Hey Zack Snyder fans, could you do the rest of us a favour and knock it off? Because you’re the biggest reason why we’ll never have nice things.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Snyderfans spent three years demanding Warner Media release the Justice League SnyderCut after the theatrical Joss Whedon hybrid bombed back in 2017. And they got their way when Warner and DC released Snyder’s four hour version on HBOMax last March.
But that victory came with a caveat. The SnyderCut officially ended Snyder’s chapter of the embattled DCEU (DC’s Cinematic Extended Universe) and Warner went to great lengths to let everyone know that it completed Snyder’s DC trilogy (Man of Steel and Batman Vs. Superman were the other two). But instead of being happy with what they got after three years of asking/requesting/demanding/begging, after they got their way while just about every other fandom on the planet is ignored, many SnyderFans refused to be happy. No, they wanted more and were stomping their feet and throwing temper tantrums until they got their way.
Give someone an inch . . .
The ReleasetheSnyderCut crowd morphed into the RestoretheSnyderVerse tribe the second Snyder’s Justice League saw the streaming light of day. Snyder made no secret that he had ambitious plans for the DCEU that would have translated into an entire Justice League trilogy and a handful of stand alone movies. Those plans leaked onto the Internet (Superman was going to turn into Super-Tyrant and a bunch of rag tag rebels would travel back in time to prevent it from happening) and SnyderFans immediately began demanding Warner allow Snyder to complete his vision of the DCEU.
And they weren’t going to take no for an answer.
They began review bombing other Warner movies (most notably Godzilla Vs. Kong) and trashing everything the company was tied to. They resumed their campaign of online harassment (more than one Warner exec and has been chased off social media by bullying and threats) and are now spearheading a movement to get existing customers to cancel their HBOMax subscriptions while discouraging new ones from getting it.
Let’s establish a couple of things before we go any further. Not all Snyderfans are guilty of the stupidity that some are wearing like a badge of horrible honour. Many have condemned the actions of their toxic brethren and have even “counter-bombed” the negative reviews the neanderthals wielded like weapons. And let’s not forget that many Snyderfans raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for suicide prevention in honour of Zack Snyder’s daughter Autumn.
Plenty are good people.
Nor does any of this excuse Warner Media’s role in this mess. Warner told the world that the SynderCut was a myth for three years before finally admitting it existed. And how they treated Snyder following the suicide of his daughter was a text book case in corporate cruelty, callousness and mismanagement (it’s little wonder so many people took the embattled director’s side).
From bringing in Joss Whedon to ignoring the multiple red flags during Justice League’s production to diluting the final product with constant interference, Warner is just as responsible for this fiasco as anyone else. Their decision to release the SnyderCut was a reluctant gamble to attract more subscribers to the fledgling (and struggling) HBOMax. But there’s a reason you don’t negotiate with terrorists, and at the end of the day Warner decided to do just that. Now they’re finding out why it’s such a no-no.
But having said all that, let’s remember that many of the tactics the more extreme members of Snyder’s cult used to get their way were reminiscent of the Gamersgate and Comicsgate crowds. Despicable tactics they’re employing again because they’re over-entitled children who have an exaggerated sense of their importance.
SnyderFans are looking at an uphill battle. Warner Media’s movie making arm is likely going to be in a holding pattern until it’s merger with Discovery is approved and completed sometime in 2022. Don’t expect any major projects getting the green light from whoever’s in charge because they might not be in charge tomorrow. It might not even be called Warner Media this time next week.
The powers that be will either ignore or dismiss entirely the rantings of juvenile fanatics on the Internet while they complete one of the biggest mergers in corporate history. And if movies like The Suicide Squad and The Batman do well in the meantime, they will have little incentive to deviate from their current path.
But that won’t stop SnyderFans from harassing people and chasing whoever they can off social media. What they fail to understand is that the louder they scream and rage and cry, the more the people they’re trying to convince will tune them out. You don’t reward the child throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of the store by buying them a toy.
But that’s beside the main point. Snyderfans selfish obsession isn’t just giving fans everywhere a bad name, it’s hurting everyone’s cause. Watching what’s happening right now, why would any major studio give in to a fandom’s grass roots campaign again? Why would another studio invite this kind of foolishness? Snyderfans are making it really easy to label all fans greedy bullies and reinforcing the idea that you don’t ever give them what they want or they’ll demand more.
Look at it this way. Whenever Warner’s new food chain is established and their new head honcho is asked if they plan on restoring the Snyderverse, they could easily answer that with a question of their own. They could ask why fans would treat them so poorly after they gave them what they wanted with the SnyderCut? They could ask why they would want to reward a collection of selfish miscreants twice? And while they would be well within their rights to ask such logical questions, you would probably miss the fact that they wouldn’t separate the reasonable, rational fans from the toxic ones.
And that’s how all studios will look at it. “Hey Netflix, did you see there’s a lot of fans demanding you bring Tyler Rake back to life for an Extraction sequel. What do you think? What’s that about Warner and Snyderfans? Yeah . . . oh . . . you think? So that’s a no?”
Could you imagine if HBO did give in and rewarded that fan petition by remaking the last season of Game of Thrones? Sure, that last season really did crank up the suck factor, but could you imagine the obscenely expensive and unreasonable demands that would have been made by an emboldened fanbase? Because you can rest assured that there would have been more petitions making more demands and GoT’s final season would have ended up as some catastrophic Frankenstein of fan fiction. Which would have been far worse than what we got.
And while Justice League isn’t the first franchise to be hijacked by toxic fans (and sadly it won’t be the last), it may be the first time we’ve ever seen a fandom ratchet up the toxicity after getting exactly what they wanted.
(For the record, while no one should blame Zack Snyder himself for the actions of his fans-they even tried to sabotage Sesame Street-he isn’t helping matters by whipping up his fanboys every fifteen minutes with “new” images and “leaked” news.)
Snyderfans are essentially scaring off studios and content providers from the notion of giving fans what they want. Studios will no longer see it as satisfying fans but rewarding and enabling a bunch of thankless crybabies instead. And as we’re seeing right now, that’s a whole bunch of headaches they just don’t want to deal with.
Hell, Snyderfans may have helped convince AT&T to abandon the movie game just a few years after getting in (though crippling debt and a struggling bottom line probably didn’t help either).
So the next time a movie studio or production company or a book publisher politely declines or even outright ignores a grass roots fan campaign, remember what Warner is going through with SnyderFans right now. Remember what happens when you give toxic whiners what they want, regardless if those whiners are only a fraction of a fanbase. Remember why content creators will now refuse to give their audience a single inch.
Remember that the Snyderfans’ ruined it for the rest us.
Image via www.redditt.com
