In my last post I talked
about the fascination the Irish have with their old folk tales and legends. But
the Irish aren’t the only ones captivated by stories like these. The rest of
the world also seems to be particularly interested in this kind of genre at the
moment. Is it possible that we still crave for stories about other worlds? And could
this also be a reason for the hype with franchises like Lord of the Rings, Harry
Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games? In recent years, there
has been a boom in fantasy and science fiction. As a fan I’ve been following
the development of books made into movies and unfortunately also into franchises.
This development always
starts out in America, that’s where all the magic happens, where most media
hypes emerge and spread throughout the whole world. If you watch the events
happening in America, you are sure to know the franchise of tomorrow. They have
Comic Con, mall tours and loads of merchandise. With the right marketing a story
can become a huge success. When the hype has already reached extremes in the US,
people in Europe slowly begin to notice that something’s going on. For example,
when the first Twilight movie came
out in Austria, all of a sudden everybody read the book, even though it might
have been the first and last book they read voluntarily. It’s still a mystery
to me how all these people wanted to get their hands on the books, after
watching Twilight in German. In the
movie the storyline moved too fast and made the plot look ridiculous. The
German dubbing destroyed any connection whatsoever that you might have sensed
with the original voices of the main actors. Despite all of this, a worldwide Twilight mania arose and seemed to bring
about the craziest fans ever.While Harry
Potter fans were cute with their wands and Gryffindor scarves, the passion
of Twilighters was sometimes frightening, particularly for the actors. The
actors, who played vampires, were asked to bite their fans an unspeakable
variety of body parts and those who played werewolves, to take their shirts off
at every occasion to let fans feel their six-packs. The most worrying aspect of
this behavior is that these demands often come from underage fans.
Not surprisingly, a lot of
companies see this obsession as an opportunity to make money. The story becomes
a product and every little detail is turned into an item for the fans to buy. Whether
it’s bizarre stuff like the Edward body pillow , Pattinson Panties , or normal items
like Aragorn’s sword or Harry Potter’s wand, everything around the books is turned into money.
All that counts is profit
and what better proof is there than Stephenie Meyer selling the rights to her
story to Lionsgate, a movie production company, which bought Summit
Entertainment (the former production company of the Twilight series).
This later turned out to be
a rumor: She didn’t exactly sell all of her rights. In a blog
post from February 22,
Meyer declares that they discussed the possibility of another book and its
movie version. However, the idea to make as much money as possible out of the
story still holds true in this case.
And Lionsgate also happens
to be the same company that produced the latest franchise: The Hunger Games.The movie was released just a few weeks ago and
has already topped the box office earnings of all four Twilight movies. According to the Guardian they made $ 155m in the debut night, making them the runner up to the
last Harry Potter ($169.2m) and The Dark Knight ($158.4m). The science
fiction story, set into a dystopian America that is divided into 13 districts,
provides a love triangle and lots of blood - as in children slaughtering each
other. With two more books in the trilogy (Catching
Fire and Mockingjay) to shoot plus the possibility of seeing more of the Twilight saga on screen, Lionsgate has
surely hit the jackpot. Sadly, as it is ground through this money-making-machinery,
the original material gets lost, and the story, that was a pleasure to read, is
suffocated under the weight of marketing strategies and absurd products.
Naturally, there are people
who can’t understand the frenzy at all. They judge fans according to a few
extreme examples, who can no longer separate fantasy from
reality, and the ridiculous merchandise that apparently all fans buy. Sometimes these people become haters, insulting people
for what they like and waging war against fans, not realizing how unreasonable they
are behaving. Haters reduce the story to a few basic clichés, to make it look
like a silly thing that no rational individual could possibly be passionate
about.
I didn’t like Twilight
because the high school hottie, who happens to be a sparkling vampire, takes
the awkward shy girl. I liked the books, because of Edward’s gentlemanly treatment
of Bella. The fact that he’s a vampire was just enough fantasy for me to even pick
the book up in the first place. Although I hated overly romantic novels at the
time, I was surprised how much I liked this story of forbidden love. Back then,
there was no talk of movies or merchandise, there was only a book in the school
library. And if the books hadn’t been turned into movies, I’d still read them
over and over again, because it is the story that counts.
No comments:
Post a Comment