Decades only make sense in retrospect because being alive during one is ??? ?? ????a series of experiences, while looking back is a remembrance. Pinpointing ten-year trends is an inexact endeavor precisely because the arc of popular taste is only noticeable when it’s over or, as with the case with entertainment in the 2010s, never seems to end.
One only has to look at the top 20 highest-grossing films of the 2010s to see that our media climate is saturated with franchises, sequels, superheroes and all of those satisfying, big-budget movies that actually get butts in theater seats. It wasn’t that different in the 2000s, when seventeen of the top 20 films were sequels or book adaptations (or both, there’s a lot of Harry Potter on there), but even as that trend continues there has been one small shift that says a lot about how TV and movies shifted this decade — in the 2010s, entertainment began to look even further inward for its inspiration, choosing to ceaselessly expand upon that which was already done as opposed to moving on to other, new ideas.
Star Wars came back this decade, which was more or less to be expected, but the 2010 edition of a galaxy far, far away came with spinoff movies like Soloand Rogue One. Harry Potter threw it back to the 1920s for the Fantastic Beasts series, which hewed to the rules of the Wizarding World but brought magic to New York City and Paris. On television, The Big Bang Theoryspun off Young Sheldon while Breaking Badmanaged a quick turnaround with Better Call Saul. All of these examples owe a lot to one massive, disorganized collective of nerds who lived through the 2000s and emerged this decade hungry for something specific and confident that Hollywood would be there to serve them.
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The 2010s, as a decade, belong to fandom.
Fandom didn’t spring out of nowhere. For the past thirty years it has grown and progressed each decade to eventually assume its position of absolute cultural dominance. The early internet of the 1990s brought people together in small, online communities, but it wasn’t until the social media of the 2000s that fandom began to develop into its current, and not likely final form.
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, fandom existed on the internet in insular communities. Fansites with message boards dedicated to discussing specific franchises existed but were kept separated by the nature of the early web. As the decade progressed however, the internet began to expand and connect fandoms in ways that hadn’t been possible before.
SEE ALSO: The 15 best films of the 2010sDeviantArt, a website which now hosts millions of pieces of fanart, was founded in the year 2000 and quickly picked up steam as the place to see artists put their own (sometimes porny) spin on fan favorite characters. FanFiction.net had been around since 1998 but grew in the 2000s as a place to find fan-written stories that expanded the canon universes of hundreds of books and movies.
These sites’ searchable databases of properties and characters precluded a change in the way fans interacted online. Fandom became less of a collection of islands and more of an all-encompassing, increasingly weird internet party. 2006 brought Twitter into the mix and Tumblr joined the fun in 2007. Archive of Our Own, now the largest collection of online fanfiction on the internet, bookended the decade with its founding in 2009.
Fandom also flexed its necromantic social media powers to bring dead ideas and canceled shows back to life on a scale that straight up didn’t happen in the previous decade
The most important hallmark of fandom in the 2000s was its “transformative” nature. Transformative specifies a type of fandom occupied by the possibilities of a written or cinematic universe. These fans take worlds created by their favorite authors and constantly remake them — changing characters’ genders, fixing plot points they don’t like, writing book-length epilogues or prequels, and discarding the idea that the author’s direct intention is the most important part of any work.
In fanfiction and fanart, popular non-canon romantic pairings like Marvel's Captain America and Bucky Barnes can be the center of a story as opposed to existing in whatever subtext its ardent shippers dig up from the "official" version of events. Harry Potter's parents and the rest of the Marauders have novel-length adventures of their own, adventures that aren't beholden to J.K. Rowling's text and the pre-written endings she supplied.
Transformative fandom is seductive and undying. Like dark magic, it keeps characters and franchises alive in the shared minds of millions of online creators, who naturally latch onto the joy of staying in a fictional place long after its original author has abandoned it. If transformative fandom has one hallmark, it’s that it always finds room for more in any given story.
Like many things that start on the internet and wind up on TV and movie screens, it took Hollywood a while to catch up. After a decade of book-to-movie adaptations and sequels, fandom was bigger and louder than before, amplified by social media and its ability to connect studio creators with a curious, transformative audience that was more than ready to pay money to see what they wanted appear on screen.
