Fanboy Revisionism
Why do fans refuse to accept the things they love may sometimes be imperfect?
We are fast approaching the 25th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which premiered on May 16, 1999 (two days before my tenth birthday). Retrospective articles are popping up, and people are remembering, once again, how the movie was not as warmly received as one might have expected, given it was the first Star Wars movie in theaters after a sixteen-year hiatus. Except, if you ask a certain faction of the fandom, no such thing happened. Or rather, it did, but it was only a media thing; fans couldn’t possibly have hated The Phantom Menace.
This sort of revisionism has been a thing for almost ten years now, with the more virulent side of the fandom retroactively praising the prequel trilogy to fuel their disdain for the sequel trilogy which, among other things, was not supervised by George Lucas. Of course, Lucas himself is the prime argument against their claim they didn’t hate the prequels: he sold Lucasfilm in 2012 because he was fed up with the likes of “George Lucas raped my childhood” and other phrases coined by disgruntled keyboard warriors.
But there was no social media back then, said keyboard warriors will counter. How could there have been online toxicity coming from fans? True, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the bunch did not exist at the time of the prequels’ original release, but online forums of all kinds were very much a thing, and filmmakers and actors were known to hang out there as well.
At least one episode of The West Wing was inspired by Aaron Sorkin’s interaction with fans on the internet, and Joss Whedon was an avid reader of at least one forum devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Seth Rogen has openly admitted he and producing partner Evan Goldberg got a kick out of reading negative pre-release posts about The Green Hornet on the movie’s IMDb message board (those message boards in general could be quite the cesspool, which is why IMDb eventually got rid of them for good in early 2017).
Negative reactions to The Phantom Menace were so commonplace Simon Pegg – who probably regrets doing so now – used his alter ego on the sitcom Spaced to vent about the disappointment (actually, he called it a “betrayal”). The 2009 comedy Fanboys, about a group of fans trying to break into Skywalker Ranch to see the movie early, ends on the punchline “What if it sucks?”. An even bigger deal was when, three years later, Attack of the Clones failed to become the highest grossing movie of the year, the first time that had happened to a Star Wars movie (it was no. 4, behind Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the second instalments of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings).
Conversely, The Last Jedi did end up being the top grosser of 2017, much to the chagrin of Rian Johnson-hating fanboys who even went as far as attacking him for (accurately) pointing out even The Empire Strikes Back was a divisive film at the time of its original release (and before you ask, yes, Johnson is old enough to have seen all three chapters of the first trilogy in theaters during their original run).
It's not just a Star Wars thing: Zack Snyder fans have spent the last couple of years claiming Aquaman as part of the so-called Snyderverse, simply because it grossed a billion dollars; when the film came out in 2018, they despised it for being a lighthearted, colorful adventure (and despite statements to the contrary from Jason Momoa, the movie does contradict Zack Snyder’s Justice League). They’ve also repeatedly criticized James Gunn for casting a new actor as Superman, despite previously calling Henry Cavill a “traitor” for even considering reprising the role in non-Snyder projects, up to and including the release of Black Adam.
And on the Marvel side of things, history is being rewritten to make it look like the Marvel Cinematic Universe was essentially flawless up to the end of Phase Three (the films released from 2016 to 2019), and perfectly planned out. The latter is a blatant lie (rewatching the first Avengers movie makes it obvious the Tesseract was not meant to be an Infinity Stone, as they’re two different objects in the comics), and the fans clearly have memory-holed their general disdain for Iron Man 2 and Thor: The Dark World, not to mention the pre-release skepticism surrounding Guardians of the Galaxyand Ant-Man. The franchise’s aura of infallibility is pretty much limited to, you guessed it, Phase Three.
Given how easy it is to look up these facts online, one wonders why these fans – who more often than not are perfectly aware of their statements’ lack of veracity – insist on selling a different version of events. Especially since, if history is any indication, they will just resort to a different distortion of the truth further down the line, amending the existing falsehoods to reshape the discourse in their image. A rather ridiculous image, at the end of the day.