Superfan focus groups are a horrible idea, Disney and Lucasfilm

It's another day that ends in "Y," meaning there is some sort of discourse on social media.

Variety released a piece yesterday about toxic fandoms, opening with a discussion of Amandla Stenberg's video in which she talked about the bigoted backlash they received during The Acolyte. The article is a breakdown of how different studios have tackled the bad side of fandoms. One part of this article has set off socials, where an anonymous studio executive discusses using superfan focus groups. In the article, it says:

"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.”

How cowardly of studios to take this kind of mindset, especially when it mentions in the same article that most fans are casual fans AND that studios calling out these bigots actually saw a drop in the backlash. Calling them out is the correct way to handle it, and it's disgusting that Disney and Lucasfilm have left its actors from The Acolyte out to dry. Do you need John Boyega to call you out again, Disney, at another Black Lives Matter rally? Boy, this article I wrote about that very topic did not age well!

There are three reasons why this superfan focus group idea is, in fact, a bad one. Let's buckle in and talk about it.

1. The TV Streaming Model is Broken

Streaming services are struggling across the board. These companies are continuously chasing exponential growth, which is not viable. In turn, we see that the current television model is fundamentally broken. We are in a time where there is so much content on all the streaming platforms, and the truth is that most people do not have time to watch maybe a handful of shows, if that. In turn, it can take time for the numbers for a series to grow. These executives are trigger happy, not willing to wait. If they see their bottom line not growing up, up, up, up, up, then goodbye show! If a series has a slow start out of the gate or doesn't perform at the numbers expected, it will be canceled without giving it the time to grow. This is not how television is supposed to work.

I always think of my best friend and her husband, who are Star Wars fans but are almost always behind on things. They both have full-time jobs and a toddler. They haven't watched The Bad Batch Seasons 2 or 3, nor have they seen The Acolyte. It's not out of want. They want to watch these shows but are fans of other franchises outside of Star Wars too, which also take up their viewing time. If the TV landscape worked like it is supposed to, my friends would have all the time to catch up at their leisure. These shows would have the time to grow their audience so that new fans could discover them. The Variety article points out that superfans are the smallest part of fandom; most fans are more casual ones, like my best friend, and might have to watch a series later. Will she get a chance to, though? With shows getting canceled or, worse, removed from streaming services altogether, will she even get a chance to see The Acolyte? Heck, I'm a couple of seasons behind on Abbott Elementary, Succession, and What We Do in the Shadows because so much of my work is focused on other media. I'm always worried these series will be pulled from their streaming services before I can catch up.

Unless a show is a House of the Dragons-level success, it will be canceled. This is not how television is supposed to function. Streaming services promised an everlasting library where fans could access their favorites anytime. This was a lie out of the gate, and we are now seeing its failures.

2. Fans Don't Actually Know What They Want

Did you know that The Empire Strikes Back had fan backlash, and now it's considered one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever made? Look at the prequel trilogy going through its renaissance in the last few years despite their initial hate. My personal favorite is the revisionist history around The Clone Wars (read that with sarcasm). Seeing fans talk on Twitter about how it was always loved is a flat-out lie. I know this because it's the origin of one of my podcasts. I met my co-podcaster at a 2009 Dragon Con panel about The Clone Wars, and it was an hour of fans complaining about the show. Here it is if you want proof! Heck, Ashley Eckstein once said how she sobbed over fan backlash to her character. Now, Ahsoka Tano is a beloved character in the franchise.

There is a reason that we hire artists, writers, directors, and creatives to make movies, to make TV series. It is to bring in fresh new ideas to try different things. Some work. Some don't. That is the nature of art. Creatives are also brought in because, frankly, fans do not know what they want. Fans are constantly chasing the feeling of nostalgia. They want to capture in a bottle the feeling they felt as a child seeing Star Wars for the first time. However, I hate to break it to you, but that's not going to happen. Just like studio executives chasing exponential growth they will never have, fans will never have that golden feeling again. And that's okay!

