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The New Collaborative Cinema: Labor in Contemporary Franchises

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Natallia Yeloshyna

April 2021

© 2021 Natallia Yeloshyna. All Rights Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

The New Collaborative Cinema: in Contemporary Film Franchises

by

NATALLIA YELOSHYNA

has been approved for

the Film Division

and the College of Fine Arts by

Ofer Eliaz

Associate Professor of Film

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

Abstract YELOSHYNA, NATALLIA, M.A., April 2021, The New Collaborative Cinema: Fan Labor in Contemporary Film Franchises Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz This paper reviews recent attempts of contemporary media franchises to include fan labor in the development of commercial entertainment cinema. By examining , Lord of the Rings, Fifty Shades and the franchises, I argue that socially and historically unique characteristics of contemporary culture allow contemporary franchises to encourage and reinforce audience involvement into franchise development. In particular, the Fantastic Beasts resets hierarchical relationships between the creators of J.K. Rowling’s franchise and the imput of its fans. This makes the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald the most progressive example of a producer-consumer relationship in contemporary cinema. This paper provides an overview of strategies of producer-consumer communication in film franchises that can help film theorists to better understand the specifics of the contemporary media environment and filmmakers to avoid mistakes in communications with their fans. 4

Dedication

I am dedicating this thesis to my greatest inspiration - J.K. Rowling. Her fictional world is always there to welcome me home. I simply cannot imagine my life without my wizarding mom. Everything I am now is because of her. 5

Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to thank my tutors and thesis committee: Professor Ofer Eliaz for dedicated involvement in every step of my education at Ohio University, believing in me from day one, listening to my endless discussions of the Wizarding World and providing valuable feedback even during weekends and even on holidays as well as for watching all and Fantastic Beasts , of course; Professor Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf for always encouraging me to write about my passions and supporting me with her academic expertise; and my outside reader – Professor Edmond Y. Chang – for his passionate participation in my research and sharing my desires to bring Harry Potter to academia. Here, I also would like to thank Professor Louis-Georges Schwartz for his understanding of my unhealthy passion regarding “big, scary things.” Thank to these people this thesis looks like an academic work and not just a fannish conversation. Second, I want to thank the Director of the Film Division - Steven Ross – for the enormous amount of seen and unseen work that he does for all film students. Third, I would like to thank my classmates for being open to my ideas and reading countless pages of my thesis as well as for our numerous formal and casual conversations about media franchising. Thanks to them, my thesis was supported with fascinating examples of fan- from other popular franchises that diversify my original ideas. 6

Table of contents Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments...... 5 Introduction ...... 7 Chapter 1: Contemporary Film Franchises as Generational Mirrors ...... 11 1.1. Film Authorship Theories: A History ...... 13 1.2. From Millennial Marketing to Zoomer Marketing ...... 23 1.2.1. The Cauldron Is Leaking ...... 24 1.2.2. Pop-Sociology and Contemporary Commerce ...... 28 1.3. Conclusion ...... 34 Chapter 2: An Easy Muggle Solution for A Serious Wizarding Problem ...... 37 2.1. Fantastic Fans and Where to Find Them ...... 38 2.1.1. The Lord of the Rings and : The Example of ...... 39 2.1.2. Star Wars: The Example of J.J. Abrams ...... 42 2.1.3. and Fifty Shades: The Example of E.L. James ...... 46 2.1.4. Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts: From J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World to a ...... 47 2.2. “Fan”-tastic Business Model for Contemporary Media Franchises ...... 58 2.3. Conclusion ...... 62 Conclusion ...... 64 Works Cited ...... 68 Appendices ...... 75 Appendix 1: Segmentations ...... 75 1.1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (P. Jackson, 2013) ...... 75 1.2. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019) ...... 77 1.3. (S. Taylor-Johnson, 2015) ...... 81 1.4. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (, 2018) ...... 83 Appendix 2: Business Model Canvas – The Wizarding World Franchise ...... 86 Appendix 3: Budget and Communication Strategy for Legal Commodification of Fan Labor in The Wizarding World Franchise ...... 87 Appendix 4: Terms and Conditions Agreement ...... 89 7

Introduction When people say that they like Harry Potter more than Fantastic Beasts, The Lord of the Rings more than The Hobbit, Twilight more than Fifty Shades, and the original Star Wars films more than the of Star Wars Legends, I ask them to explain these preferences. In most cases, they say that they do not like prequels and because these films depart from their canons. Then I ask them about something that they like in those films. As a response to this question, I almost always hear a fascinating speech about the very parts of new films that refute . Paradoxical, isn't it? In one way or another all media have been interested in an active audience. However, this interest reached its peak with the emergence of the so-called new media phenomenon at the end of the 20th century. The distinctive characteristic of the new media marketplace is that it sells content to audiences so it can later sell these audiences to advertisers. This affects the structure of contemporary films, by bringing fans, and their labor onscreen. It has become a commonplace, at least since the , to interpret films as expressions of a director’s subjectivity. The lack of a clear marker of authorship is, I contend, at the heart (whether explicitly or not) of much criticism of contemporary film franchises. However, today’s audience wants not only to follow but also to interact with them. That is why contemporary entertainment cinema has become increasingly interested in engaging the audience. The most innovative examples of interactive cinema can be found in short forms. However, feature films also experiment with giving their audiences the power to steer the narrative. The assumption that the audiences may expect to see certain things onscreen changes the product integration from simply being a covert marketing ploy into a form of data collection that leads to the commodification of fan labor. Besides questions regarding legal issues as well as technical difficulties associated with harnessing fan-created materials, this tendency actualizes an issue of fan-sourced authorship in the film industry. The phenomenon of fan labor in contemporary film franchises shows a new direction of collective authorship where the audience was previously excluded from any consideration as a film’s creators. Although theory, the dominant conception of film authorship, has long emphasized film as the unique expression of a single author or authorial vision, some filmmakers have sought to integrate audiences into the filmmaking process. For example, the schlock filmmaker William Castle offered the audience a ‘punishment poll’ in Mr. Sardonicus that was released in 1961. During the film's climax, each audience member needed to hold a card with a glow-in-the-dark thumb up or thumb down to decide whether the main villain should be cured or die. The projectionist would then project the reel that matched the majority opinion of the 8 audience. Such audience interactivity at the post-production stage required Castle to create two different endings of the film before its release. However, in contemporary franchise filmmaking, fans have become “a constituency that media companies both recognize and actively seek to incorporate, encourage, monetize, and manage” at every step of the process.1 Moreover, the studios do not even try to hide this purely mercantile interest, as they did previously. The first ‘user-generated film,’ as it is called by its creators, is Steekspel (Paul Verhoeven, 2012). A five-minute opening scene, written by scriptwriter Kim van Kooten, was published on the Internet before the film's production, and potential viewers were invited to finish the scene themselves the way they wanted the film to end. About 700 scripts with a total of more than 3000 pages from nearly 400 authors came in response. The final selection included 50 scripts written by the viewers and Verhoeven himself only selected the scripts and supervised the editors. Today, uses the same principle in the children’s series The Adventures of Puss in Boots (2015 – 2018) and Buddy Thunderstruck (2018) as well as in the interactive Black Mirror: (David Slade, 2018). The main difference between the second generation of the World Wide Web and the first one is participation. In Web 1.0, the users’ role is limited to viewing content in a passive manner, but in Web 2.0 users do not act only as consumers, but also as contributors or producers of their own materials. Web 2.0 services improve the more people use them. So, when we say that some companies benefit from using Web 2.0, we mean that they “harness collective intelligence,” that is they invite customer feedback and even participation in the creation of their products. Why do they do this? Because they want to get more money. How can they force consumers to give them more money? By providing good content. And how can they know what content consumers like? Ingeniously simple – they ask fans about it! The influence of new media and Web 2.0 technologies on the cinematic field has been studied previously. However, the scholarship is quite limited due to the low number of relevant cases for calling filmmakers’ interest in using fan labor in film production a new cinematic phenomenon. Thus, previous studies were focused on pre- and post-production stages of the filmmaking process. One of the few examples of such scholarship is Simone Murray's article “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is,” published more than 15 years ago, which discusses film studios’ increasing willingness to engage with fans in pursuit of better sales.2 Now we can say

1 Mel Stanfill, Exploiting : How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 5. 2 Simone Murray, “‘Celebrating the Story the Way It Is’: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom,” Continuum 18, no. 1 (March 2004): 7-25. 9 that there is a certain fan-oriented tendency in the film production process itself, which raises the question of contemporary film authorship as well as the future development of the industry. The goal of my project is to expand collective authorship theories by including the audience in the list of film creators, so such theories can reflect the current stage of the filmmaking process. This thesis also analyses precursors of the phenomenon of fan labor as well as its impact on the future development of the film industry. My research objectives include describing the inappropriateness of the existing single author film theories in the analysis of contemporary films and expanding a collaborative theory of authorship by including active fans into members of film production collectives. These objectives need to be met so the new theory can explain and not simply criticize the changes caused by participatory culture, transmedia storytelling, and media convergence. The of the project lies in addressing the question of contemporary film authorship by studying four major film franchises that use fan but present it in films as canonical information. As a methodological approach, I will mostly use production analysis and film policy research with the focus of defining contemporary film authorship. Thus, in my work, I will provide a contemporary criticism of the single-author theories that will lead to the development of an appropriate fan- oriented that can reflect the current tendencies of the industry. I look at contemporary approaches to Hollywood film production in which and fan labor is integrated into the development process at every level of a film’s production. Although some amount of audience feedback has been integral to much of Hollywood production since the studio era, the situation I am looking at is different because the selected films use fan fiction but present it as canonical information. I am working with the following franchises: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit, The Twilight Saga + Fifty Shades, and The Wizarding World. In each case, I analyze the different strategies of fan labor: in the case of Star Wars, I show that fanon is being prioritized over the new canon in the films by J.J. Abrams; in the case of Fifty Shades fanon becomes the canon itself; in case of The Hobbit, fanon co-exists with canon and in case of The Wizarding World, fanon shares all the above-mentioned features as it is filtered by a group of professionals so J.K. Rowling can create her new canon on it.3 The thesis consists of two chapters. The first chapter traces the foundations and development of all existing film authorship theories (Auteur theory – Scriber theory – Collective theory) to show their limits in defining authorship of films that belong to popular multi-media franchises. This chapter also provides my explanations of the new industrial model with the

3 Canon is anything presenting in official works by the creators of something. Fanon is any element that is widely accepted among fans, but has little or no basis in canon. 10 emphasis on the generational factors of Millennials and Zoomers. The second chapter analyzes the phenomenon of contemporary film franchises with case studies of Lord of the Rings + The Hobbit, Star Wars ( + Disney), The Twilight Saga + Fifty Shades, and The Wizarding World (Harry Potter + Fantastic Beasts) franchises focusing on their collaboration with fans in regards of the film production. While I trace the history of all four franchises from the releases their first installments to the current time, the main emphasis of this chapter is devoted to the current organization of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, because the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald currently presents the most progressive way of using fan works in the development of the franchise through films. This chapter also builds a relevant theory of collective film authorship including the reimagining of the value of such cultural phenomena as retcons and redefinition of the notion of infringement in contemporary films as well as it provides a new business model that potentially can be adopted by contemporary film franchises in practice.

