Perhaps one of the most profound changes of the last 10 years is the extent to which the entertainment industry has begun to exploit the passion of fanbases for their own commercial ends. “The industry needs fans more than ever before,” explains academic Suzanne Scott, author of Fake Geek Girls, a study of the gender politics of fandom. “They need fans to ensure big opening weekends at the box office, they need them as promotional labour to create more ‘authentic’ excitement around a media object, or to distinguish one text from the glut of content that we are constantly choosing between as consumers.” Just take the techniques employed by Netflix, who have become masters of facilitating ‘organic’ conversation around their output.

When fans bite back

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, they even rely on them as investors. A famous example being the 2014 big-screen revival of cult TV detective drama Veronica Mars, a sequel made possible only by the crowdfunding efforts of fans, and which subsequently led to a 2019 TV return on streaming service Hulu. With the latter series, this equal partnership dynamic started to become complicated, however, with certain fans recoiling in horror when creator Rob Thomas killed off love interest Logan. To quote journalist Constance Grady, writing for Vox: “Thomas, they said, had taken advantage of their desire to see Veronica and Logan together, using their investment as shippers to leverage not just their time and attention, but the literal dollars out of their pockets. In that case, didn’t he owe them something?”

Jenkins thinks it’s a fair question. “The sense of ownership reflects the way humans have always engaged with stories,” he says. “We use stories to make sense of who we are. We use stories to debate our values, fears, and aspirations. We display our attachment to stories in various ways and we define ourselves through which stories mean the most to us. There’s nothing odd about this. What is odd is the idea that corporations want to claim a monopoly over the storytelling process, resist input from their audience, and lock down stories from further circulation and elaboration.”

But such a fan-guided approach to art also feels endemic of a time when a lot of mainstream storytelling has come to be regarded more as a product designed to service the consumer than a means of artistic expression. This, in a sense, is what Martin Scorsese was getting at last year when he said that superhero movies were more akin to theme parks than cinema; a comment many construed to be a jibe at the most dominant franchise of the age – the Marvel Cinematic Universe – which tends to prize tonal and stylistic uniformity above all else. Which is not to say, of course, that they are not good films. But much like biting into a Big Mac, when you see a Marvel movie, you tend to know what you’re going to get.