The Death of the Fanboy

These are dark days for fanboys. This summer been the worst in living memory for comic book franchises, sequels and the like — Prince of Persia, The A Team and Jonah Hex all failed to ignite at the box office. The year’s biggest successes have instead been kiddie pics: Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever, The Karate Kid, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Toy Story 3. Even Harry Knowles is feeling down. Holed up in his Texas ranch, fast approaching his 40th birthday, the grandfather of online fanboys oozed seigneurial disdain over the latest Karate Kid (“this fucking kid knows jack & shit about KARATE.”) and took peevish issue with Toy Story 3 for “the idea that in the end, Andy would give up WOODY. It kinda pisses me off…. the notion of leaving childish things behind...I loathe that conceit.” The fanboy community are thin-skinned bunch — they throw a hissy fit if M Night Shaymalan so much as praises a Twilight movie— but when Harry Knowles castigates a movie for the under-8s for its emotional maturity, you know something is up. As the LA Times reported earlier this month, “First, it was filmgoers over 30 whom the studios abandoned, which they did by closing down the specialty divisions that made movies for that audience -- to concentrate on films made for fanboys. Now, with so many movies aimed at young males flopping this year, it may not be long before they move away from those too.... before you know it (usually in two or three years, when the winds may have changed direction again), we could see a multiplex full of movies the whole family can enjoy.” As Greg Livingston points out in The Great Tween Buying Machine: Marketing to Today’s Tweens, “The former Generation X and Y kids who are parents now have this entirely inclusive family philosophy — they include their children in all decisions, from what food they’re going to eat to what car they’re going to buy.” In other words: the brain of kid with the wallet of an adult — a super-consumer. With tween remakes of Footloose, Saturday Night Fever, The Bodygaurd and High School Musical 4 on the way, one pictures he average fanboy retreating to Norma Desmondish seclusion in his basement, The Empire Strikes Back playing in a continuous loop overheard. “My demographic quadrant is big,” he proclaims proudly, tightening his bathrobe. “It was the pictures that got small....”