ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that word-of-mouth on social media enables the film audience to exert greater ‘authorial agency’ on contemporary Hollywood film financing processes than ever before. It does so by exploring instances in which increasing participation with the commercial products of popular culture has led to an alignment of goals between the audience and the industry. This occurs because the fungibility of capital that is demonstrated through the mechanism of word-of-mouth automatically places audiences into a hierarchical capitalist system. It begins by defining ‘authorial agency’ and establishes its relation to contemporary Hollywood film financing dynamics. Then, to put this relationship into its historical context, it explores how the Hollywood film financing process has developed up to our current age of social media. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how each successive change in the dominant system of production in Hollywood has been linked to a fundamental desire on the industry’s part to eliminate risk in film financing. To help explicate this, the chapter then discusses fandom as a function of risk management in Hollywood and how contemporary film fans may now exert a greater degree of authorial agency over film casting decisions through their more ‘visible’ word-of-mouth interactions on social media. Finally, it uses the concepts of fandom and authorial agency to compare the audience’s relationship to the pre-production processes of two Hollywood films. One that took place before the advent of social media, Batman (1989), and one that took place afterward, Tusk (2014).
