The Virtues & Vices of Fan Films
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Fan films have been in the zeitgeist more than usual recently. One fan film in particular, of course, has been the most prominent: Spider-Man: Lotus, which released on YouTube this past weekend.
It's hard to talk about Lotus without getting lost in the behind-the-scenes drama involved, which pretty quickly made it dead to the eyes of much of the internet long before it was released. I'm less interested in talking about that drama, which is so self-evidently Not Great, but I'm also a little reluctant to even talk about the movie itself. Dogpiling on indie stuff isn't really my favorite thing to do. Suffice to say, though, the movie is also Not Great; at least, I think, given the very large budget and the general amount of hype and showmanship put into the Kickstarter campaign, many seem to agree that it should be quite a bit better than it is. The characters in Lotus feel stagnant and stuck in a state of suspended angst and eternal flashbacks for much of the runtime, the much-hyped (and supposedly very expensive) action/VFX sequences are wildly underwhelming, the movie has very little to say beyond having a general appreciation of the Spider-Man canon, and the story mostly feels like a melodramatic and overlong retread of something we've seen in much better Spider-Man movies dozens of times over. It has the aura of a project made by a person with a firm notion of what the Spider-Man chest emblem should look like, but no real sense of a story to tell.
In a certain sense, it feels bad (and a little unfair) to heap criticisms like this onto low-budget films made for the internet, almost like punching down. I've certainly experienced my own share of negative reviews on some of my early no-budget movies in high-school, which often just made me want to respond, "yeah, it's not perfect, but I was 16 years old and it cost nothing to make." The practice of seriously "reviewing" movies like that, as though they're the same as a studio picture, doesn't feel very reasonable to me in any context.
Aside from the aforementioned drama though (which involved some very disturbing leaked DMs from some of the people behind the project) it seems like the thing that has made Spider-Man: Lotus a target for criticism has been its very large budget by fan film standards. I think that does bring it closer to fair game for critique. If Lotus were made for a couple thousand dollars and it was 20 minutes long, I'd probably be lauding it among the more competent and well-executed student films out there. I'd probably say that it's unreasonable to even review it seriously, and that the use of such a small budget to make something this solid was impressive enough to ignore the narrative flaws. Most of the movie is competently shot, after all—and standards are different when you know somebody is working with next to nothing, which is why the no-budget Ugandan film Who Killed Captain Alex? is a masterpiece!
As it stands, though, Spider-Man: Lotus certainly doesn't look or feel like something that should have cost $110K to make. Yeah, $110K.
Richard Linklater's Slacker cost $23K. YouTuber Ralph Sepe's debut feature King Candy cost next to nothing. Joel Haver's profound movie 31 Days in Marshall, North Carolina had a budget of $1,600. This is not in the same league as those, and it cost practically 10x as much.
Another piece of the critical puzzle, I think, was the way that the creator of Lotus carried himself online in the process of making and funding the film; a big part of the draw for funding Lotus was a sense that it would be doing Spider-Man right, correcting the "mistakes" made by directors like Jon Watts in Marvel's current incarnation of the character, and making a movie that could stand next Sam Raimi's trilogy as one of the more loyal feature adaptations that took Spider-Man seriously. I don't think it's completely wrong on paper to want to try your hand at something like this, but as soon as you start implying that you're going to "do it better than Hollywood," it's undeniable that there's a certain arrogance involved—and when you're confident enough to hold a spectacular red carpet premiere in LA, people will hold the film to a higher standard as a result.
So, Spider-Man: Lotus isn't great. I don't think it's abominable, and I don't think it's worth obsessively tearing down—because that might just discourage someone else from putting something better out there. But it all certainly got me thinking—about the purpose of fan films, about their place in pop internet culture, and about how we determine the validity of a piece of art.
I've seen a lot of cynicism on the Twitter timeline about fan films in the last few days, obviously in large part because of present company, and I sympathize with it. Isn't the media landscape saturated enough with superheroes and franchises? How depressing might it be if our next generation of filmmakers only knows how to tell stories about Spider-Man and Darth Vader, and lacks the human experience to actually make things that feel real and honest? Only an infantilized culture would crowdfund a $110K Spider-Man cosplay movie when we're already getting multiple Spider-Man movies per year. Sure, maybe it's a "democratization of storytelling" for the average joe to get to make his own Spidey movie, but personally I like my democratization to give voice to original ideas, not more of what we're already getting in spades.
