hope they’d be kind.”

They were. Transformers has taken in $263 million so far.

But that still doesn’t do much to help studio execs find out exactly who these people are and why they’ll turn a critically panned franchise such as Fantastic Four into box office gold or the critical darling Grindhouse into ground chuck.

“In the final analysis, the answer is, we don’t have the answer,” says Bert Livingston of 20th Century Fox, which distributed Fantastic Four.

“They need their movies to be treated a certain way,” Livingston says. “We don’t know exactly what way that is. There are a ton of these fanboys. We don’t know exactly who they are.”

And asking who is Fanboy is a little like asking who is Spartacus.

“I am Fanboy,” says Transformers‘ Shia LaBeouf.. “I post as many comments as anyone on AintItCool.”

“I’m Fanboy,” says comedian Cook. “I was just on the Net reading a debate about who could beat up the other: Batman or Superman.” Cook won’t say how he voted.

“I am Fanboy,” argues Tobin Bell, who plays the villain Jigsaw in the Saw franchise. “Just because I act in horror movies doesn’t mean I’m not a huge fan of them, too.”

“Well, I’m not Fanboy,” Alba says. “But he’s saved a couple of my movies. So whoever he is, I’m glad he’s out there.”

Contributing: Luz Elena Avitia

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