On Aug. 28, Amandla Stenberg, the lead of the “Star Wars” series “The Acolyte,” posted an eight-and-a-half-minute video to her Instagram Stories about Lucasfilm’s abrupt decision not to pick up the show for a second season just a month after the Season 1 finale streamed on Disney+.
“It’s not a huge shock for me,” Stenberg said. Since the series was announced in 2020, she continued, “we started experiencing a rampage of, I would say, hyper-conservative bigotry and vitriol, prejudice, hatred and hateful language towards us.” (Stenberg was unavailable to comment for this story.)
In other words, “The Acolyte” was the latest high-profile target of “toxic fandom,” the catchall term for when fan criticism curdles from good-faith dissatisfaction into a relentlessly negative, often bigoted online campaign against either the project or its stars or creative leaders. In a franchise economy increasingly dependent upon established audience devotion to drive the bottom line, the threat of toxic fandoms poisoning that enthusiasm has become a seemingly intractable headache for almost every studio. And it’s only getting worse.
“It comes with the territory, but it’s gotten incredibly loud in the last couple years,” says a veteran marketing executive at a major studio. “People are just out for blood, regardless. They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.”
Sometimes, toxic fandoms behave reactively. A “House of the Dragon” episode featuring two female characters kissing and an episode of “The Last of Us” focusing on a gay couple were both review bombed — the practice of mobbing sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb with negative user reviews, which gained mainstream attention following the premiere of 2017’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” And an entire YouTube ecosystem is devoted to declaring projects like “The Marvels” and “The Boys” “woke garbage” (among other pungent sobriquets).
Just as frequently, the backlash begins before the project has seen the light of day: a Reddit mega-thread dedicated to outrage over “Bridgerton” casting a Black woman (Masali Baduza) as the love interest for Francesca (Hannah Dodd); social media epithets directed at the actors of color cast as elves and dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”; death threats aimed at Leslie Jones during the press tour for 2016’s “Ghostbusters.”
Perhaps the greatest irony of this phenomenon is the disproportionate impact these toxic fandoms have relative to their actual number.
“The vast majority of any fandom are casual fans,” says John Van Citters, VP of Star Trek brand development, who has been with the storied franchise since the 1990s. “The number of people who live and die on their franchises are very, very few, and then those who come after things that they espouse to love with venom are a really, really tiny subset of that already smaller subset of fandom. It’s just much easier to see it now. I don’t know that it’s really that much broader than where things were in 1995 — it’s just that the bullhorn wasn’t there.”
For some, combating that bullhorn amounts to acting as if they can’t hear it. “Particularly when it’s a negative, toxic conversation, we don’t even engage,” says a TV marketing executive. “Like with toxic people, you try to not give it too much oxygen.” One principal concern is that reacting to these kinds of attacks risks alienating fans who are unhappy with creative choices about a franchise but haven’t tipped over into abusive behavior. So a studio may attempt to amplify friendlier voices instead. “We’ll reply to comments that are positive and elevate those things,” says the TV exec.
Still, toxic fandoms have grown so pernicious that they’ve become a fact of life for many — and so powerful that while talent, executives and publicists will privately bemoan the issue, fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story even on background. (As one rep put it, “It’s just a lose-lose.”)
Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.
“They’re very vocal,” says the studio exec. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.’” These groups have even led studios to alter the projects: “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”
Several studio insiders say they often put their talent through a social media boot camp; in some cases, when a character is intentionally challenging a franchise’s status quo, studios will, with the actor’s permission, take over their social media accounts entirely. When things get really bad — especially involving threats of violence — security firms will scrub talent information from the internet to protect them from doxxing.
In some particularly egregious cases, a direct response has been necessary. In 2022, after “Obi-Wan Kenobi” actor Moses Ingram denounced the “hundreds” of racist messages sent to her about her role — “There’s nothing anybody can do about this. There’s nothing anybody can do to stop this hate,” she said — Lucasfilm posted a statement to its Star Wars social media accounts that read, in part, “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.” The Star Wars accounts also shared a video of “Obi-Wan” star Ewan McGregor saying the abuse made him “sick to my stomach” and that “if you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no ‘Star Wars’ fan in my mind.”
Later that year, the cast of “The Rings of Power” condemned “the relentless racism, threats, harassment, and abuse some of our castmates of color are being subjected to on a daily basis,” and actors from the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy posted photos of themselves wearing clothing featuring the ears of Middle-earth creatures in multiple skin tones underneath the message “you are all welcome here” written in Elvish. Those efforts may have had an effect. In an August interview with Amazon MGM Studios TV chief Vernon Sanders about “The Rings of Power,” the executive said the show hadn’t experienced the same racist hostility in advance of Season 2 that had greeted its 2022 debut. “People have had a chance to actually engage with the show,” he said. “Overwhelmingly, what we’ve seen is that folks who came with an open mind can discuss and debate their favorite things — which takes you out of the place of that ugly conversation that happened with some folks who may have been infused with an agenda that’s separate from the show itself.”
There is one other way to handle toxic fans on the internet: Stay off it. “I’m not online, so I’m protected,” says frequent Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen (“WandaVision”). “Generally, it’s a lot of positive experiences of making kids happy. I ignore the other stuff.”
Marc Malkin contributed to this story.
From Variety US