A brief reminder: Jesus said the meek would inherit the Earth, not the geek. It's easy to think otherwise. Geek culture is everywhere these days. You see it on television. You see it in the news. Formerly fringe events like the San Diego Comic Con are now mainstream culture mainstays. And as a member of the geek community, I'm generally happy about this -- but it has led to some quirks.
As geek culture has grown it's become a big business. Which means big businesses now pander to it. As comic book heroes top the box office the push has been on to dive farther and farther into the underground to find the next big thing. Tap into the geek world, the thinking goes, and you've got an instant audience. Which is true, to a point, and yet virtually every attempt to do so has failed.
Some fail because they clearly don't understand the audience they're playing to. Mostly, however, there simply aren't as many of us as the marketing folk seem to think.
It's an easy mistake to make. We're a vocal bunch and not shy about what we like. The vast majority of online film and media sites have a notable geek angle to them, meaning anything that hits that sweet spot gets a disproportionate level of coverage. If a concept takes off online it's easy to mistake the enthusiasm of a few thousand for the opinion of a few hundred thousand. And when the right - or wrong - people do that we end up with Snakes On A Plane.
Or, more recently, Scott Pilgrim Versus The World.
Or, now, Paul.
Don't get me wrong, I like Scott Pilgrim a lot. It's one of my favorite films of 2010 and I'm glad it exists. But films like this are bad business and ultimately bad for the long term growth of the sort of content people like me really do want. Here's why, using Scott Pilgrim as an example.
Universal is hungry for a new comic based property to base a film on when along comes a hot young director - in this case Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead's Edgar Wright - with a small but critically acclaimed graphic novel that he wants to make into a film. Great. Perfect. Now the question becomes how much to spend in the process. The online guys love the book. The online guys love Shaun of the Dead and Edgar Wright. There must be a good sized audience, right? So let's make it big. Sixty million dollars, no problem.
Except there is a problem. Several. First, despite the massive online buzz around Wright's first two films they actually did pretty crappy business at the box office. The people who love them love them a LOT but there aren't actually that many of them. Second, the book in question is barely known, having only sold a few thousand copies at the time. Which means we're spending Marvel money on a property that has a tiny fraction of any Marvel superhero's name recognition. Third, the cast and the marketing campaign were all based on the assumption that the concept would sell itself directly to the geek community.
The result? They spent a reported $60-million - the real number is much higher than that once you include sizable budget overages and the cost of marketing - and have brought in only $46-million at the international box office. Financially the film is a failure, not because the geeks didn't come but because nobody else did. What does it mean at the end of the day? It means that Scott Pilgrim was a film that should have been made for between $15-million and $30-million but the suits are going to blame the failure on the content rather than their own bad projections next time a project like this comes up and just say no.
Which brings us to Paul.
If ever there was a movie that catered to the geek community, this is it. Hell, the entire storyline is driven by a couple of guys trying to get to the San Diego Comic Con. Personally I'd like to see it succeed but I doubt it will, for precisely the same reasons as Scott Pilgrim. Too expensive at $40-million, from a director who entirely failed to capitalize on the success of Superbad with follow-up Adventureland, and built on the back of stars who are beloved by a vocal geek community but ignored by everybody else in North America. Ask an average teenage kid in Middle America if they know who Nick Frost is. They won't but they need to if you're going to have a shot at making back forty mil.
The problem with geek culture is that we've convinced ourselves and a segment of the entertainment industry that we're the mainstream when we're still far, far from it. And in the process we've guaranteed ourselves a series of costly flops made in our name which ultimately means the industry will soon just pack it in and move on to the next thing.