In addition to the abovementioned spinoffs (Fantastic Beasts, Solo, Better Call Saul) that appeared this decade, all of which can be summed up with a fanfiction prompt, fandom also flexed its necromantic social media powers to bring dead ideas and canceled shows back to life on a scale that straight up didn’t happen in the previous decade (a notable exception is the fan campaign for the 2005 Fireflymovie Serenity, which would have five sequels by now if that show had aired closer to the end of the 2000s). Twitter rallied around leaked Deadpoolfootage from an abandoned special effects test and buoyed Ryan Reynolds’ star-remaking turn as the merc with a mouth in two whole-ass movies. It also rescued Brooklyn 99from cancelation and screamed Veronica MarsSeason 4 into existence after already screaming its way to a movie in 2014.
Fandom became so powerful in the 2010s that fan reaction to their wishes being granted became an entirely new subsection of news and entertainment. This ranges from actual reaction videos to longtime fans watching the first trailer of some long-awaited adaptation to entire articles written about what “Twitter” thinks of a movie or new season of television. In the ultimate merging of transformative fandom and the things it admires, fans increasingly became a part of the stories they consumed, for better and for worse.
SEE ALSO: 10 trends of the 2010s that changed how we see TVMatthew D'Ambrosio, a writer and script coordinator who worked on television adaptation The Vampire Diariesin the early to mid 2010s noted how fandom and social media affected the series. "TVDwas happening right around the Twitter boom so on premiere nights we’d sit around the room and just read reactions to see if what we were going for landed or what people hated/loved," he wrote in an email to Mashable, "If a story point just isn’t landing, it was helpful (and informative!) to see that happen in real time."
While public opinion always had the potential to influence what gets made, towards the end of the decade fans began to have input on howit gets made, best exemplified by the 2019 Sonic the Hedgehogtrailer that featured a widely mocked designfor the title character. The pushback on Sonic’s look was so strong that Paramount Pictures pushed the movie’s release date to give them time to redesign and reanimate the hedgehog. The case of Sonic is extreme, considering fan opinion nipped a crucial element of the film in the bud before the movie made it to theaters, but there have been many other examples of fans left disappointed by how Hollywood expands their favorite properties after they’re already out.
The fourth and fifth seasons of Arrested Development, which premiered on Netflix years after the show’s cancelation, don’t come close to the 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating for the Fox-aired Season 3 of the show, and the most recent Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwaldhas a 37% approval rating on the same site. When Star Wars: The Last Jediangered fans who criticized the movie’s alleged disrespect to the canon, they rallied around Change.org and GoFundMe petitions demanding that the movie be remade to better suit their ideas.
That’s always been the lurking variable in mainstream entertainment’s turn towards fandom. The aphorism “you can’t please everyone” is doubly applied when the basis of an audience’s enjoyment is their personal interpretation of fictional worlds. Fandom has never been cohesive, but in a media climate where the niche obsessions of the 2000s are now the default form of entertainment it’s easier to perceive the creative and ideological fractures that have always been present.
To betray that spirit for a spinoff that seems superfluous, or focuses on the wrong elements of the original work, holds no interest for people who can simply imagine it better.
In many ways, the disconnect between the consumer pool of transformative fans and creators has already caused studios to publicly reconsider the strategy of constantly churning out more angles on the same stories. Solo: A Star Wars Storyhad comparatively low box office numbers compared to the mainstream franchise and reportedly led to its studio pulling further film length spinoffs off its release schedule (they do plan to release TV length Star Wars stories The Mandalorianon Disney+, as well as two prequel series on the same service). The Fantastic Beasts movies also performed poorly, not even cracking the top 50 box office earnings just a decade after the Harry Potter movies dominated in theaters.
Even with social media giving fans an open forum for feedback it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why some of this decade's spinoffs have landed and others faltered, but looking back on the history of fandom and knowing why these imaginative side stories grew popular in the first place, one can hazard a guess. A decade of transformative fandom rendered every fan an expert on exactly what elements of a story are important. It could be the characters, their relationships, the setting, the emotional beats — these things form the spirit of a work. To betray that spirit for a spinoff that seems superfluous, or focuses on the wrong elements of the original work, holds no interest for people who can simply imagine it better.
Still, considering the scale of and attention paid to the numerous fanfiction-esque projects released this decade, fandom emerged as Hollywood's most desired demographic. Theirs are the eyes big-budget creators now compete for, and in that way fandom won the 2010s. All the petitions in the world can’t argue with the billions upon billions of dollars studios racked up giving people more of what they thought they wanted. Sitting at the end of the decade, still at an imperceivable point on the arc of this trend, it’s hard to predict where and what this win means for fans. Maybe the arc of fandom is just like everything else these days: neverending, while always leaving the door open for a spinoff.