Why are filmmakers pandering to fans with main character energy

There’s a scene in the first half of The Devil Wears Prada 2 (don’t worry, this isn’t a spoiler) in which Andy’s friends are egging her on to write a tell-all book about Miranda Priestly.

They debate whether anyone would ever talk to you again if you do such a thing, and as any fan of the Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway movies know all too well, this is clearly a reference to Lauren Weisberger.

Weisberger was a junior assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue in the late 1990s, an experience she turned into the book on which the films are based. It’s part of The Devil Wears Prada’s lore, including the fact Wintour, when told of the book’s existence, couldn’t recall her former employee.

If the movie had made a throw-away remark about the perils of writing about your boss, it would’ve gotten away with. But this was an exchange — a neon-signposted moment going “wink-wink, get it, get?!”.

Yeah, duh. Cue eyeroll.

You can already picture the pat-on-the-back conversation during production when someone declared, “Oh, the fans will LOVE that”.

Like so many modern movies, especially anything that is a sequel or part of a franchise, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages in fan service, a phenomenon of pandering to existing devotees at the expense of the film.

Fan service can be a good thing because it activates audiences to turn out to the cinemas at a time when the movie business still hasn’t recovered from pandemic-era shutdowns and the disruption of labour strikes.

It can also create special moments in long-running franchises such as the moment Captain America called Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, in Avengers: Endgame, paying off a set-up from four years and 11 movies earlier.

Would Minecraft have neared $US1 billion in ticket sales if it didn’t have all those very specific references that then spurred more and more kids and teens to the cinema after word got around — oh, boy, did it get around — that there was a chicken jockey thing?

For the rest of the audience, it was utter nonsense.

But even if you did understand the reference — as many will that Devil Wears Prada 2 one, along with the 75,000 other callbacks and easter eggs peppered throughout the movie — fan service bumps you out of the story.

Now you’re thinking about Weisberger or cerulean blue jumpers instead of the scene in front of you. It’s distracting and often unnecessary.

Like the Minecraft movie, the two modern Super Mario Bros movies, the sequel of which was released earlier this month, are now part of the pantheon of whole movies, not just moments, that are “for the fans”.

Those movies are little more than a collection of video game references combined with nostalgia. Film fundamentals such as plot, themes or performance run a far second behind whatever feelings it evokes of other experiences audiences have had.

It’s a delicate balance for filmmakers who want to both pander to existing fans and still make a movie that makes sense on its own, and it’s increasingly becoming a segregated thing where all these movies exist that feel cynically designed to appeal to one segment, even if it’s a large one, and everyone else just gets told “it’s not for you”.

But why can’t it be?

Ryan Gosling recently made a song-and-dance about how it’s not the audience’s job to keep the cinemas open but the industry’s job to “make things that make it worth you coming out”. He’s right, and when he says “this movie is for you”, he’s talking to everyone.

That comment was in the context of the success of Project Hail Mary, a genuinely affecting and warm-hearted sci-fi friendship epic that did incredibly well among audiences and critics because it managed to be both good and crowd-pleasing.

Gosling is actually paying lip service to fans too, but the thing about Project Hail Mary is that it didn’t have an existing fanbase, except for those who had read and loved Andy Weir’s book.

For most of the audience that saw Project Hail Mary, to the tune of $US616 million and counting, it was a relationship that started from zero. Through the old-fashioned principles of great filmmaking, it created that fanbase, as did the first The Devil Wears Prada movie.

It also becomes a problem when you give too much over to loud, clamouring fans.

Star Wars is, unfortunately, notorious for having one of the most toxic fandoms in pop culture, which is not even something it has actively cultivated, which can’t be said for certain filmmakers who revel in stirring their noxious fans.

It’s gotten to the point where Star Wars figures have had to publicly call out the bad behaviour, as Ewan McGregor did when his co-star Moses Ingram was the target of racist and misogynistic trolling.

But there was a time when Lucasfilm acquiesced to that fandom, when some of them, a particularly vociferous segment, kicked off after Rian Johnson’s film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, made canon that anyone, even a janitor, could have the Force, the supernatural powers imbued in Luke and Leia Skywalker.

Those fans were upset about a lot of things, including female and non-white characters becoming more important in the franchise.

By the next film, the Star Wars powers-that-be responded, and J.J. Abrams swept back in and made it canonical that Rey, Daisy Ridley’s Force-wielding character whose parentage had been suggested as run-of-the-mill, was secretly descended from Emperor Palpatine. Urgh.

That move empowered certain Star Wars fans that any tantrum could lead to what they want. It was like negotiating with a kidnapper.

Bad fan service reached its peak with the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, which was released this past week.

The film has been wildly successful with a $US219 million worldwide box office on its opening weekend, and is on track to become the highest grossing biopic of all time.

Time and again, what you hear in media, on social media, on the street, is that Jackson fans loved it. It let them experience the highs of Jackson’s musical talents without the inconvenience of his tarnished legacy and the multiple allegations of child molestation, which he denied and which his estate continues to reject.

Even Jackson’s daughter, Paris, said the project contained “full-blown lies” and that it “panders to a very specific section of my dad’s fandom that still lives in the fantasy, and they’re going to be happy with it”.

Michael’s producer, Graham King, has form. He also helped make Bohemian Rhapsody, another musical biopic that was more interested in simultaneously preserving a smoothed-out legacy while gearing up to cash in.

The Queen fans loved Bohemian Rhapsody, and had few qualms about the film’s propensity to underplay Freddie Mercury’s demons, as long as they could tap along to those hits and feel inspired to buy tickets to The Rhapsody Tour which Brian May, who had significant creative influence over the film, had readied for the following year.

Movies like Bohemian Rhapsody and Michael are more marketing vehicles than films in their own right. They serve purposes beyond just box office receipts, they’re parts of engines which run a whole music empire.

To do that, having thorny, honest conversations about artistry and the pain that is sometimes part of that creative process, can work against those demands.

The Bruce Springsteen movie, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, was an artistically more successful film than either BoRhap or Michael but the fans didn’t get behind it.

It only made $US55 million at the box office, and the conventional wisdom was it was because it focused on a dark period in Springsteen’s life, when he was contending with depression, and it didn’t feature many of the bigger, crowd-pleasing bangers of his career.

One of the best musical biopics of this century was Love & Mercy, which was about Brian Wilson. It was similarly more faithful and nuanced about its subject than a glorified concert movie. It was a 360-degree exploration of Wilson’s process, his emotional state, and his drug use, and it certainly wasn’t designed to make anyone feel better.

Released in 2014 it only made $US28 million even if it was before the crest of BoRhap and the subsequent biopics that are less interested in the whole of an artist than they are in selling records or enriching the beneficiaries of their estates.

For Hollywood studios and producers, the lesson is clear: give the people what they want, which is hagiography and greatest hits, even if it flattens and denies the complexity of the real-life artists behind them.

It also infantilises fans as a nebulous body who somehow needs to be protected from unpleasantries.

When Milos Forman shot Amadeus, they weren’t worried about upsetting Mozart purists, not that the Austrian composers’ appreciators were in denial about the different shades that colour an artist.

It seems to be a more modern phenomenon, no doubt abetted by an online culture where everything can only be light or shade, not light and shade.

Diehard fans want things their way, and studios want to make money pandering to them, and we get stuck in this vicious circle of fan service for money’s sake.

Everyone would be better served if filmmakers were allowed to tell a good story worth telling. Remember, every franchise or brand that has fans started off with none but there was a level of imagination, creativity and artistry involved that people discovered it anyway.