ABSTRACT
Media fans are people who devote great amounts of time, effort, and resources to celebrate, criticize, and recreate media texts in diverse ways, and this particular response to Batman v Superman exemplifies the astonishing creative agency of fans. The galaxy of fan culture, which encompasses a dynamic range of idiosyncratic traditions and practices, is broadly shaped by principles of appropriation, transformation, and participation. The practice of remixing cinema has been part of fan culture for decades, but several factors elevated The Phantom Edit in 2001 to the status of a fan-editing touchstone, including the development of large-capacity hard disk drives and the popularization of peer-to-peer file sharing technology. The many fan edits manage to avoid removal due to their obscurity; there are other cases in which fan edits persist online quite possibly because of prestige. A concept in extensions of fan culture is its propensity for change, to evolve in response to new social movements, economic conditions, and technological innovations.
