Nerd Culture, Fandom and their Rise to Power in the Film Industry

Revenge of the Nerds first hit screens in 1984. Directed by Jeff Kanew, it tells the story of college freshmen Lewis and Gilbert and the troubles they face there. As nerds, they are bullied and mocked by the ‘cool kids’ and the movie establishes that this is standard practice. Nerds aren’t cool.

In recent years, fandom has become something of a staple in popular culture. With The Big Bang Theory coming up to its tenth season, it appears nerd culture is becoming the norm. Superheroes and space adventures were once only considered cool by “social misfits,” who Henry Jenkins described as child-like men who lived in their parent’s basements and had never kissed a girl. William Shatner’s appearance on Saturday Night Live at a fake Star Trek convention caused uproar among Trekkies with his famous line: “Get a life, will you people? I mean, for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show!” Trekkies everywhere were devastated that their idol saw them in the same way that the general public did: like infantile nerds who could not separate fantasy from reality. This is rarely the case in the present day. John Boyega and Daisy Ridley continuously discuss how much they love Star Wars fans and their devotion to the franchise. Mark Hamill is an incredibly active presence on social media, tweeting fans daily and commending them on their collections of merchandise. Do nerds finally have the societal recognition they’ve always desired?

In this time of “reboot culture”, the superhero movie is consuming the box office. The Marvel Cinematic Universe became the highest-grossing movie franchise in the world in 2015. Marvel Studio’s dominance of the film industry was made all the more clear when they revealed their release calendar. How do three films a year until 2020 sound to you? For a franchise that supposedly appeals to nerds, how has it succeeded? The simple answer is that nerd culture is now popular. Fandom is the new cool.

In the 1970s, when Comic-Con was founded, it drew around three hundred attendees over three days. The convention has since expanded and is held annually in over thirty locations around the world. There are five Comic-Cons yearly in the United Kingdom alone. In 2011, Forbes Magazine announced that the San Diego Comic-Con was “the biggest convention of its kind” in the world. In 2015, over 167,000 people attended. Dozens of movie franchises, from Twilight to X-Men, have released exclusive material at Comic-Con. Fans will queue for days at a time just to see a glimpse of their favourite actors. With each year, the convention grows. In just a few years, nerd culture has become so acceptable that even William Shatner regularly attends!

Author Neil Gaiman believes that nerds have become empowered in recent years. The people once considered nerds are now well off, while the ‘jocks’ that bullied them are unemployed and unsuccessful. He believes that nerds are “more than making money, they [are] changing the world.”

Geek chic has risen to the top of the fashion industry too. Topshop created university-style t-shirts in 2012 that read “geek”, “dork” and “nerd.” The irony of the trend is that the only people who didn’t wear the shirts were the geeks, dorks and nerds themselves. Does this mean that they were suddenly the social group being looked up to? No longer do today’s youth want to be the pretty, sporty or unintelligent individuals the ‘cool kid’ stereotype used to require. All of a sudden, the ‘in thing’ is to be clever, to binge-watch television shows and to stand in line for hours at comic book movie premieres. Nerd culture has become the new normal.

As with anything, negative connotations have begun to appear through the rise of fandom and nerd culture. To be cool, something else must be uncool. Now that fandom is winning the popularity contest, those who aren’t fangirls or boys are the people who are being mocked for it. In 22 Jump Street, when Channing Tatum’s Jenko goes back to college, he is left confused and hurt when what used to make him cool turns him into the social outcast. Instead, his nerdy friend Schmidt (Jonah Hill) takes his place as the ‘cool kid’ that gets the girls. Frequently, fans are heard putting down their peers if they don’t know about the latest Netflix original series or if they haven’t yet seen Marvel’s most recent release. What used to mean that nerds had no friends is now the way to be cool: sitting at your computer and watching movies and shows all day.

Have the disempowered become the powerful? The nerds who were once mocked appear to now be the people calling the shots in the movie industry. After all, the nerds bought the tickets that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe so large. They bought the tickets to find out the answer to the ultimate question: who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman? Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice took in over $400 million in its opening weekend. This leaves DC Extended Universe with high expectations for their upcoming Justice League movies and 2016’s Suicide Squad is looking to be the year’s most highly anticipated film.

Fandom is a participatory culture. The more somebody loves something, the more they talk about it, which, in turn, promotes it. This promotion educates more people who would have, otherwise, never have heard about it, thus, bringing in more fans. Henry Jenkins says that fan culture is a culture in which fans become producers of their own texts. The rise of fan fiction is a clear depiction of this. Our screens would never have been graced by franchises such as the book-to-screen adaptations of Fifty Shades of Grey or The Mortal Instruments without it. Whether you’re a fan or not, there is no denying that E. L. James’ Twilight fan fiction has made a huge name for itself in fan culture. Her website even hosts a page dedicated to the many Fifty Shades of Grey online fan clubs.

Jenkins believes that fan culture is very much related to Web 2.0. but that brings with it many questions. Are fan-produced texts creating revenue for the franchises they love? Or are fans putting pressure onto studios? Could they be doing both? This seems to be the case in the way of television at least. Shows such as Gilmore Girls and The X-Files have been rebooted to appease their many fans. MTV’s 2014 ‘Fandom of the Year’ managed to convince Warner Bros. to distribute Veronica Mars after a Kickstarter campaign resulted in the television show’s movie adaptation. The campaign raised over $5 million after fans were devastated by CBS’s decision to cancel the series.

In regards to film, self-confessed nerd Joseph Kahn’s short movie Power/Rangers was uploaded online in 2015. Created to act as homage to the Power Rangers, the film, instead, created a lawsuit between Kahn and rights-holders Saban Entertainment. The fan-made film went viral and had been watched over six million times before Saban had it taken down. They were worried it would take attention away from the reboot they are already launching. The lawsuit, instead, did the opposite. Kahn’s critically acclaimed video has since been re-uploaded to YouTube and has been watched over eighteen million times. Its upload has also successfully promoted the Power Rangers’ 2017 film.

There is no denying the strength of fan culture. Without the dedication of nerds,

fangirls and fanboys, many of today’s largest franchises would not be where they are.

Marvel’s rise to the top of the box office has been almost unanimously credited to its fans. Joss Whedon’s open letter attributed The Avengers’ success to the hard work of the Marvel Comics fans, who never stopped caring about the heroes and their stories. 

The years of being mocked and cast out have paid off for the fans, who have finally gained their place in society. It’s a win for nerds and a win for capitalism. After all, the film studios are doing very well for themselves! The nerds have had their revenge and it came in the shape of comic-book-movie box-office success and an abundance of Netflix original series.

Written by: Abi Davis-Fletcher (Twitter - @abidavisf)