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Chapter 1: Contemporary Film Franchises as Generational Mirrors In cinema, all theories of authorship have long emphasized the camera as the personification of a personal style or perspective. However, if we would evaluate contemporary films with the extant authorship theories, today all four abovementioned franchises fall into the category of a ‘bad’ or ‘not serious’ films. Auteur theory, still highly accepted in the film studies discourse, attributes film credit to the director by praising the artistic personality that signs the film with its unique artistic expression. The most well-known auteur theory supporters are Francois Truffaut, who attributed his theory with The French New Wave cinematic movement but also credited some pre-New Wave filmmakers (Henri-Georges Clouzot, , ) as ‘men of cinema’,4 and who applied his own version of the theory to The era.5 Alhough The Cahiers writers admired many Hollywood films, for theorists like Truffaut, Hollywood always produced films that were marked by their lack of personal style. Hollywood auteurs were notable precisely because, while working within the system and producing recognizable studio films, their personal expression still came through in the themes or repeated ways in which they violated the rules of Hollywood cinema. Thus, it is important to recognize that there are really two different conceptions of the auteur theory. For the French New Wave critics, it is a critical tool – a way for critics to interpret and evaluate films. For Sarris, it is a classificatory tool that provides critics with something that can guide the work of the director to show that some directors are or are not auteurs. However, the authorship in films of contemporary franchises cannot be found in the director’s personality (or its absence) alone, at least because the same visual elements usually exist in all the films of the franchise, even though they are directed by different directors. Another approach to authorship is the Schreiber theory, which focuses on screenwriters rather than directors as the primary auteurs of a film. The main theorists here are Richard Corliss6 and David Kipen7 who tried to rewrite film history from the point of view of the party who writes rather than directs the story. This theory is more relevant to the current tendencies of film production but is still inaccurate, because reflecting the idea of Roland Barthes about the death of the author, the screenwriter now is not a writer of a story but just a scriptor or compiler of fan

4 Truffaut, François, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema (France, 1954),” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 133-143. 5 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27, no. 27 (Winter 1962–1963): 1-8. 6 , Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (: Penguin Book, 1975). 7 David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2006). 12 ideas. Thus, some fan-oriented authors become “an inter- or paratextual framing device, a matrix of other (inter)texts that served as a paratextual role in directing interpretation.”8 Collective authorship theory sees a film as a cooperative and collaborative effort of the whole filmmaking team. We can mention Pauline Kael9 and George Sadoul10 among supporters of this theoretical movement. However, such theorists as Paul Sellors11 insist on treating as members of a film production collective only people that intentionally work toward making a film. Therefore, even though all four film franchises that I use in my work do not hide the fact of harnessing and commodifying the intellectual properties of their fans, the audience usually does not fall into the category of people that intentionally write fan fiction for films. Thus, history shows that art always reflects the state of society. The Italian Neorealist movement, for example, signified poverty, strife, and the new reality of Italy after World War II, and German Expressionism developed as a result of youth's reaction against German bourgeois culture. Therefore, digital commodification that we see in today’s franchises appeared as a response to some material, cultural and social technologies specific to our time. As it was stated earlier, in the 20th century, postmodern theorists argued for a new understanding of the relationship between authors and artworks. Roland Barthes argued for what he called “the death of the author”. He claimed that whereas in former times the authors completely owned the text and strengthened their presence in it, contemporary texts are created by compilation methods that cannot be attributed to a single authorial presence. It is not that Barthes denigrated authors. He claimed, rather, that interpretation of a piece of writing should not be determined by authorial intent. It is the reader who must interpret the piece of writing. Basing one’s understanding on the author’s goals for the piece would be committing an intentional fallacy. Thus, Barthes’ concept of authorship deprived the author of such undivided domination and called for the overthrow of a writer, who imposes their will on the reader. That is, in the framework of the author-text-reader triad it is the readers who now play the leading role, since the text comes to life thanks to them and not to the author.12 Barthes’s concept can be more useful in describing the collaborative cinematic culture, created by teams of people rather than individual authors (even though the very notion of an

8 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 127. 9 , “Circles and Squares,” in It at the Movies, ed. Pauline Kael (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), 292–319. 10 Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film Makers (California: University of California Press, 1972). 11 Paul Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” Journal of and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (August 20.07): 263-271. 12 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 3, no. 5-6 (1967): 27-9. 13 authorial agency for Barthes – whether singular or plural – was always a function of the structure of the text). However, even in in this concept, Barthes contrasted the author and the reader with each other, arguing that they are incapable of communication. By the example of contemporary culture, Barthes’ linear concept can be rethought and pushed further by considering the phenomenon of fan labor that makes the relationship between the author, text, and reader cyclical, spiral. Thus, currently there is no film authorship theory that fully accounts for the fan authorship model of production found in the contemporary Hollywood franchises that I am focusing on. The Fantastic Beasts franchise shows the most progressive example here as its fan fiction is not being filtered for films subjectively by one person, as it was done by Peter Jackson in The Hobbit as well as by J.J. Abrams in the trilogy of Star Wars or by E.L. James in the Fifty Shades film trilogy. In Fantastic Beasts, it is done as objectively as it is currently possible: by the department of workers that only categorize a huge amount of fan fiction for J.K. Rowling so she can combine them in her new Fantastic Beasts film script. 1.1. Film Authorship Theories: A History In cinema, authorship addresses the issue of acknowledging credit behind a film. The problem of identifying film authorship becomes the subject of debates again and again around the world, but it all began in France. Although there have been many articles on cinema in post-war France, including those by Louis Delluc and André Bazin, is traditionally considered a pioneer in this field. In 1948 he published “The Birth of a New Avant-Gardee: La Caméra-Stylo.” Accusing French cinema of theatricality and archaic literary adaptations, Astruc put forward the idea that the development of the film’s concept cannot precede the shooting process itself. That is, the idea and its embodiment should merge into a single entity without bringing them into some correspondence with each other. Therefore, according to Astruc, the process of shooting is a kind of cinematic analogy to the literary technique of the stream of consciousness or automatic writing, where the content of the utterance (original thought) and its form (embodiment of this thought) are merged together.13 Astruc’s conclusion could seem illogical to the modern reader because if the shooting process is similar to automatic writing, then the work of the filmmaker can be compared only with those literary traditions that declare the primacy of the text. However, this was the assumption that allowed the author to draw his conclusions. Astruc focused on the literature that was popular in France after the war, so it is not

13 Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Gardee: La Caméra-Stylo,” in The New wave: critical landmarks, ed. Peter John Graham (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968), 17-23. 14 surprising that in his essay he mentioned Faulkner, Malraux, Sartre, and Camus as model authors. They all worked very actively within the stream of consciousness technique. In less than 10 years Astruc’s ideas grew to the level of a large-scale theoretical system. In 1951 they were adopted by the young generation of French film critics of . The articles of Francois Truffaut and his colleagues - Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, - formed a whole theory of film authorship that quickly acquired the status of a new ideology. The key role was played by the manifesto article “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema” published by Truffaut in 1954. Truffaut thought that certain directors were auteurs and others were simply metteurs-en-scène. He liked auteurs, but not simply because they stamped their personality on their works, but because they made cinema something different than theatre. According to Truffaut, auteurs manipulated the medium better. Thus, the article proclaimed cinema as an art, championed directors as the principal and the only true authors of films and thought about the artistic personality of film directors as the main parameter that determines the quality of films. The most famous part of this article is the double accusation against Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost - two iconic figures in French cinema of the war and post-war era - who were engaged in transferring literary works to the screen. On the one hand, Truffaut accuses them of the “faithfulness to the spirit of the works they adapt,”14 as this turns into the loss of the director’s artistic personality or, in the words of Astruc, proclaims the supremacy of thought, and not the writing process itself. On the other hand, this faithfulness to the original is declared by Truffaut as faithfulness in word and not in deed, because the scripts of Aurenche and Bost have nothing to do with the that they take as a basis. However, how can the problem of scriptwriters consist simultaneously in faithfulness to the original and at the same time in its distortion? This puzzle can only be solved if we look at films from a position of director's artistic personality. With it, Truffaut’s double accusation looks logically flawless: the individuality of the writer replaces the individuality of the scriptwriter, and the individuality of the scriptwriter replaces the individuality of the director.15 Otherwise, Truffaut's statements can look like a denial of any film , as well as the nullification of the obvious merits of two outstanding screenwriters to the French cinema, because an over faithfulness to the literary works betrays cinema, since cinema has necessarily its own means of expression. This betrayal means that the adapted work is not a cinematically accurate reflection of the original. However, speaking about film adaptations, it is important to remember that the key

14 François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema (France, 1954),” 133-143. 15 Peter Biskind and Alexandra Peyre , Le Nouvel Hollywood (Paris: Le Cherche midi, 2002), 513. 15 for Truffaut is that an adaptation should still be a new work, not a flat, cookie cutter work that mimics the original. Jean Renoir, for example, made film adaptations (La Bête humaine (1938), which is an adaptation of a by Émile Zola). Moreover, Truffaut himself made a of ’s Farenheit 451. The thing that would make these films acceptable to Truffaut is that they are fantastic films that capture the spirit of the novels as well as showcase Renoir’s and Truffaut’s artistry. Criticism of Aurenche and Pierre Bost in Truffaut's article was of a pronounced evaluative nature. By turning the theoretical system into an ideological weapon, Truffaut proclaimed the idea of films d'auteurs based on the presence of directors’ artistic personalities in films. According to Truffaut, auteurs original motifs into films which belong only to them and no other. Thus, auteurs have full authority over the films and transforms them into the expression of their own personality. Truffaut created the theoretical concept of ‘politique des auteurs,’ which means studying a film as the continuation of the aesthetic choices of a filmmaker and not as a work attributed to a precise or time. The tone of the article did not leave any doubt that the entire world cinema - from its origins to the present - is just a field of the fierce battle of progressive ‘auteur cinema’ with the notorious ‘tradition of quality.’ Radical expressiveness that has always been used in cinema and literature only in special cases has been proclaimed by Truffaut as a reference point for the new understanding of art. The paradox is that Truffaut saw the presence of the author’s personality in a film where the conscious influence of director on the audience’s perception is minimized, the author is distanced from his/her work as much as possible and allows the audience to interpret what it sees by filling in the semantic voids with viewers’ flight of imagination.16 Truffaut repeatedly returned to Flaubert’s aphorism "Madame Bovary, c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”). This 19th-century French novel gave the young film critics the key to the new understanding of authorship in films. Therefore, for example, deep mise-en-scène of (, 1941) implied a similar degree of freedom of film space perception for Truffaut. It is not surprising that the idea of an elusive author’s personality was almost mystical in the articles of the Cahiers magazine and ultimately led to the creation of a personality cult of the director. In the second half of the 1950s, the author's theory turned into a new secular religion and its spread in France became inevitable. Other French magazines (even those that like Positif were always much more ambivalent about the idea of auteurs) followed Cahiers and even some directors like Jean Renoir picked up propaganda for new ideas. Truffaut’s ideas were also used as

16 François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 127. 16 the basic principle of the thematic organization of film screenings in Cinémathèque Française, which allowed to broadcast the author’s theory among Parisian cinephiles. It is not surprising that individuality seemed an ideal evaluative criterion for the new generation of film critics. Free interpretation does not need scientific evidence. Cahiers critics themselves were authors interested in expressing their personality. Their tasks were not to study the film but to create the work, which the reader had to interpret along with the film analyzed in the articles. Thus, criticism became equal to the film itself and Cahiers’ theory of authorship has become a self-enclosed system. In the early 1960s, many critics of Cahiers took up cameras themselves. Their idea of the supremacy of visual writing turned into a real apology for film amateurism. Following Astruc’s ideas about filmmaking as flow-of-consciousness and Truffaut’s arguments about forms of adaptation, one cannot help but conclude that the author is able to express himself/herself by simply picking up the camera and starting to shoot without any preparations since the presence of any predetermined thought will already assume the secondary nature of its embodiment. Therefore, any technical errors (camera shake, rough cuts, lens flare) were legalized as new artistic techniques. Such a raising of unprofessionalism into an aesthetic principle is noticeable in every film of the French New Wave. America turned out to be very favorable for further development of auteur theory. New York and Chicago, like Paris, had a strong tradition of film clubs, and American was as developed as the French one. Andrew Sarris became the main advocate of auteur theory in the . In the article “Notes on the Auteur Theory” he argued that auteur theory serves two purposes: to classify films and to give them value as works of art. He officially dubbed the ‘politique des auteurs’ a new theory. However, instead of ‘individuality,’ he proposed no less vague, but, as it turned out later, a more durable concept of ‘interior meaning.’ He thought that to be an auteur director must accomplish technical competence in their technique, personal style in terms of how the movie looks and feels, and interior meaning - the essence of the artistic creation.17 In 1961 the American magazine Film Culture adopted the ‘author's theory.’ Founded by the Mekas brothers, it was closely associated with the owners of arthouses and therefore for a decade has become the main mouthpiece of the author's theory in the United States. Peter Biskind in “Le Nouvel Hollywood” wrote that American filmmakers profited from the financial crisis within large studios. They put themselves at the center of film production, a position of which