Filmmaker Alan Seawright discussed this in a recent Cinema Therapy video about Inside Out 2 when breaking down the scene around Joy stating to her fellow emotions that maybe people just feel less joy the older they get. He said:

"Joy's line, 'Maybe when you get older, you feel less joy,' is true. It is. People look back on their childhood and their early adolescence as this magical time where everything was great. And it was just joy. People want [to say], 'Oh, life was better in the 80s!' It wasn't, objectively. If you look at objective measures, it was not. But you felt more joy. That's because as you get older, things get more complicated, and joy... Like that simple childlike joy gets pushed out. It can be replaced with true joy like we've talked about already in this episode. But that [kind of] joy is always tinged with another emotion. Carefree, just solid yellow ball of joy that is your memory you can play, that goes away."

And he's right. We can never capture the nostalgia we feel for these franchises. Filmmakers can give us everything we ever want as fans in a piece of media, and we could still find a flaw in it. That's because nothing is perfect. Time, perspective, and letting go of the want to relive a golden time when we felt life was better are the ways to move forward with these franchises. Letting new things find their footing is how to go about it. There was a time when The Empire Strikes Back, the prequels, and The Clone Wars were all the hated new things that didn't capture what we felt when audiences first saw their Star Wars. And in turn, those were someone's first Star Wars that made them a fan.

So studios, if you pull together superfans to try and tell you want, it will fail. It will fundementally fail, because it will not let art be actual art. It will stifle ideas for letting the franchise grow through new stories that allow fans to find their first Star Wars.

Also, it doesn't fix the real problem in the Variety article, so let's get to the real issue.

3. The Studios are Pandering to Grifters

I do not have time to break down the full history of Gamergate to now, but here's a friendly, helpful graphic that sums it up:

These so-called Star Wars fans are grifters. They have figured out how to monetize hate, which lets them manufacture fake outrage to make a living. If they don't make the hate, they don't get the clicks, and they don't pay their bills. That's it. That's the ploy. As Variety notes from Amandla
Stenberg, the creators of The Acolyte, knew from the get-go that the backlash would happen. It started at the show's very announcement, and, like clockwork, there was something for them to get BIG MAD (TM) about every single week (shoutout to my boy Ki-Adi-Mundi). Because these are grifters making money on bad faith takes to profit.

It's perfectly normal not to like stuff. Star Wars is so huge, especially when you factor in the Extended Universe side of things. We need to normalize that we won't like everything in the franchise. I shredded Season 3 of The Bad Batch because major parts of the show that fell very flat for me. In my opinion, it is both the best and grossly worst show from Lucasfilm Animation. But the key word in that last sentence is that it is my "opinion." I can share my thoughts in an article, but I have no right to attack the creators or voice actors. I can say that it didn't work for me, but that does not mean I should be allowed to use racist, bigoted rhetoric against them.

There is a difference between fans discussing things that don't work for them and these grifters purposely looking for things to monetize their clicks. They weaponize their so-called "opinions" using rhetoric like "bad writing" to push this narrative. There is a difference between actual criticism of bad writing and what is happening here (This essay is long, but a very good breakdown of the difference.). For example, there was a big blowup during Andor because the show used bricks and screws. You don't see these people getting mad at Luke Skywalker wearing dyed blue jeans in A New Hope though! Because it's a grift. That's it. Plain and simple.

As mentioned before, Variety notes that when studios called out these people, they saw a fall in the backlash, saying:

"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.'"

This. This is what should be done over and over again. Every single time. This is what Disney and Lucasfilm should be doing, not making superfan focus groups to stick their heads in the sand. The problem will not go away by ignoring it. Call it out every single time. Protect your actors. Protect your fans.

Until Lucasfilm and Disney address these three points, Star Wars will continue to be a mess. The television streaming model is broken. Stop chasing the nostalgia dream, keep trying new things, and certainly stop giving in to the grifters.

Fix yourself up, House of Mouse, or else you're going to run into a lot of failure soon. Because this is not the way.