“Your Movie Is Gonna Suck, and it Ruined My Childhood!” The Anticipatory Interpretation of Films by Online Audiences

Abstract

While fan studies, and media reception studies more broadly, have widely covered the ways in which audiences interpret and react to texts, very little has been written on how they also anticipate such texts. Since the advent of social media and the new possibilities it has offered, both to audiences to express their reactions to media as well as to authors and producers to market their work, this phenomenon has gained in intensity and is now more visible than ever before. The aim of this thesis will thus be to examine this phenomenon more closely, and explain how audiences use different types of ancillary texts, namely paratexts and intertexts, as well as pre-existing cultural debates and context in order to construct discourses and interpretations around primary texts, despite not having any direct access to them. To this end, this thesis shall focus on Twitter activity and online press reporting during the release and pre-release periods of three specific films -- Paul Feig's Ghostbusters (2016), Eli Roth's Death Wish (2018), and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) -- chosen for the strong audience pre-reactions they drew and their blockbuster status. The thesis will first explore the theoretical concepts and ramifications of this phenomenon, and address some of the methodological concerns pertaining to using Twitter alongside other sources for qualitative research. Next is a case study of the promotional period and release of Ghostbusters, which saw a plethora of hostile reactions to its all-female main cast, including coordinated waves of harassment. Following this, I shall look at how Death Wish drew concerns from American progressives before its release, who criticised it for its reactionary pro-gun rhetoric. Finally, the last chapter shall examine the praise Black Panther received for being a watershed film when it came to racial representation in superhero films, and how this reputation was challenged and upheld both before and after its theatrical release. These case studies will help illustrate and define the phenomenon of anticipatory interpretation, and also demonstrate how audiences use digital media in order to discuss and form collective interpretations of media texts before their releases, thus shaping the later reception of said texts.