17 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27, no. 27 (Winter 1962–1963): 1–8. 17 they had previously been deprived. The directors claimed total authority over the cinematographic works the artistic value of which they formed.18 The idea of finding artistry in those areas of the film that are inaccessible to the audience turned out to be similar to the arthouse screening technique. The marketing category of ‘art cinema’ has gained a theoretical foundation, which subsequently allowed it to turn into a new method of cinema perception. Some Western film critics perceived the concept of ‘art cinema’ exclusively as a historical phenomenon. This happened because auteur theory has undergone major changes since the late 1960s. The thesis about the death of the author, proposed by Roland Barth and Michel Foucault, made the film theorists of the 1970s turn away from discussions about directors’ unknowable inner world. The author began to be perceived as a personification of the text. Throughout the post-structuralist period, the total legalization of the principle of substitution of contexts turned author’s theory into an object for endless interpretations with Metz’s semiotics, Althusser’s neo-Marxism, and Lacan’s psychoanalysis. The criticism of the interpretative approaches, which was undertaken by in the and 1990s, has forced the world cinema community to re-examine its views on auteur theory. However, the current perception of this phenomenon obliges a consideration of the historical context. The auteur theory was popular due to European and American cinephilia. Before the war, the film distribution model was strictly limited for commercial reasons and fixed each film in the historical moment for which it was relevant. After the war, American arthouses and the Cinémathèque Française screened many old films. The historical context of these museum exhibits had been firmly forgotten by that time, and they could exist only in a kind of virtual context of world culture for the ‘children of the cinematheque.’ However, the concept of ‘art cinema,’ which has long been discredited in academic film studies, is still the most popular method of perceiving films. World cinema still shows an indirect influence of the auteur theory. It is also obvious that this theory appeals to many critics and directors because it allows them to feel like creators of art. However, we need to understand that the influence of the ‘politique des auteurs’ was sown before the fundamental twists in the development of art theory: before structuralism with its autonomy of texts that precedes Truffaut’s writings, before the “death of the author” with its “birth of a reader” that had not yet infiltrated thinking about the cinema, before the renaissance of Marxism and psychoanalysis in criticism with the actualization of contexts as well as before radical re-reading of old texts by feminist and queer criticism, etc.

18 Peter Biskind and Alexandra Peyre , Le Nouvel Hollywood, 513. 18

A theory that puts the author’s genius above the text and especially the context, a theory that understands the author as an absolutely conscious, holistic, sovereign person, and not as a knot of sociocultural prejudices and random motivations should look like an antique of criticism. It may seem that today ‘politique des auteurs’ can easily be abandoned in favor of new methods of analysis as every movie is built from accidents and blind choices - a mechanical monster constructed of camera angles, the chemistry between actors, money, and a thousand unintended moments. In the article “Round up the Usual Suspects” Aljean Harmetz wrote that auteur theory “collapses against the reality of the studio system.”19 However, for some reason, the broad shadow of the author’s figure stubbornly continues to hang over any of the attempts to go roundabout ways. Pauline Kael consistently challenged Sarris’s position on the pages of . Her main argument was formed around the fact that “Sarris' theory is not based on his premises (the necessary causal relationships are absent), but rather that the premises were devised in a clumsy attempt to prop up the ‘theory.’”20 Kael’s voice regarding the theory of auteur cinema appeared in the article called “Circles and Squares” published in the magazine . She called Raoul Walsh's films Every Night at Eight (1935) and High Sierra (1941) - which Sarris used as examples of the director’s recognizable style - weak, and wondered if the director that uses the same tricks can be praised. She accused Sarris of formalism and an inability to see the essential banality of those films. She admitted that the argument about technicality seems logical but thought that such writers as Herman Melville and Theodore Dreiser wrote better works than their more technical colleagues. Further, she criticized Sarris’s statement about the director’s personality in the film as a qualitative criterion. Kael agreed with Sarris’s statement that Hitchcock’s personality is read in his films but opposed that it should not be encouraged. In contrast, she referred to the example of Carol Reed, whose style is not so recognizable, because he, unlike Hitchcock, did not repeat any techniques.21 Another vivid text in which Kael criticized the author’s theory is “,” in which she argued that the contribution of the director, screenwriter, and main actor in Citizen Kane is exaggerated. She said: “he had been advertised as a one-man show; it was not altogether his own fault when he became one. He was alone, trying to be ‘Orson Welles,’ though ‘Orson

19 Aljean Harmetz, Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of "Casablanca" - Bogart, Bergman, and World War II (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 29. 20 Pauline Kael, “Circles and Squares,” in , ed. Pauline Kael (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), 297. 21 Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 301. 19

Welles’ had stood for the activities of a group. But he needed the family to hold him together on a project and to take over for him when his energies became scattered. With them, he was a prodigy of accomplishments; without them, he flew apart, became disorderly.”22 Kael questioned whether the name of cameraman could be excluded from the eulogy addressed to Citizen Kane. However, after the analysis of different versions of the film’s script, she concluded that the main creative force was screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. 23 Kael paid great attention to the work of screenwriters. She said that “it's amusing (and/or depressing) to see the way auteur critics tend to downgrade writer-directors - who are in the best position to use the film medium for personal expression.”24 In a review of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), she scrutinized the script of the film and wrote that the writers Robert Benton and David Newman made a great contribution to the success of the film. Kael noted that the merits of American scriptwriters are not noted by anyone. She was concerned about the fact that “[Jules] Furthman, who has written about half of most entertaining movies to come out from Hollywood ( wrote most of the other half), isn't even listed in new encyclopedias of the film. David Newman and Robert Benton may be good enough to join this category of unmentionable men who do what the directors are glorified for.”25 Despite the rejection of the theory of auteur cinema, Kael paid much attention to directorial work in her review of Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967). Her reasoning was interesting because of her reluctance to understand the technical side of film production and adherence to an emotional approach of film evaluation. Here is what she wrote about the work of and the film The Godfather (1972): “The direction is tenaciously intelligent. Coppola holds on and pulls off together.”26 This clearly shows Kael’s approach to – guidance by instincts and feelings. Another aspect of interest to Kael was acting. In the review of the film Star! (Robert Wise, 1968), Kael talked about Julie Andrews - the leading actress of the film. Kael wrote that Andrews did not have the necessary glamor for the role and looked like an excellent student, whose well-rehearsed smile did not inspire confidence.27 In the text about The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968), Kael turned to a retrospective analysis of the actor’s work and devoted

22 Pauline Kael, Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, The Citizen Kane Book (New York: Bantam, 1971), 123. 23 Pauline Kael, “Raising Kane: I and II,” The New Yorker, February 20 and 27, 1971, 43-89 and 44-81. 24 Kael, “Circles and Squares,” 297. 25 Pauline Kael, “Bonny and Clyde Review,” The New Yorker, October 1967, 151. 26 Pauline Kael, “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 1972, 132. 27 Pauline Kael, “Cripes,” The New Yorker, October 1968, 206-210. 20 several paragraphs to Katharine Hepburn’s acting, recalling her previous films in with which she created an image of a strong woman. Kael was disappointed with the actress, who had lost her singularity with new roles: “When actresses begin to use some of our knowledge about them and how young and beautiful they used to be - when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves - they may get praise and awards (and they generally do), but it's not really for their acting, it's for capitulating and giving the public what they want: a chance to see how mighty have fallen.”28 Thus, Kael attached much importance to many participants of the filmmaking process. Nevertheless, we need to note a disdainful attitude to representatives of some cinema professions. For example, Kael seldom distinguished editors and sound designers in her analysis, although she discussed the importance of their work. In the light of her rejection of the theory, it also seems contradictory that she had several favorite filmmakers (, , ). Therefore, when Kael did not write about directors, her attempts to analyze films as a collaborative effort are still focused on a concrete person whose artistic personality signs the film. This allows me to conclude that Kael had inconsistent adherence to the principles of the auteur theory and was under the influence of single-author ideas. In “The ’s Contribution to the Screen,” Kenneth Macgowan suggested that a director’s power over the story was unquestionable due to a lack of any real screenplay in the era and added that “so far as the modern film is concerned, we may say that in the beginning is the word-the written word, which later becomes the spoken word-some directors work with the writers from the very start, and all have some hand in remolding the script nearer to their heart's desire.”29 Sarris’ position was also doubted by one of his New York University students - Richard Corliss, who challenged his teacher in the book Talking pictures: screenwriters in the American cinema. The main idea of the book rests on the assumption that a narrative film must begin with a screenplay as one cannot build a skyscraper without a blueprint.30 Corliss' idea was interesting, but it seemed that the author himself doubted his theory and even invited Sarris to write the introduction to his book. In 2006, David Kipen – a literature director of the American National Endowment for the Arts - came up with Schreiber theory. He thought that with bloating directorial influence

28 Pauline Kael, “Lioness in the Winter,” The New Yorker, November 1968, 189-192. 29 Kenneth Macgowan, “The Film Director’s Contribution to the Screen,” College English 12, no. 6 (March 1951): 307. 30 Richard Corliss, Talking pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (London: Penguin Book, 1975), 398. 21

American films putrefied into “generalized jejune awfulness.”31 Thus, the author was convinced that “in the first 50 years film history belonged to the producers. The next 50 years of film history belonged to the directors. Now, at long last, it is the turn of the artists who create something from nothing, the screenwriters.”32 With the help of films of and Eric Roth, Kipen tried to rewrite the history of cinema by raising screenwriters to the throne of film creator. In “The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History” Kipen argued that auteur theory is fraught with logical problems and Schreiber theory considers the party who creates rather than tells the story. Kipen did not want to supplant the auteur theory of the director’s dominance overnight but correct it in such a way that it provided a more realistic representation of how collaborative filmmaking really is. This assumption was curious but hardly universal. Despite the progressiveness of his thought, Kipen was strongly convinced that knowing who wrote a film is the surest predictor of how good it will be. This makes Schreiber theory just a kind of a writer-centered approach of auteur's theory that still saw a film as a work of a single person. Auteur and Schreiber theories give critics a way to associate film authorship with a single entity. However, both collapse against the reality of the contemporary media franchising that forces a film to be considered as a result of a collaborative effort. Paul Sellors wrote that “if there is one substantial point in the critique of romantic notions of authorship, it is that authorship is not an instance of solitary genius but, like most other human activities, a social practice.”33 Georges Sadoul in “Dictionary of Film Makers” said that the main author of a film is not necessarily the director, but can be the main actor, screenwriter, producer, or even the author of the original story (in case of literary adaptations).34 Using unprecedented material that influenced the further development of film theory, Sadoul examined the history of cinema through the prism of the collective creativity of filmmakers. He did not try to describe the process of creating films as works of individual directors but to detect lines of interaction between various members of a filmmaking prosses. The main thread in Sadoul’s work was the idea of the corrupting effect of cinema commercialization and the disastrous disproportion between the industrial and technical sides of modern cinema, which under capitalist conditions is designed to impede the freedom of artists and transforms the film industry into that very standard ‘dream factory.’ Sadoul showed how the development of cinema took place simultaneously in all countries of the world in the