That's what I'd say if I was going all in on negativity. And maybe, at certain times, I am.
Despite all of this, I can't write fan films off the way that some have in the last few days. In a certain sense, my first movie was a fan film; it was an 8 minute movie called "Indiana Jones and The Transport to Heaven," starring my 9-year-old self as Indiana Jones. I've got a pretty confident suspicion that most of the people reading this might be in a similar boat; most of my early movies were Harry Potter, Indy, or Star Wars imitations with myself as the hero. Heck, even Steven Spielberg's first movie was a miniature recreation of the train crash from The Greatest Show on Earth. For almost every aspiring filmmaker, the initial moment of revelation and interest comes from an obsession with something witnessed onscreen and the desire to recreate it with your own devices at home.
It does feel like eventually we have to move on from recreations, though; and indeed, most fan films try to do something beyond just imitate—they seek to add something to the character that fans value or want to see onscreen but haven't been satisfied with in previous adaptations. That's where some of the originality comes into play, but it's also where some of the arrogance can happen too. If you're crowdfunding a hundred thousand dollars just to prove that you understand a comic-book character better than the people making the movies professionally, it becomes increasingly likely that you don't have an original meaningful story to tell—you're just trying to prove your own fan credentials.
Some people out there in the Twitterverse have made statements like, "what kind of unoriginal hack would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for an indie film and use it to make another Spider-Man movie? Make something original, for the love of god!" While I sympathize with that sentiment, I do think that it willfully misses the obvious fact: it's nearly impossible to crowdfund hundreds of thousands of dollars for something original. People did not donate to Spider-Man: Lotus because they wanted to see an independent feature film; they donated because it was a Spider-Man film.
As such, I can clearly see the value of higher-budget fan films for this purpose: enabling a young and aspiring filmmaker to make something original with the benefit of popular name-recognition that allows them to flex their filmmaking muscles and do something thoughtful and new below the surface.
In many ways, this is what I feel like my friend Alex from HiTop Films is doing with his upcoming Jason Todd film, which released a trailer this weekend. Alex has been a huge fan of Jason Todd's Robin for years, but he also has a very distinct idea for a story; not to spitefully "correct" the filmmakers in Hollywood, but to use the name of DC and Robin to tell a tale that is universal and human and about much more than just "getting a superhero right." Alex is using fan-funding to make a feature film that he'd probably still want to make even if the character of Robin was off the table; it's just that the name gives it an audience. Not to mention, Robin has never had a live-action movie before—so it feels like ground that hasn't been tread a hundred times over.
That's not so different from what some of the better studio superhero films out there have done in the past; Logan, The Batman, Spider-Man 2, and Iron Man are all original and solid movies that use the name and mythos of a popular character to tell a story that feels like it stands as its own narrative, apart from being "a tribute for the fans" or "a love letter."
I guess the line that I'd draw in the sand would be this one: if you want to use a popular character to tell a story that's meaningful to you under the guise of a "fan film" and gain a built-in audience in the process, I think that's cool. Use the lore as window dressing and make something with soul. But if all you're interested in doing is making your own version of what's already been done dozens of times, proving you can do it better than Hollywood, worshipping a character and his mythos like it's The Bible, "getting the suit right" and making sure his angst is dialed up, then just make a 5-minute short with your friends! It's not a bad desire. The director of Spider-Man: Lotus is someone who just graduated high school, and he saddled himself with a massive project far too big for his current capabilities. It's not wrong to be ambitious, but I think this is why making short films is such a good exercise. We've all wanted to learn through imitation, especially when we're young; it's just an idea better-suited for a Saturday afternoon than a multiyear hundred-thousand-dollar Kickstarter campaign.
And, to be fully honest: I'd like to see someone with the guts to make something completely original even without a built-in audience. It doesn't need to cost $110K. As long as you've got a meaningful story bursting out of your soul to tell, it can be great. Just look at Who Killed Captain Alex? or 31 Days in Marshall, North Carolina.