I spent some time in a lot of new pop media forums this year. This is what I observed.
In comic book circles, it’s a very difficult time to be someone who actually liked the movie Madame Web. Who didn’t think Morbius was “that bad, damn, y’all need to calm down.” Some of the Spider-Man communities I’m in are absolutely unhinged. Like, the One More Day storyline happened seventeen years ago, and they’ve been complaining about it since instead of just trying to make the best of things, narratively. There’s this very strong implication of a long memory when it comes to things that the fandom doesn’t like.
Which, of course, immediately contradicts itself when you dig further down.
The Amazing Spider-Man movies featuring Andrew Garfield were not nearly as well-received as the Tobey Maguire movies. And there’s a very long and complex evaluation of the critique when you break it all down. Whether it should have gotten the flak that it did is a whole other conversation. But the actual facts suggest that this poor critical reception led to underwhelming box office numbers which cut the originally planned series short. There’s a direct cause and effect there. Even with the benefit of hindsight, a lot of that initial opinion of the movie remained.
Something very interesting is happening right now around the live-action “SSU” movies (Venom, Morbius, et al) and how fans perceive Sony as a Spider-Man IP holder. In the past six years, Sony has put out seven movies in the Spider-Man IP, all of which explore things beyond Peter Parker as Spider-Man. One just came out and is already meeting divisive critical reception, two were huge critical successes, three were critically divisive but did really good at the box office overall, two were flops. When you actually put the data together, it’s a mixed bag of success.
There’s a contingent of the online Spider-Man community that is so bound and determined to turn Sony into this mustache twirling villain, they’re 1. ignoring actual facts and figures about the success of their movies 2. attempting to rewrite the collective memory of the fandom to bolster this new perception.
This also reflects into a more sort of collapsed understanding of the IP’s broader narrative and what other parts of the fandom might prioritize.
I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since I was a kid, so that’s going on thirty years. In that time, there have been three live-action Spider-Man series and eight animated shows. I’m sick to death of watching the same (usually) teenage boy go through the exact same set of emotional storybeats over and over again. I would much rather be served something middling but experimental than get fed the same thing I’ve been getting fed since 1994.
And I’m very aware that means I’m probably asking for imperfect media. That I’m working against the flow of the status quo that the comic community has such a terrible relationship with. I’m also willing to accept a few minor hiccups and growing pains on the promise of something new and different.
And that would be a very bold statement in a number of the forums I’ve been in. But I absolutely know people in real life with a similar opinion. People who don’t waste energy hating these sets of movies. They watch them, develop their own opinion, and in a general sense, don’t have nearly as strong a negative opinion as the online community does collectively.
There are large contingents of this fandom that never even bothered to see the movies yet are staking bold claims of quality as if they have. And among the people who have seen the movies and say “they’re shit,” far too many, if not the majority, can’t actually verbalize their complaints.
This ends up being how this whole interplay cycles over. Only the horrifically negative opinions gain traction in critical and online fandom spaces. So those are the things that other fans see. The things that the people making the movies see. And it’s naive to think that that doesn’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity with the cycle of creation and fandom reaction.
Pixels and Pins Studio 