31 David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2006), 150. 32 Kipen, The Schreiber Theory, 150. 33 Paul Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (August 2007): 265. 34 Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film Makers (California: University of California Press, 1972), 288. 22 conditions of fierce competition for audience attention. Thus, he was convinced that “film is a primarily collaborative medium, so it would seem odd that theorists are constantly searching for the singular artist responsible for authorship.”35 This idea was accepted in the article “Collective Authorship in Film” by Paul Sellors, who argued that due to the nature of the filmmaking process, a film always aligns with a collaborative form of authorship. He suggested that a member of collective authorship must be an actual or potential member of cooperative activity and said the director’s contribution to the film as only a part of the whole.36 To reiterate, in the beginning, producers dominated the film industry. Later directors began to play an increasing role. The theory of the director’s primacy expanded, got new weighty evidence, and turned into a theory of sole authorship. At first, the fact that the directors and screenwriters became the most powerful figures in the creation of the film was a positive phenomenon. Nowadays, when cinema has become an incredibly expensive industry, we see that the functions of directors and screenwriters are declining, their influence is decreasing, they become less important figures in the creation of the film, their names in the credits defines nothing and is not remembered by the majority of audience members. David Tregde argues that “auteur and schreiber theory present much simpler ways of discussing authorship in the academic and public spheres because of their ease of understanding and lack of need for empirical research.”37 Although those approaches remain dominant even when directors and screenwriters became unable to make money through control and personal expression, my work provides an attempt to discredit a single author theory outright in contemporary cinema. I think that due to the mass of modern cinema and its accessibility, it is now closely and firmly connected with the economic, political, and cultural phenomena of modernity, and its undeniable and powerful influence expands the range of phenomena that make up its history. This process of defining film authorship goes hand in hand with the commercialization and globalization of cinema. At the moment, the collaborative theory allows critics to explore performers, production staff, and even studios as co-creators of the motion picture. However, my work broadens the theory by treating film audiences as active members of cooperative film production processes in a way that is anti-art in its aesthetics but

35 David Gerstner and Janet Staiger, Authorship and Film (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27. 36 Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” 267. 37 David Tregde, “A Case Study on Film Authorship: Exploring the Theoretical and Practical Sides in Film Production,” The Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications 4, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 10. 23 reflects the current stage of contemporary media production, because now the spectator is the central player. 1.2. From Millennial Marketing to Zoomer Marketing The filmmaking process has relied on directorial ingeniousness since the late 1940s. However, it seems that everything has its own expiration date, and the film industry is not an exception. We cannot challenge the young viewers with our ‘brilliant’ ideas anymore because the new viewers are creators themselves. They are not so much interested in what others think, they care only about their own thoughts and sometimes about the thoughts of their fellows. Thus, when contemporary viewers sit to watch another film franchise installment, they already know more than the director, screenwriter, and all the other people from the film crew combined. What we need to do in this uneasy situation is to accept the fact that new viewers are more knowledgeable and at least try to appease them by including fan labor in the creative process of filmmaking, because in the end, it is them who open their hearts and wallets to consume things we do solely in exchange for their money.38 Therefore, earlier most of the films were made for viewers-consumers. However, close to the second decade of the 21th century, the target audience of commercial films has become more and more participatory. Affected by the influence of Web 2.0 technologies, some viewers still want to be entertained by consuming original content, but some want to create the content themselves and receive pleasure from recognizing the value of their own work (we have never had so many participatory viewers before). Thus, there is a tendency that shows that young people, including many representatives of Gen Z, tend to create and get pleasure from other people enjoying the results of their work (and the more their works are recognized by others, the more satisfaction and motivation to create more they receive). However, a slightly older audience members – for example, even Gen Y representatives - enjoy reading materials created by anybody but them. They pay money not to entertain but to be entertained. Of course, these divisions do not fall as neatly along generational lines. Many acknowledged fan are written by people of ripe years. Moreover, it is possible that the majority of Gen Z still primarily consumes rather than produces media. Thus, it is not only Gen Z that has learned to enjoy participatory media. However, in general, these two generations have diametrically opposite interests, but together they form the target audience of contemporary commercial films. Gen Z is old enough to have the ability to pay for entertainment and Gen Y is still quite young to be

38 My whole thesis (and the second part of this chapter, in particular) is about - imaginary groups of passioned fans - and not to people who except from watching films and maybe reading original literary sources do not have interest in franchises. 24 completely wallowing in family, children, and massive loans. Thus, what we have got today is the situation when we are burdened to create cultural products that can at once satisfy the needs of two completely different parts of the audience. Generational characteristics of the target audience of contemporary film franchises change the process of filmmaking into a collective process with tight collaborations between producers and consumers. I need to note that currently, these new film production practices that include commodified fan labor meet criticism not only from the side of the viewers that do not belong to Gen Z but also from the side of professional critics and old-school filmmakers. Yes, Episode 8 of the Star Wars is the second-worst score film in the entire franchise according to ; The Crimes of Grindelwald brought less money to J.K. Rowling than any other film of the Wizarding World franchise; professional critics and picky cinephiles laugh at the dialogues in Fifty Shades films, and Lord of the Rings fans still cannot forgive Peter Jackson for the violent betrayal of Tolkien in The Hobbit film trilogy. However, the assumption regarding the fact that now these franchises are losing their money is superficial and fundamentally wrong. If we get into the phenomenon of collaborations between film producers and consumers, we can see that it is the most financially successful model for long-lasting products in contemporary commercial film and media industries so far. In this section, I will assess the set of sociological aspects of generations that now make up the target audience for contemporary film franchises. My goal is to make contemporary filmmakers and critics understand why it can be so difficult but beneficial to work with modern youth without forgetting the needs of previous generations, as well as how to channel the creative nature of the new audience for the good of the industry. 1.2.1. The Cauldron Is Leaking Traditionally, it is thought that fan fiction never makes its way into the mass audience, partly because of the copyright issues and partly because it is so unoriginal and generally badly written. However, it is not the case now. If the story of E.L. James is widely known, it doesn't mean that her amateur text that melted hearts of millions of young girls around the world is the only story when fandoms’ cauldrons were leaking. 4 years ago, on November 5, 2016, an image of Pepe the Frog reading a book with ‘JK’ on the cover was uploaded to www.4chan.org - an anonymous English-language imageboard website. The post was called “The Cauldron Has Leaked.” It contained the abovementioned image followed with a link - https://dropfile.to/MrRFzy4 - that led to an 800+ pages long scanned PDF document with right margin comments on every page. The text was a version of a Harry Potter story as experienced by Fred and George Weasley. 25

About a month after this post was submitted to www.4chan.org, a deleted member of Reddit's r/HarryPotter community summited a 6000+ words long discussion/theory post called “The Case for Fred and George.” The post provided the results of the attempts to find the authorship of the mysterious text uploaded to www.4chan.org. It started with the identification of 4 possible variants of who may be the author of “The Cauldron Has Leaked” text. The first assumption was that the text was a fan fiction written by a second party with no affiliation whatsoever with the Harry Potter franchise. The second assumption examined the thought that the text was written by J.K. Rowling herself. The third scenario described the idea that the text was written by a second party associated with the Harry Potter franchise under the approval of J.K. Rowling. And, finally, the fourth scenario was that the text was written by a second party associated with the Wizarding World franchise without the knowledge of J.K. Rowling. After identification of the 4 possible variants of who may be the author of the text uploaded on www.4chan.org, the author of “The Case for Fred and George” text provided arguments for and against each of the identified scenarios and came to the conclusion that the text was written by an American under the approval of J.K. Rowling. The arguments were based on the analysis of linguistic units and the writing style of the mysterious text. On December 3, 2016, a member of the r/HarryPotter Reddit community known under the username TheBoyWhoWrote submitted a comment to “The Case for Fred and George” discussion/theory thread. The comment said that he was the one who wrote “The Cauldron Has Leaked” text but he had nothing to do with its release online on www.4chan.org. The discussion thread was closed with the following final edits made to the main post. “This has now become a conversation with the guy who wrote the book! AND... this will now go down in history as the time I wasted hours and hours of potential sleep theorizing how a book not written by JKR and Co. must have been written by JKR and Co. The author of the ‘leak’ seems cool tho, considering my tirade and pushy questions. Hopefully, he'll post the book somewhere so you guys can read it. I'm seriously disapointed [sic] that it's not legit and I would luv to read the rest of the series! He brought Fred and George to life in a way I was desperately missing. Before you leave, check out my anagram. It's near the end. I mean...props to me.”39 At the beginning of January 2017, an electronic version of the “The Cauldron Has Leaked” text was published by a user named MCliffordAuthor on www..com - a website for writers to publish new user-generated stories. The text now called “Fred and George and the

39 R/harrypotter, “The Case for Fred and George,” Reddit, December 3, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/5gbh3w/the_case_for_fred_and_george/. 26

Toilers of Trouble” was accompanied by a book cover saying the author’s name - M. Clifford.40 Besides “Fred and George and the Toilers of Trouble”, the first book in the seven-, MCliffordAuthor has also uploaded an unfinished second book called “Fred and George and the Elixir of Life” as well as some other texts written under the pen name Emmet Sinclair that are not related to the case under discussion. MCliffordAuthor has a short biography on www.wattpad.com. It says that his name is Mike. He is originally from Chicago, but now is living in . He considers himself an indie author who has already completed the seven-book series of Fred and George’s time at Hogwarts and now is doing an extensive edit to get the books as perfect as possible. Even though the text written by M. Clifford represents an interesting case of fan fiction that goes from the format of short amateur stories to long and officially published books as well as despite the fact that the Reddit analysis did not lead its author to the correct answer of who is the author of the leaked PDF, the question of who uploaded the PDF version of “The Toilers of Trouble” with margin comments to www.4chan.org remains, as far as I am aware, unanswered. This is what interests me the most in this case as it deals with the work of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team, which will be discussed later in the text. Before M. Clifford spoiled the discussion of “The Case for Fred and George” post, its author wrote the following: “This is a somewhat undeniable argument that JK Rowling not only knew about the leaked Fred and George book(s) from the fifth of November, but may have co- written it, along with a team of writers, assisted by her publishers, and under the guidance of the ‘Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team’ at Warner Bros. in an effort to create a multimedia Expanded Universe Franchise that could rival Marvel, Star Wars, and anyone else for decades to come. I do not believe it is fan fiction. The story is 95% canon from my research, in line with Rowling’s books, the subject matter hints at and points directly to elements that were revealed only days later in Fantastic Beasts, the timing is too perfect, the circumstances are bizarre, and (if published) stands to benefit everyone who has a financial stake in the Potter ‘vault’.”41 Therefore, the author was wrong in his assumption that “The Toilers of Trouble” was written by the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team with the supervision of J.K. Rowing herself. However, the recurring assumptions that fan-authored texts were used in the Fantastic Beasts series became to sound more than just a coincidence or fans’ conspiracy.

40 Mike Clifford, “Fred and George and the Toilers of Trouble,” accessed October 16, 2020, https://www.wattpad.com/story/95031658-fred-and-george-and-the-toilers-of-trouble-year-1. 41 R/harrypotter, “The Case for Fred and George,” Reddit, December 3, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/5gbh3w/the_case_for_fred_and_george/. 27

Although I cannot provide any undeniable pieces of evidence supporting the idea that the margin comments in the PDF version of M. Clifford’s text were made by the workers of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department, who read fan fiction in order to use it in the development of the official Wizarding World franchise and its films, in particular, the following fact is unquestionable. A fan-sourced text ‘was leaked’ to fandom and many fans read it, partially because, at first, they thought that it was written by J.K. Rowling or at least approved by her. Some fans got pleasure from finding references to this concrete text (not just to the abstract fan theories) in the ‘canonical’ texts of the franchise both old and new ones. This, I argue, represents the way people of the last generation born in the 20th century consume cultural products. However, the Fred and George books themselves represent the logic of how younger people – Gen Z (and presumably Gen Alpha) - consume media.42 Thus, “The Cauldron Has Leaked” text followed by “The Case for Fred And George” post show us examples of how the current target audience of media franchises consume cultural products in two diametrically opposite ways. One part of it wants to entertain, the rest want to be entertained and what is interesting here is that both these parts of the audience symbiotically coexist in one fandom. The Wizarding World franchise is the most progressive so far in its relationship to fan faction not only because it combines canon and fanon in its films, but also because they at least planned to legally receive fan labor through their official website. After the shift from www.pottermore.com to www.wizardingworld.com, their ‘fan club’ section was not working (it only contained the ‘coming soon’ note and a feedback form asking fans to share their ideas on what is interesting to them). Now, the “” section works, but the feedback option was removed. Of course, there should be a reason for that (maybe fans were not sharing their thoughts via the official website). However, at least the Wizarding World franchise tried to receive fan ideas more or less legally. On November 8, 2019, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. also posted a job of a Director, Experiential, Harry Potter Global Franchise for their Harry Potter Global Franchise Development department. The main responsibility of the person they were trying to find for this post was “to represent the fans (and thereby the franchise) on the day-to-day development of key Product initiatives for the Wizarding World (Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts).”43 This officially

