Are Intolerant Fans Killing 'Star Wars'?

The relative lack of success of Solo: A Star Wars Story have many speculating that the franchise might be entering a downward spiral. While many might blame the profit-hungry Disney for the turn of events, there's a case to be made that troll-ish fanboys are poisoning the waters around the franchise with their hateful and violent reactions to the new movies and their stars. Read on for one writer's take on the situation.

Via The Hollywood Reporter.

Fandom has always been an us versus them proposition. In the early days, it was because you loved something that the world at large found silly, be it comic books or Doctor Who. It was you, and those who felt like you, against everyone else. Star Wars redefined fandom because it built a bigger tent than had ever existed before. Suddenly, the "everyone else" also loved Star Wars. Your mom knew what The Force was. Mark Hamill was on The Tonight Show. There was Yoda underwear. It was the first real “fan” thing that exploded into a phenomenon. But fandom always needs a “them.”

Star Wars is in an interesting place right now. The most recent film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, has been drastically underperforming at the box office. After two weeks in release, it had pulled in a mere $271 million worldwide. Analysts believe Disney will lose $50 million or more on the film, and Solo comes on the heels of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which-despite making $1.3 billion worldwide—proved itself an incredibly divisive film. While critics loved it (judging by the 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes), fans were split.

Some loved the bold liberties of writer-director Rian Johnson. They understood that there was room under that big tent for characters like Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), women placed—alongside Carrie Fisher’s Leia and Ridley’s Rey—at the center of the Star Wars drama.

But others hated it. Hated everything it stood for. Hated what they saw as a social justice warrior remix of the Star Wars they grew up with. And they hated Tran’s Rose most of all because they decided that she was the avatar for all that was wrong with the franchise. Those fans — a minority but a loud one — found their “them” in the very thing they used to love.

Those who chose this particular vein of the Dark Side, emboldened by the faceless intoxication of the internet, went hard on Tran. Racist invective, misogyny, rape and death threats, all hurled at her constantly, unrelentingly, transforming what had been a Cinderella story — The Last Jedi was Tran’s first major film —into a modern-day nightmare. On June 4, she all but quit social media, stripping everything from her Instagram save for a profile picture and a bio that says “Afraid, but still doing it anyway.”

(It shouldn’t go unnoticed that when this stripe of fan decides they don’t like a new take on an old favorite, they level their hate on the woman of color. Leslie Jones bore the brunt of the backlash to the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters and the racist, sexually violent tweets she got also caused her to withdraw from social media to find her balance.)

All of this begs the question: What exactly do Star Wars fans want? For so long, all they were asking for was more. It was 16 years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and then 10 years between Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens. Just getting Star Wars on the big screen was enough … at first. But then fans wheeled on the prequels: too much Jar Jar, too convoluted. (The vitriol was strong enough to chase Lucas away from directing and perhaps from Star Wars altogether.)

Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.

Do you think fans are creating a distasteful atmosphere around Star Wars? Sound off in the comments below.