When Did Hollywood Stop Listening to Its Own Audience?
I genuinely don't understand when Hollywood decided that its relationship with its audience should become adversarial. For decades, the basic formula was pretty simple, make something people love, listen to what those people respond to, give them more of it, and make a lot of money in the process. But somewhere over the last decade or so, it increasingly feels like major studios stopped asking, “What do our fans want to see?” and started saying, “We're going to tell you what you should want to see.”
Look at what has happened to some of the biggest franchises in entertainment. Star Wars, Star Trek, Disney's classic properties like TRON, the MCU, and now the DC universe have all experienced some degree of audience frustration, while Tolkien's Middle-earth and Stargate are increasingly being subjected to creative decisions that seem disconnected from what originally made those properties beloved. I'm horrified seeing what appears to be happening with the X-Men for their coming. These aren't obscure little properties with five fans on the internet. We're talking about enormous, established fanbases that have spent decades buying tickets, merchandise, books, games, subscriptions and collectibles and keeping these franchises alive. And that's the part I don't understand. Why fight your customers?
There is nothing wrong with changing things, taking risks, introducing new characters, or telling stories with different perspectives. Great franchises have always evolved. But there is a massive difference between expanding a universe and fundamentally changing what people loved about it while dismissing the audience that built the franchise in the first place. When fans repeatedly tell you what they love, what they don't like, and what they would gladly pay to see, ignoring them isn't artistic courage. At some point, it's just bad business.
What makes it even stranger is that Hollywood has access to more audience data than at any other point in history. They can see what people watch, what they rewatch, what they buy, what they talk about, what they abandon and what they refuse to pay for. The information is sitting right in front of them. Yet there seems to be a growing tendency to believe that the audience needs to be educated rather than listened to and maybe that's the real problem. Some executives and creators seem to have forgotten that being a fan isn't an obstacle to making art, it's the reason the art has an audience in the first place. Fans aren't merely consumers waiting to be corrected. They're the people who kept these stories alive between movies and television shows. They read the books, bought the toys, played the games, attended conventions, introduced their children to the characters and spent decades building communities around these fictional worlds.
Hollywood doesn't have to give fans exactly what they demand. Artists should absolutely be allowed to create. But if a studio repeatedly ignores the people who love a property, insults their intelligence when they complain, changes the fundamental character of the franchise, and then wonders why attendance and enthusiasm decline, eventually it has to look in the mirror. The frustrating thing is that I don't think audiences are asking for anything unreasonable. We want good stories. We want compelling characters. We want the worlds we've loved to be respected. We want new ideas that actually feel like they belong in those worlds. And most importantly, we want to feel like the people making these things actually like the things they're making. Hollywood doesn't need to agree with every fan. It doesn't need to surrender creative control. But it might be worth remembering a very old lesson from business, listen to your customers.
Because ultimately, we're not obligated to keep buying something simply because we loved what it used to be.
And if Hollywood keeps treating its own audience like the enemy, eventually the audience may simply stop showing up.