42 Even though M.Clifford was born in 1978, that is he is 43 years old as of 2021, which technically makes him a representative of the so-called Gen X. He wrote Toilers of Troubles at the beginning of , when he was 23, which is the age of contemporary Gen Z representatives. 43 “Director, Experiential, Harry Potter Global Franchise. Warner Media,” accessed November 20, 2019, https://www.warnerbroscareers.com/find-jobs/?173885BR. 28 confirms the franchise’s development direction towards close work with fans, even if the leaked PDF of M. Clifford text with marginal comments is not their doing. This makes me conclude that the attempts to use fan labor in contemporary franchise’s development is the most progressive media strategy for the second decade of the 21st century. However, the suggestion to move away from single authorship does not mean a simple disappearance of the author. Despite the participatory tendency the idea of authorship persists as a kind of horizon or mirage that shapes the value and reception of the work. Therefore, in the text that follows I will argue for the usefulness of the participatory model of filmmaking as a unique characteristic of the current historical period of authorial ambiguity. I will do this with the help of the Strauss–Howe generational theory and its application to the analysis of the audiences of contemporary media franchises. This theory will help me to frame the changes in reception of contemporary film franchises and give sociological background about the specifics of how different members of film audience interact with the franchises I am analyzing. 1.2.2. Pop-Sociology and Contemporary Commerce The ambiguity of authorship that we see in contemporary culture provides context to suggest two slightly different lines of thoughts. The first line of thought assumes that media change because fans change. The second one assumes that fans change because media change. New collaborative tendencies can be the cause of the situation when film franchises act as generational mirrors or the effect of this phenomenon. The relationships between media and fans can even be bi-directional. However, what is even more important here is that the question of a qualitative change in fans that appears in all the proposed theories. The identified change in media comes at the same time as one of the main pop-sociology events - the adulthood of the first generation of 21st-century children. Thus, even though the dispute between those who argue that media change and those who think that media are changed looks similar to the age-old question of what came first, the chicken or the egg, we can say for sure that the current changes in filmmaking practices are somehow connected to a completely different audience that we are honored to have in the 21st century. The Strauss-Howe generational theory (the Fourth Turning theory) was first described in 1991 when Neil Howe and William Strauss merged the results of their studies of such a popular social phenomenon as the generational conflict in a book Generations.44 Independently from each other, the authors found that the behavioral patterns of people born in the same historical period

44 William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584-2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991). 29 are completely different from the behavioral patterns of people born in another historical period when they were of the same age as the first ones. As a result, Strauss-Howe’s pop- sociology and history state that an aggregate of people born every 20 years – the exact number of years that have already passed in the 21st century - forms what the authors call a generation. The basis of Strauss-Howe logic is that an average length of ordinary people’s life is about 80 years and it consists of four periods – childhood, young adulthood, midlife, and elderhood - of 20 years each. Thus, every 20 years we have a group of people that shares the same set of characteristics that are fundamentally different from the characteristics that are inherent to the representatives of another generation. Strauss and Howe made such a statement because of the idea that our behavior depends on the conditions in which we were living until 12-14 years old because it is up to this age that we form our own systems of values, which we then take with us our whole lives. The formation of these groups of values is a subconscious process and most often is unnoticeable to us. However, throughout life, each generation inevitably lives and acts under the influence of their group of values. These generational values are formed under the influence of historically unique political, cultural, economic, and social events – which, in their turn, determine the pace and other characteristics of technical progress. They affect the formation of people as individuals and largely determine their behavior. In 1997, Strauss and Howe detailed their theory as the cyclic repetition of patterns of behavior across generations in the book The Fourth Turning.45 They wrote that historical events are associated with recurring generational personas - - which, in their turn, are part of a larger unit called saeculum. Each saeculum is a fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras. For example, the latest saeculum include: the Baby Boom Generation, Generation Next (), Millennial Generation (Generation Y), and (Zoomers). People born at the intersection of generations are partial carriers of the values of the surrounding groups and form the so-called transitory or echo generations. Thus, large scale historical transformations do affect our values, but Strauss and Howe say that such historical transformations affect us in a way that we associate ourselves with a group of people born at the same period. What is also interesting in this theory for my work is the assumption that when the latest generation of a saeculum ends, a new round begins, where the fifth generation (following a group of four previous ones) always shares values similar to the first generation.

45 William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. (New York: Broadway Books, 1997). 30

Here is a short summary of four generations in the Millennial Saeculum. The Baby- Boomers (Me Generation) were born from 1943 to 1960. They were named after the birth boom that took place after World War II. The events that had the greatest impact on this generation were: the end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the 1968 Vietnam War, rock music and the sexual revolution, the 1973 oil crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the first manned moon landing. The Baby Boomers had an overtly narcissistic ‘I am everything’ attitude that quickly led to a frantic youth coup of indescribable power. They seemed to be always blessed with generosity — the very best that their parents could give them. Thus, these true yuppies always demanded more than they could afford to pay for themselves. Therefore, the values of this generation are based on the psychology of winners. Work was of great importance in the adult life of Baby Boomers. They wanted to be participants in all the social, historical, and political processes, not just their bystanders. Generation X (Generation Next or Generation)46 was born from 1961 to 1981. The events that had the greatest impact on this generation were: the Afghan War (1979-1989), the Cold War and the Gulf War; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the discovery of AIDS; the assassination of John Lennon; the era of personal computers, pop culture and MTV with the emergence of the new musical groups and trends like ‘heavy-metal;’ the phenomenon of Kurt Cobain; and the death of Princess Diana. The children of Generation X are believed to have had the most unhappy childhoods, as the divorce rate among their parents (representatives of the baby boomer generation) was incredibly high and hugely exceeded the number of happy marriages. Because of this, representatives of this generation are often very different from each other: some were able to overcome the obstacles, rise above the circumstances and achieve success in life, while others chose to live on the dole all their lives. Initially, the media spoke quite negatively about the representatives of this generation. However, criticism gave way to rave reviews after this generation managed to learn how to use the development of technical progress in their favor. Generation Y (Millennials) was born in the period between 1982 and 2004. The events that had the greatest impact on this generation were: the Iraq War, the development of communications and computer technology, the economic crisis of 2008-2012, and a new surge of . Generation Y is related to the so-called Boomerang Generation, the Generation of Perma-children or Generation since its representatives tend to postpone the transition to adulthood for a longer period than their peers in previous generations, as well as prefer to stay longer in the parental home. Such economic conditions as the international financial crisis,

46 Jones Landon, Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), 1. 31 widespread rise in housing costs, and unemployment lead Kathleen Shaputis to attribute to this generation “the crowded nest syndrome”.47 Representatives of this generation actively strive for self-expression both through the Internet and beyond. In “The Millennial Generation: A New Breed of Labour?” Pyöriä, Pasi, Satu Ojala, Tiina Saari, and Katri-Maria Järvinen analyze the logic of Gen Y labor. They refer to 3 types of work orientations as identified in “The Affluent Worker” - the classical study of John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt - and write that “a distinction is typically made between three types of work orientation: an employee with an instrumental orientation to work regards work primarily as a source of income, an employee with a bureaucratic orientation is committed to career development, and an employee with a solidarity orientation identifies with the workplace community.”48 The results of their research show that, in comparison to the previous generations, Gen Y does not see the value of the work itself, neither in the sense of income source nor the development of their careers. Instead, “they may consider it more important to identify with the work community, that is, to adopt a solidarity orientation.”49 As according to the authors “work orientation reflects the meaning of work to the trajectory of the individual’s life course more broadly,”50 their drive to receive identification with the community at work is also mirrored in how Gen Y representatives spend their leisure time. Instead of receiving a kind of self-affirmation by presenting themselves as creators in the participatory Web 2.0 framework realia, they get satisfaction from consuming the products created by others. Moreover, the importance of consuming media as a member of a certain community – fandom – becomes of primary importance for Gen Y. For example, diehard fans of the Harry Potter franchise – which is usually associated with Gen Y - call themselves Potterheads. Very often they are active forum commenters on www.fanfiction.net and as I have noticed use usernames that are somehow related to the franchise on this website. Their usernames define their dedication to a concrete fandom and not, for instance, to the fantasy genre as a whole. In contrast to forum users, fan fiction authors use names - be they their real names or fictional ones that are not directly connected to the franchise - as their usernames. This allows them to post fan fiction from one www.fanfiction.net account to different sections of the website and, thus, be

47 Kathleen Shaputis, The Crowded Nest Syndrome: Surviving the Return of Adult Children (Olympia, Wash.: Clutter Fairy Publishing, 2004). 48 John Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, The affluent worker: Industrial attitudes and behaviour (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 2. 49 Pasi Pyöriä, Satu Ojala, Tiina Saari, and Katri-Maria Järvinen, “The Millennial Generation: A New Breed of Labour?” SAGE Open 7, no. 1 (January 2017): 10. 50 Pyöriäm, Ojala, Saari, and Järvinen, “The Millennial Generation,” 3. 32 members of different fandoms. Therefore, we may conclude that people who write fan fiction do not share the logic of commenters that exemplary Gen Y representatives have. The logic of fan fiction creators is more likely to reflect the logic of Gen Z – the only true generation of the 21st century. Representatives of Generation Z (Zoomers or the Me Me Me Generation) were born around 2005 under the influence of the development of the Internet; the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001; the 2003 invasion of Iraq; the global recession of 2009; the election of the first black US president Barack Obama; and the ubiquity of social media. Thus, Generation Z - digital natives - is the first generation to grow up in direct contact with the Internet, which greatly influenced its development. Representatives of Generation Z are always online, constantly communicating with their peers by mobile phone, SMS, and social networks. Another distinguishing characteristic of Gen Z is that it grew up in an era of economic uncertainty, so it is often compared to the Silent Generation (1925–1942), which saw the aftermath of the Great Depression. This has led Gen Z to seek out-of-the-box ways of working and new ways of doing business. This generation is the least studied so far. However, it is believed that representatives of this generation will be more cautious and more conservative than the rest of the existing generations. Thus, most Gen Z representatives are in favor of social and economic equality, mostly because multiculturalism - a policy aimed at preserving and developing cultural differences and a theory or ideology justifying such a policy - became widespread in this era. Gen Z is known for its excessive use of technologies and video games, in particular. In the article “Generation Z: Technology and Social Interest”, Anthony Turner refers to studies that show that “dopamine released in the limbic system of the brains of video-gamers is comparable to levels released in amphetamine users.”51 The fact that such studies attribute excessive amounts of time spent by Gen Z playing video games to their inability to manage frustration, fear, and uneasiness, and to declining grades, allows Turner to conclude that Gen Z tries to fill time and emotional voids by using escapism and fantasy.52 Although we have all rights to be suspicious of these kinds of studies as they seem to flow too neatly into the old moral panic about playing games (or watching movies, or reading novels), what interests me in such studies is their number in the current academic discourse. Thus, even if Turner as well as many other scholars with similar point of view on technology are not right in the sense of how similar playing video games

