The geeks are rallying.
/Film, a geeky movie website, led a boycott of the insignificant spoof Superhero Movie to protest the cutting down of a film called, of all things, Fanboys. The feature film version of this story about Star Wars obsessives was shortened by the studio, and the geeks at /Film were not ok with that. Their boycott sort of worked—Miramax will release the complete Fanboys on DVD—but it just underscores the distinct force that the geek contingent has become.
Of course those known bastions of geek love, your Star Treks and Star Wars and stories about magical creatures and fantasylands, have long relied on the super fan to turn out in massive droves on opening night, buy the merchandise and watch the sequels. But there was a time when geeks were seen as a niche market rather than a compelling force. In the old, old days, comic books were once thought to be as dangerous to society as rock and roll, and certainly not catered to. They made a movie about Dungeons & Dragons in the 70s that certainly didn’t work. Comic-Con, the yearly comic book convention in California, was a relatively small affair until a few years ago, and didn’t “Star Trek fan” used to be synonymous with “awkward around girls,” not “J. J. Abrams”?
These days, Comic-Con has become a major platform for marketing and releasing information about upcoming movies and TV events. It seems like every comic book and sci-fi character has gotten their own TV show or movie (the Terminator, Bionic Woman, the Tick). Shows like Lost or Heroes reward careful and obsessive attention to detail, not to mention rewatching and webisodes and codes hidden in Youtube clips or fake advertisements. Major event movies with mass appeal and obsessive potential, like The Dark Knight or Cloverfield, tap into the geek nerve cluster with massive Alternative Reality Games (ARG) before the movies come out: fake websites, phones baked into cakes, secret messages sky-written in GPS-marked locations. The Cloverfield ARG barely even figured into the movie itself; it was possible to see the movie without knowing any of the backstory, or even to play the ARG and not see the movie.
The increase in catering to nerd culture and the rise of nerd-centric industries like computing mean it’s no longer so awful to be a geek. You may get made fun of in high school, but the industry wants your interest and particularly your dollar. The geeks can inherit the earth, and no one obsesses like the obsessed. The fanboys will win!
