The Morbius fandom misread

With lean-through behaviour growing ever more central to fandom, it is natural for marketing and strategy teams to look for trends in this sort of behavoiur in order to identify sentiment and fandom groups. 

This can take the form of tracking anything from likes on official posts, to hashtags, viral posts and videos, memes, newspaper articles, and popular parodies. However, tracking these engagement points on a quantitative basis misses the importance of their quality; nuance is needed to adequately discern what metrics really mean. 

In this case, the studio behind Morbius – Columbia Pictures, in association with Marvel – may have misjudged. In theatres, by its second weekend, Morbius was the second-lowest performing superhero film of all time. After it was moved to a digital-first streaming launch in light of its poor performance, however, the audience’s tone changed. The low box office numbers were suddenly countered by extremely high social engagement. Parodies, memes, hashtags and online chatter all went wild, from those who had not even seen the film all the way through to Jared Leto, one of the headline actors, taking part in the fun. Accounts started popping up on the likes of Twitch, with the film being illegally streamed on loop; the first account was live for 12 hours before Twitch shut it down, after which other accounts began to pop up (being difficult to find, the last of them may not yet have been extinguished). The entire script was copied-and-pasted into text posts on Twitter and Tumblr as well. By all quantitative metrics, the film had become an overnight success (piracy notwithstanding). 

However, critical to the context here, most of the hype surrounding the film was about how bad it was. It became a fan favourite to hate on, joke about, make fun of, reference, and irrationally defend as an underdog – not because peple actually liked the film itself, but because of the fun of social participation using the film as a backdrop. Critically, as well, due to the rampant piracy, not only was the discourse around disliking the film, but the widespread illicit availability meant anyone who wanted to see it had ample time to do so, in a variety of ways on a variety of platforms. 

Perhaps the phrase ‘no such thing as bad press’ may have come to mind. Regardless of this important context, with the film trending on every social platform and memes spilling across the internet, Columbia Pictures decided to re-release it in theatres on its 10th weekend. Almost predictably, given the reason behind the viral popularity of the film, it generated only a disappointing $310,665 of box office revenue in the first three days. 

Fandom is fickle, and audiences have never been more creative. Tracking numbers of likes, shares, and views no longer does enough to capture the full depth of consumer sentiment and engagement – which, if misjudged, can have very expensive consequences. While the impact of piracy is beyond the remit of content creators, their ability to create content that can plan to stand up to – or at least take into account – the scrutiny of lean-through superfans is now essential.

Roles

This report is relevant to the following roles:

Audience Insight