51 Aviv Weinstein, “Computer and addiction: A comparison between game users and non-game users,” American Journal of Drug & Alcohol Abuse 36, no. 5 (2010): 274. 52 Anthony Turner, “Generation Z: Technology and Social Interest,” The Journal of Individual Psychology 71, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 111. 33 is to amphetamine, the interest and maybe even addiction of Gen Z to creating content in participatory Web 2.0 services that we experience now needs to be taken into consideration. This fact is important in analyzing Gen Z for the future development of long-running franchises from an economic standpoint. Pyöriäm, Ojala, Saari, and Järvinen write that the differences between generations “are not tied to a certain age group, but comparisons over time suggest that unchanging values do not swing back as young people get older.”53 This makes me argue that adjustments to the Gen Z logic are crucial for contemporary franchises, as now the functions of their new installments are not the expansion of the current target audience number, but its retention. In an effort to retain two different groups of the target audience of the Wizarding World franchise as well as all the others film franchises, it is important to remember that, let us say in 10 years, they will share the same values as they share now: one part of the fandom (Gen Z) will be creators and the other (Gen Y) will remain to be consumers. Therefore, as this division within the current franchises has already occurred and we cannot do anything about it, we need to work towards creating media products that could satisfy the needs of two diametrically opposite groups of fans. Now, when Gen Z that due to their current age as well as historical features of the third decade of the 21st century reached the peak of interactions with franchises, we need to change the way we have been marketing cinematic production for just Gen Y consumers. This, however, will require collaborations with Gen Z and their specific labor preferences. Even though the theory of generations has become widespread, it has been met with controversy in academic circles. Some admired the theory, others criticized it. The main complaint of such authors as Gary L. Jones, Tim Fernholz, and David Greenberg is the lack of hard empirical data and generalization of all members of a generation in the Strauss-Howe theory. In response to such criticism, the authors have said: “We've never tried to say that any individual generation is going to be monochromatic. It'll obviously include all kinds of people. But as you look at generations as social units, we consider it to be at least as powerful and, in our view, far more powerful than other social groupings such as economic class, race, sex, religion, and political parties.”54 When I refer to Gen Y and Z in this work, I mean social grouping based on Strauss- Howe’s generational archetypes. In essence, Strauss-Howe thought that generations develop similar collective characteristics and follow similar life-trajectories. Thus, each generation has its

53 Pyöriäm, Ojala, Saari, and Järvinen. “The Millennial Generation,” 10. 54 Brian Lamb, “Generations: The History of America's Future,” filmed April 1991 at Booknotes, C-SPAN, http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/17548-1/William-Strauss. 34 own , and those archetypes repeat sequentially. In Generations, Strauss-Howe identifies the following 4 archetypes: Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. In The Fourth Turning, the authors change this terminology and began the use of more colorful names for generational archetypes: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. According to Strauss and Howe, Prophet (Idealist) generations, such as the generation of Baby Boomers, focus on morals and principles. Nomad (Reactive) generations, such as Generation X, are passionately attacking the established institutional order which always leads to them becoming pragmatic midlife leaders. Hero (Civic) generations, like Millennials, are team- oriented optimists; and Artist (Adaptive) generations, like Zoomers, are socialized and conformist young adults that always break out as process-oriented midlife leaders. Thus, today's ‘Artists’ are those super creative TikTokers that in the last few years have undermined all established understanding of doing business. They are uniquely creative. So why not use their creativity in films and other collaborative media? After all, if Strauss and Howe are right, the next time we are able to work with such an audience will be only in 60 years. 1.3. Conclusion I am sure that at least once all of us have thought about how the events of our favorite books and films could develop or about what was left behind the scenes. Eventually, it often happens that all original artworks have very creative fandoms. It would be even more accurate to say that the culture of and fan fiction form a separate universe with their own star authors. However, there is an important nuance: writing fan fiction for the drawer is one thing and publishing it so that it becomes an object of commerce is a completely different thing. If it is most likely that nothing threatens anyone in the first case, legal penalties for may occur in the second case. The difficulty lies in the fact that copyright is still not an area where everything is clear and unambiguous. Basically, quite a few ‘old school’ fantasy writers (like, for example, George R.R. Martin - the author of novels A Song of Ice and Fire that were adapted into the series ) seem to have tried to isolate themselves from fan fiction because they are brought up with a different work ethic. However, the 21st century dictates its own rules, so now most of the authors are silent on this score. Nevertheless, silence does not mean that all authors are delighted. It usually means the opposite. Yes, some authors support fan fiction largely because some of the new authors grew up in close contact with the fanfic environment. However, a large proportion of such authors mark their fans as friendly only fictitiously. In fact, they just put up with things that are too difficult to stop. 35

Most of the problems of fan fiction lie in the distortion of the original work perception. This is a rather curious topic because, in the 2000s, fans began to believe that they were not only the main reason for creating books and films but also tried to dictate their will to the creators, who, on the wave of indignation, almost completely became simple tools for someone else's pleasure. Here you can remember petitions to change the ending of Game of Thrones or rework the new Star Wars. It seems that commercial cinematography has gone over to large sums, which it is obliged to recoup, and really got hooked on fan approval. However, what do we do with the fact that fan fiction has its own star writers, but it is essentially still prohibited as a phenomenon? An interesting example of the desire to erase authorship was shown by fans after the network attacks of trans activists on J.K. Rowling for her words that biological gender is reality. J.K. Rowling has become so unwelcomed by fandom, so many comments that contain suggestions to attribute the authorship of Harry Potter to Daniel Radcliffe, who seems to share fans’ tolerant views, appeared on Twitter. Although I think that fans have a clear understanding that the personal tastes of the author and the rigidity of the reception of their works are not necessarily related, they are not able (or have chosen not to be able, for tactical political reasons) to separate the personal views of the author from the work of art created by them. Thus, in the 21st century, the author that makes it difficult for fans to exist is just being erased by their own fandom. In such a relationship, the author becomes not only a hindrance, but fans’ number one enemy. Fan fiction writers cannot live without the books of their favorite writer or films of their favorite director, because these original works stimulate them and give them material for their own works. However, at the same time, they are jealous, capricious, and touchy, when the authors interfere with them. What do you think will be the attitude of fans towards authors who forbid fans to do what they like? Well, they will go to a film that is not interesting to them once, well, maybe twice. For the third time, fans will simply refuse to go to the cinema at all. Who will benefit from this situation in the end? After all, nobody! What I think is the key in this situation is the phenomenon of authorial ambiguity. In the 21st century, contemporary media franchises are neither creating nor even pointing to any direction of the development of the beloved by fans’ fictional worlds. Their texts are permanently unfinished, so their archives always remain to be open to the public with no appointment required for visits. Surprisingly, it seems that now the public visits those archives more often than archivists themselves. Moreover, they leave their traces everywhere: one – Gen Z create documents, the other – Gen Y – put them on the archive’s shelves. So, why not use what is given to us on a silver platter? 36

There are no unambiguous predictions in this regard so far and no one exactly knows how to respond to new technological and generational challenges. However, I believe that if we ban fan fiction, we will just squelch the art of contemporary and future commercial cinema. I only hope that eventually, this is the last thing we all want to happen. 37

Chapter 2: An Easy Muggle Solution for A Serious Wizarding Problem Films should be made and evaluated following the current state of society and as society changes – cinema should change too. And it does change. Contemporary cinema is unlike anything it was before, in part due to changes in the relationship between producers and fans brought about by the spread of the internet. However, a theory appropriate for its evaluation and analysis is still to be developed. Abigail Derecho explores fan fiction as a contemporary artistic practice. She uses Derrida’s concept of the archive that is open towards the future to describe the specifics of fan fiction enthusiasts’ work. She points our attention to the notion that the archontic principle wills the archive to add to its own stories.55 The application of Derecho’s view of the phenomenon of fan fiction surrounding contemporary cinema can help to expand collective theories of film authorship because when fan labor is used in film production, the audience becomes part of a collaborative effort of the filmmaking prosses. Moreover, applying Derecho’s ahierarchical logic of archontic, we can say that the role of fans as one amorphous entity in contemporary film production is no less than the role of director or screenwriter.56 The current state of the Wizarding World franchise works like a virtual construct surrounding the fictional world built by J.K. Rowling that constantly enlarges itself with new texts written both by J.K. Rowling and her fans. This happens because like all archives, a virtual construct of all Wizarding World texts invites us to enter the archive (consume all the antecedent installments in the franchise), select specific items we found useful (interesting narrative lacunes), make new artifacts (create fan fiction) and deposit the newly made works back into the source text archive (publish fan fiction on websites like www.Fanfiction.net). Archives do not have any hierarchical gradation between antecedent and descendent texts. Thus, in the Wizarding World archive, J.K. Rowling's novels coexist with fan materials on an equal footing and are waiting to be used in films just like dusty archival documents wait for their readers on a large archive shelf. The screenwriter refers to the archive to compile a script for the next film of the franchise from a preselected interesting for the majority of the audience materials. The same thing happens in other franchises too. A phenomenon that is similar to what

55 Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. , Kristina Busse (Jefferson: McFarland, 2008), 64. 56 One plus of the generational theory is that it groups people and actualizes that belonging to groups is a real value for members of that groups. Thus, I do not even argue for bringing concrete fanfiction texts onscreen, but for identifying themes that are popular in fandoms and implementing them (narratives constructed by the whole fandom) into films. 38

Lev Manovich calls a database cinema57 happens, by which films that develop their narratives by selecting scenes from a given collection are understood. However, besides being based on a common database or cinema thesaurus, contemporary film franchises are also based on their own local database or archive, the role of fans in the formation of which I am emphasizing in the current thesis. 2.1. Fantastic Fans and Where to Find Them When it comes to cinema, the auteur theory treats cinema as a one-way form of communication from author to spectator. It looks like passing the ball from producers to the audience and never returning the ball back in a way that film marketing creates a linear and unidirectional communicative flow between producers and consumers. 30 years ago, when auteur theory was still relevant to the whole cinematic field, Pierre Bourdieu examined interactions between three fields of practice: the artistic field, the field of power, and the field of class relations. Bourdieu was critical of those approaches to art that praise the genius of the artist in something that he called ‘charismatic ideology of creation’. As a response to such subjectivist theories, he developed a sociological approach that located the production of art within the particular social conditions that had given rise to its production. He developed a social construct that graphically illustrates interactions between these three co-existing and permeable but still unlinked fields, in which the artistic field occupied a dominated position within the field of power and a dominant position within the field of class relations.58 However, as Elana Shefrin notes: “with the advent of media entertainment conglomerates and the Internet, Bourdieu’s fields of practice are becoming more permeable, with a two-way communicative flow between the dominant and dominated forces.”59 That is, now those who have a large amount of capital, whether it is director, scriptwriter, the studio or even a larger agency, are not always ‘dominant’ and consequently do not always determine the development of the franchise. Thus, Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production was valid before the invention of the Internet and is no longer relevant to the new media landscape that nowadays provides the base for strong producer- consumer affiliations. That is why the nature of communicative flows between three fields of

57 Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 2 (June 1999). 58 Pierre Bourdieu, “The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 31. 59 Shefrin Elana, “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 3 (September 2004): 263. 39 practice needs to be reinvented within the context of new media that now highly empowers dominated forces. If the earlier communicative flows between film producers and their audiences was linear and unidirectional, then now they have more like a circular structure and resemble bouncing the ball back and forth, where producers release the film in order to receive fans' response that is explicitly needed in the production of the next film. Some examples of visual products where fan labor was included in the development of the story includes X-files, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, The Lost Experience, , The Final Frontier, and . With the advent of media entertainment conglomerates and the Internet, Bourdieu’s fields of practice becomes more permeable with a two-way communicative flow between the dominant and dominated forces. Now the more attention contemporary film franchises pay to their fans the more they improve themselves in the sense that they arise a never-ending interest in their products among their participatory fandoms. Thus, the advent of online fandoms has out-moded the nature of communicative flows between Bourdieu’s three fields of practice in cinema and now supplies a strong link between the three fields. Therefore, 10-15 years ago, fans were not able to change any of the cultural projects being offered.60 Now fandoms can change the cultural project being offered and in cinema, instead of single authors inspired by the auteur theory, we have something that I call collective authorship. However, here I need to explain what I mean by the word ‘change.’ To do so, I want to address the films The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Jackson, 2013), Fifty Shades of Grey (Taylor-Johnson, 2015), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Abrams, 2019) and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018). 2.1.1. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: The Example of Peter Jackson Four of the most successful contemporary film franchises actively strive toward integrating audiences within the film production process. They do this in different yet still quite similar ways. Peter Jackson consulted with Tolkien fans before starting Lord of the Rings adaptations, because he understood that he is only one fan in the huge and probably knows less about Middle-earth than some of the fans who would pore over the films to find divergences from Tolkein’s text. Tolkien fans were not a single monolithic entity pushing Jackson to make a film that will please all fans. However, a film that serves at least a portion of fans turned out to be better to the franchise’s future commercial success than a film that rejects all thoughts and desires of its audience.

60 Shefrin, “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom,” 263. 40

The Lord of the Rings is a originally invented by English writer J.R.R. Tolkien. Concerning literature, Robert Stam - an American film theorist - explains that we read ‘through’ our introjected desires, hopes, and utopias, fashioning as we read our own imaginary mise-en-scène of the novel on the private sound stage of our mind.61 I think that the same general point might be made of films, because post-release, these imagined pre-texts may be supported or contradicted by the ‘text-as-fully-realized,’ leaving viewers variously affirmed, surprised, enchanted, frustrated or disappointed.62 The uniqueness of Tolkien’s fictional universe lies in the fact that if, when adapting novels, film producers usually face the need to add elements necessary for the screen but usually not included in books, then in the case of the Tolkien’s legacy, the fictional universe seemed to be so spelled out that the main problem of film producers was a decision of what to exclude from the novel, and not what to add to it. This required from filmmakers such knowledge of the Tolkien universe as his literary fans have, fans who found gaps even in the Tolkien universe and for many years after the author’s death were filling them with numerous fan theories. Therefore, when Peter Jackson was creating the film adaptations of The Hobbit, he needed not only to plunge into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien but also to be aware of what The Lord of the Rings fans thought about it. Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema actively courted The Lord of the Rings fans throughout all aspects of writing, casting, filming, and marketing The Hobbit trilogy. Jackson encouraged participatory fan practices because when he began adapting Tolkien’s novels into a screenplay, he faced an unusual challenge in the filmmaking process: he needed to connect with 100 million loyal Tolkien fans and avoid alienating them with the extended fictional universe as much as possible. Jackson asked Harry Knowles - a media critic of www.Aint-itCool-News.com - to conduct an online interview based on questions submitted to Knowles’ website. There were two interviews, 20 questions each, discussing the crafting of the screenplay for the three films. Jackson also focused on Tolkien websites and alliance possibilities with online fans at www.TolkienOnline.com. He was cataloging the casting suggestions made by the fans and was intrigued by the idea of fannish actors, whose level of commitment in portraying Tolkien’s characters would be unusually high.

61 Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo, Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 49. 62 Carolyn Michelle, Charles Davis, Ann Hardy, and Craig Hight, “Pleasure, disaffection, ‘conversion’ or rejection? The (limited) role of prefiguration in shaping audience engagement and response,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 62. 41

Perhaps surprisingly, this interest in fan labor led to some scenes that are far from the Tolkien canon. For example, the film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug has a scene in which Thranduil, whom the Tolkien fans liked so much, angrily tells Torin that he fought the Great Serpents of the North, showing his burnt face as evidence. However, there was nothing like that in Tolkien’s books. In Tolkien’s novels, there was also no dragon attack on Doriath during the First Age as well as there were no wars between dragons and elves in the Second Age. None of the Middle-earth elves took part in the War of Wrath either. Here, I can also mention the scene of Thranduil's conversation with Tauriel or the story of Thranduil's wife and her relationship to the white gems of Lesgalen that never appears in Tolkien’s books. The violation of the canon in the first scene was necessary for the development of the love triangle Kili - Tauriel - Legolas, which was not in the pages of Tolkien, but was actively present in fan labor – various creative activities engaged in by fans.63 Regarding the second scene, I can say that Tolkien never mentioned Thranduil's wife in his notes, and the elf king’s campaign to the mountain did not have any hidden motive. However, in the minds of the fans, the complex character of Thranduil was known as an egoist who locked himself in Mirkwood due to the loss of his wife and changed his life views under the influence of the information that Tolkien presented in his canon.64 Thus, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the least faithful book-to-screen adaptation, because Jackson deviates a lot of Tolkien’s information and substitutes it with fan theories, fan fiction as well as fan complaints regarding the first Hobbit film (see appendix 1.1.). The most vivid information taken from the fandom is about gender (Tauriel) and species diversity (Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Men, Maiar, Orcs, Wargs, Wraiths, Nazgûl, etc. are present and even given some personality in the film). Moreover, P. Jackson enters deep into the realm of fan labor and with the help of fannish ideas reimagines even his own previous reimaginings regarding Tolkien’s legendarium that we see in his Lord of the Rings films. It makes me to conclude that in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug fanon (fan labor) is prioritized over old canon (Tolkien’s legendarium) and new canon (previous P. Jackson films). Of course, Jackson’s films faced some criticism. The part of the audience who did not like Jackson’s first trilogy knew more than was expected from viewers, while the audience of Jackson’s second trilogy did not know what was required. However, The Hobbit film series shows us that “by using the Internet for social communication, Peter Jackson was able to be a

63 Jeong Seung-hoon and Jeremi Szaniawski, The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 64 This part of fanon is developed in such fan fiction works like The Kingdon of the Woodland Realm: The Saga of Thranduil trilogy of novels written by J. Marie Miller. 42

‘filter’ for a lot of good ideas of fans.”65 I cannot say that Jackson's film franchise was unsuccessful. He just could not satisfy the tastes of all groups on which his audience was divided into from the beginning. However, Jackson’s interactions with Tolkien fans were a strategic move to co-opt the overall import of fan opinions. He got inspiration from the fans’ thoughtful perspectives and studied observations on the proposed cinematic adaptations while he was simultaneously increasing his credibility with the future audience of the films. His films show us new modes of authorship, production, marketing, and consumption that are characterized by Internet fan clubs, online producer-consumer affiliations, and controversies over the proprietary ownership of digital information. Elana Shefrin writes that producer-consumer alliances in the industry of media production are a potentially useful exercise. With the help of Jenkins’s study of participatory fandom, she concludes that Jackson would not have achieved these levels of success if he had not strategically aligned himself with Tolkien online fans as a primary order of business. However, she also adds that major changes in the processes of production and consumption must occur before this model could be applied widely.66 Nevertheless, Peter Jackson’s positive example is not the only case that illustrates attempts of contemporary film producers to collaborate with fans. Star Wars is a franchise that started as being very inattentive to its audience, came to the stage of active fan engagement to the development of the franchise but due to the uncontrolled usage of fan labor turned back to the principles of a single author in its films. 2.1.2. Star Wars: The Example of J.J. Abrams Star Wars is a franchise created by George Lucas in 1977. However, in 2012, Lucas sold the franchise to Disney where the sequel trilogy was produced by two directors: Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams. Rian Johnson produces his films like George Lucas did. However, J.J. Abrams completely abandoned the strict policy of that always ignored any fan feedback and makes films that are nothing else but an adaptation of Star Wars fan theories. It is worth mentioning that not all fans from the Star Wars fandom are satisfied with this approach. In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams was so driven by the idea of adapting fan labor that he almost forgot about the original content that was used only to glue together as many fan theories as possible. As Suzanne Scott notes, “transmedia stories disintegrate the author figure, as artists in different media collaboratively create the transmedia text, but, in order to assure audiences that someone is overseeing the transmedia text’s expansion and creating meaningful connections

65 Shefrin, “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom,” 276. 66 Shefrin, “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom,” 283. 43 between texts, the author must ultimately be restored and their significance reaffirmed.”67 However, contemporary marketing trends show that even a negative reaction is better than no reaction at all. Films without controversial approaches do not upset the audiences but also do not delight them. They just get lost in the welter of other films on offer. From the beginning of the Star Wars franchise, fans’ creative interpretations of the narrative have been disregarded by George Lucas. As a result, a huge army of Star Wars fans were always left disappointed. Fans posted thoughts similar to this one: “the movie should have had us, (the die-hard fans), in mind more than it did and we all know that. George Lucas should have consulted with us, the fans, as to what we think and what we’d be most excited to see in this film… [We] hope he doesn’t repeat the same mistakes twice. Make this one for us, George; after all, it’s fans like us who’ve made you and your family millionaires many times over!”68 Thus, in response to Peter Jackson’s positive example with Tolkien’s franchise, Fox Studios urged Lucas to become more responsive to Star Wars fans. His attention to fans was limited in all his 6 films released before 25 April 2014. However, after 2014, Star Wars entered the period of the so-called expanded universe. This was the time Lucas had been removed entirely from the project. The structure of the Star Wars Expanded Universe has never been holistic. One of the reasons for this was numerous bans on its development. At the time when there were no bans, the basic rule of the expanded universe was that its works should not contradict each other and films of the original trilogy. However, new films and other franchise installments sometimes made contradictions, so from time to time, the expanded universe was subjected to retcons,69 designed to eliminate these contradictions. When original universe producers had not provided fans with such solutions to controversial issues, uncertainties arose in the structure of the expanded universe, which in turn led to different interpretations inside the fandom. Even though all installments of the expanded universe were declared as not related to the canon of Star Wars, they became a source for future works that created a new canon. George Lucas himself commented on the new canon of his franchise like this: “after Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story - however many films it took to tell - was only one of the thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell.

67 Suzanne Scott, “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 43. 68 Webmaster Kolnack, “Dear Mr. Lucas,” last modified July 25, 2003, http://clonewars.netsville.com/pm_pros.htm. 69 Retcon is a device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former. 44

Instead, they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today, it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga.”70 It is interesting that the Star Wars Expanded Universe expands the Star Wars timeline to before Lucas’ films. The earliest intra-universe work is the series Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi, which takes place thousands of years before the events shown in the films. The latest (according to intra-universe chronology) is Star Wars: Legacy comic book series, which includes events that occurred more than 130 years after the ending of the film . Thus, the Expanded Star Wars Universe includes works about various periods of intra-universe history before the events of The Phantom Menace and after Return of the Jedi. Moreover, it is vital to notice that those works were written not by Lucas, but mostly by his fans. We can see an example of fan labor, which became the new canon of the Star Wars universe due to its adaptation, in 4 fan theories and one fan fiction used in the film Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. From the first scenes of the film, the viewer understands that dead Palpatine is alive. This fan theory was included in the film because most of the fandom disliked - the only villain left after episode 8. In the film, Palpatine says he created Snoke, although earlier in the new canon, Snoke and Palpatine lived in parallel. Snook as a Palpatine puppet is another popular YouTube fan version that was used in The Rise of Skywalker. The third fan theory in the film concerns the correction of information that fans did not like in the previous franchise films. The eighth episode said that the character has no famous ancestors. However, the beliefs about the kinship of Rey with one of Star Wars legendary characters were very popular among the fandom. Therefore, in the ninth episode, we find out that Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter, which is absolutely identical to the Rey-Palpatine fan theory. Speaking about the character of Rey, it is also worth noting that in the ninth episode fan theories about the dark side of Rey were filmed. For example, in a scene where Rey flies into a rage and releases lightning from her hands, she explodes the transporter with Chewbacca. The last fan theory in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the introduction of the character Finn as a force- user, which is consistent with the fan discourse about this character but comes into conflict with previous films. Finally, I would like to mention the fan fiction, which was used in the analyzed film. The romantic connection between Rey and Kylo in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a producers’ attempt to add a romantic component to the plot of the film for the attraction of

70 Alan Dean Foster, Splinter of the Mind's Eye (New York: Del Rey Books, 1996), 3. 45 female audience to the franchise. This is an adaptation of the Reylo fan fiction, which existed before the relationship between Ray and Kylo was shown in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.71 J.J. Abrams - director, screenwriter, and producer of the latest film of the Star Wars franchise - is the main reason for fan labor in the new Star Wars films. Back in 2017, Robert Iger and the Disney team began to think about what would happen in the franchise after episode 9. Lucasfilm president - Kathleen Kennedy - believed that there will be a sequel after episode 9. However, George Lucas originally planned nine films linked together by the story of the Skywalker family. It became unclear whether there will be new films or not. Kennedy noted that the continuation of the saga depends on the success of the upcoming films. She said that if their story would be of interest, then Disney would continue to work in this direction.72 Episode 8 was filmed by Rian Johnson, who considered collaboration with fans unacceptable in his films. Johnson says: “if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen, it's like ‘oh, okay,’ it might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won't really think about it afterwards, but that's not really going to satisfy me. I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater ... What I'm aiming for every time I sit down in a theater is to have the experience with ‘Empire Strikes Back,’ something that's emotionally resonant and feels like it connects up and makes sense and really gets to the heart of what this thing is and in a way that I never could have seen coming.”73 However, not everyone liked this position. Many fans still criticize Johnson, although his film remains the best Disney film about Star Wars according to the critics. Episode 9 radically changed the policy of relations with its fandom. Its director – J.J. Abrams – is a person deeply convinced of the effectiveness of fan labor in films. This turn in the Star Wars franchise allows me to designate the new Star Wars franchise policy not in the direction of satisfying film critics but satisfying fan opinions. The Rise of Skywalker officially apologizes to fans for the first time in the history of the film franchise, because J.J. Abrams retcons the new canon by adapting fan labor for his Star Wars films (see appendix 1.2.). J.J.

71 One of the vivid examples of “Reylo” fan fiction is Interstellar Transmissions published several years before the release of the film by LovelyThings and ricca_riot on www.archiveofourown.org. 72 “Will the Skywalker Story Continue After Episode 9? Here’s What Kathleen Kennedy Said,” CinemaBlend, last modified April 15, 2017, https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1647670/will-the- skywalker-story-continue-after-episode-ix-heres-what-kathleen-kennedy-said. 73 Zack Sharf, “Rian Johnson Says Catering to Fans, Rather Than Challenging Them, Is a ‘Mistake’,” last modified December 17, 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/12/rian-johnson-catering-to-fans-mistake- star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-1202197921/. 46

Abrams wants his films to provide Star Wars fans with satisfaction at the resolution by prioritizing fanon (fan labor) over the new canon partially created by R. Johnson. 2.1.3. Twilight and Fifty Shades: The Example of E.L. James The Fifty Shades film trilogy is based on a series of erotic novels written by amateur writer E.L. James. Originally, the novels were a fan fiction response to the vampire novel series Twilight. They are a perfect and the most vivid example of fan fiction-turned-mass-audience texts. In response to Twilight, E.L. James wrote a fan fiction titled Master of the Universe and posted it on www.Fanfiction.net under the pen name ‘Snowqueens Icedragon.’ It received some comments about sexual content, so E.L. James removed it from www.Fanfiction.net and posted it on her own website www.FiftyShades.com. Then, the fan fiction story was rewritten as an original trilogy of novels. When Universal Pictures obtained film rights to the Fifty Shades trilogy, the award- winning playwright Patrick Marber was hired to convert E.L. James’ amateurish prose into a Hollywood screenplay. However, E.L. James insisted that her original dialogue be preserved in the films in its entirety. As a result, the screenplay was written by Kelly Marcel, who retained E.L. James’ dialogue unchanged. Fan fiction fans liked this commitment to the literary original very much. However, such straight film adaptations left critics and the rest of the audience with slack and improbable dialogue. However, it is also important to notice that the original Fifty Shades of Grey (Master of the Universe) is not just a fan fiction spin-off on Twilight novels and films. This fan fiction was inspired by other popular fanfics and fan trends from Twilight’s popular ‘All-Human’ fanon (trends created by the collective that are not rooted in canon but absolutely dominate the community) in a way that Twilight’s canon lies the foundation of E.L. James novel, plot and sexual fantasy elements are taken from fanon (acknowledged Twilight fan fiction like The Submissive series by Tara Sue Me), and minor details are derived from collectively created fanon (see appendix 1.3.). That is, one part of Fifty Shades is a Twilight fan fiction, and the other part is a Twilight fan fiction based on other Twilight fan fiction texts. However, the erasure of the fan community’s role in creating E.L. James’ text resulted in the fact that “the central issue in relation to fan exploitation and labor is that fan fic readers and reviewers did some of the work in creating Master of the Universe, but James took sole credit for its success.”74 Thus, there is a tension in fan fiction between fans desires and the original. And, surprisingly, fans themselves often want to deviate from the canon. However, “being a fan is

74 Jones, Bethan, “Fifty Shades of Fan Labor: Exploitation and Fifty Shades of Grey,” Transformative Works & Cultures 15, 3 (January 2014): 121. 47 a liability for James: she gets little credit for her accomplishments, and critics look askance at her for seeking creative control.”75 Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill say that “the story of E. L. James is in part a story about Twilight fan fiction, and indeed became a force that would propel fan fiction’s visibility in mainstream discourse.”76 Indeed, the Fifty Shades franchise shows us that in contemporary fan fiction communities, texts are not written or read in isolation but as a part of the archive that consists of original works (canon = The Twilight saga) and derivative works created by fans on original works (fanon = fan fiction and trends). “James thus straddles the line between producer and fan, stealing from commodified culture to create Master of the Universe while stealing from fandom to make a success of Fifty Shades.”77 This shows us the awareness of fans as a resource used by both professional and amateur authors in contemporary culture. 2.1.4. Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts: From J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World to a Shared Universe At the beginning of the Harry Potter franchise, the same stories were told using different media channels. The audience got pleasure from buying the same story in different media and the producers were happy because with every other media the army of Harry Potter fans was increased. When all available channels were appropriated by the franchise, but the desire of getting more audience was still present, producers decided to switch over from the cross-media storytelling model to a transmedia one. This meant that the whole story needed to be divided into parts for dispersion through different media channels. It worked because the audience that was tired of buying the same story all over again had found interest in searching and combining parts of the story in different media. As the main task of the creators of contemporary transmedia franchises is not the formation and expansion of the ‘army’ of fans but its retention, after the end of traditional transmedia period in the Wizarding World franchise, it became important not to lose those fans who knew J.K. Rowling’s story backwards and forwards as well as make sure that they remain faithful to the franchise for as long as possible. In 2016, Warner Bros. created the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department. This department is focused on continuing the expansion of J.K. Rowling’s universe and most of its workers' responsibility is to read and classify fan fiction about J.K. Rowling’s

75 Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020), 47. 76 Salter and Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy, 43. 77 Jones Bethan, “Fifty Shades of Fan Labor: Exploitation and Fifty Shades of Grey,” Transformative Works & Cultures 15, 3 (January 2014): 122. 48 fictional universe in order to implement it to the future development of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, the script of which is still mostly written by J.K. Rowling herself.78 Once again it is important to notice that this strategy of fan labor integration within the filmmaking process is currently not as financially successful as the single-authored content in the same franchises. Films full of story elements taken from deep fandom are usually the lowest- earning films in all franchises.79 However, in exchange for the unpredictability of big box office returns, films created using fan elements offer high viewer engagement and the ability to continue the existence of a franchise beyond the ideas of the original creator. Thus, even though Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018) is the least successful film in the Wizarding World franchise from the standard economic standpoint, its commercial strategy is the most thought out to date if we speak about media franchising. It maximizes positive reactions from active fans that want to see their ideas onscreen but still pleases those audience members that want to see completely original content and even leaves room for haters of both J.K. Rowling’s and fans’ ideas that are also a kind of successful marketing tool used in contemporary commercial cinema. The new understanding of commercial films’ success becomes possible because all four franchises I am working with in this thesis use fan fiction and present it not as fanon but as canonical information. This makes from such films 2-hours long commercials of a brand, which gives film producers more money in the long run than any single-serving blockbusters with constant rewatchings of films by fans and generating audience interest in consuming other media and merchandise sides of the franchise80. The film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is based on the part of the lore that originally comes from fan fiction. Specifically, watching this film not through the prism of a

78 The creators of the franchise collected feedback from fans from the very beginning of its existence. However, they simply collected it earlier to make sure that they developed the franchise in a direction that fans like. Now, the feedback from the fans is collected to have a direct idea of the direction the franchise needs to develop in the future. The time of faithful book-to-film adaptations has come to its end and now it is not J.K. Rowling, but her fans, who choose the direction of a franchise's story development. This section uses the example of the second cinematic prequel of the Wizarding World franchise to shed perspective on the problematic nature of bidirectional relationships between authors and fans in contemporary culture and explain the benefits of using fan labor as one of the sources of contemporary films. 79 “Movie Franchises - Box Office History,” The Numbers, accessed February 20, 2021, https://www.the- numbers.com/movies/franchises/sort/World. 80 The terms canon and fanon are used to differentiate official and unofficial parts of the lore in media franchising, which refers to all the knowledge of a franchise fictional world in its entirety. Of course, someone can enjoy media franchise installments without knowing any lore, but usually, the audience is expected to know it. In contemporary media franchising, fanon adds such contributions to the lore that it becomes very important not only in enjoying but in understanding new canonical stories. Moreover, these contributions become the foundational components of the new installments in contemporary franchises. 49 complex romantic relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald makes the plot of the film flat and even incomprehensible. The role of fan fiction at the current stage of the Wizarding World franchise reset hierarchical relationships between previously unseen amateurish fan assumptions and official information from J.K. Rowling. Thus, the viewers need to bring in knowledge of the fan fiction texts in order to be engaged by the Fantastic Beasts series. Being written by J.K. Rowling herself, the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald contains several subplots. Some of them were new to the fan community. However, the subplot on which the whole prequel series was based is closely related to Grindeldore slash fan fiction stories. Increased interest in fan fiction from both consumers and producers of the Fantastic Beasts franchise is not accidental and reflects the current stage of culture that shifts the understanding of producer-consumer collaborations from a thing to be kept away in films to a successful model of commercial filmmaking. It also reveals the expanding nature of the participatory culture in fan communities. In ’s work “Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture” the author argues that fans should be regarded not as passive consumers but as active producers.81 In Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald we see that the system of information transactions between authors and fans includes 3 stages: to give [canon to fans], to receive [canon by fans], to reciprocate [produce fanon]. If we will look at this linear system of information transactions from fans’ point of view these stages may look like Baudrillard’s idea of symbolic exchange which resists capitalist values of utility and monetary profit for cultural values.82 However, the system of information transactions in the contemporary media franchising does not stop at fans’ desire to be heard by someone else. It extends with the authors’ desire to make money from fan stories, by satisfying their desire of being heard. Therefore, the system of information transactions between authors and fans can be interpreted as having a symbiotic circular structure: to give [canon to fans], to receive [fan desires through fanon], to reciprocate [return fanon to fans as a canon]. The relationship between authors of canon and fanon in contemporary media franchises can be described through the lack of hierarchical structure between canonical and fanonical texts that, in its turn, creates a new model of contemporary artistic practice. In order to see and understand the lack of hierarchical structure among the texts that form the Wizarding World

81 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 132. 82 Baudrillard Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1976), 99. 50 universe, I want to extend the archontic approach used by fan fiction researchers for analyzing films based on fan labor. In the article “Archontic Literature A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” Abigail Derecho explores fan fiction not as a cultural phenomenon but as an artistic practice. She uses Derrida’s concept of an archive that is open towards the future to describe the specifics of fan fiction enthusiasts’ work. This concept is particularly useful for Derecho because Derrida’s archive is never final, complete, or closed. “By incorporating the knowledge deployed in reference to it, the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains its auctoritas. But in the same stroke it loses the absolute and metatextual authority it might claim to have. One will never be able to objectize it with no reminder. The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out for the future.”83 This concept is also useful for me as Derrida’s understanding of the archive rests in the archival internal drive for expansion. Thus, the archontic principle for him is “a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.”84 Derecho points our attention to the notion that the archontic principle wills the archive to add to its own stories.85 The concept of fan fiction as archontic texts suggests that works based on or referring to other texts are not derived or subordinate, but rather create an archive that expands the fictional world. Thus, the term ‘archontic’ in fan fiction admits endless (and unidentified) repetitions, but not just from the point of telling the story again, but rather from the point of telling more. The conditions for archontic films are related to a certain moment of franchises’ development when they are aimed not at expanding the target audience of the franchise, but at maintaining the interest of the already existing army of fans. The first reason why Derecho uses the metaphor of an archive to describe the functioning mode of fan fiction is to show us what happens after fans write their stories. She describes 4 functions that fan fiction makes fans do with the source texts. It invites writers to enter the archive, select specific items they found useful, make new artifacts, and deposit the newly made work back into the source text archive.86 The most interesting function here is the last one. It says that fans write their articles not only for the pleasure of the writing process but for the potential pleasure of being heard. In other words, it is not enough for a fan to write an alternative story to

83 Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: Press, 1996), 68. 84 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. 85 Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 64. 86 Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 68. 51 call it fan fiction. To be so, one must share it with others, that is, deposit the newly made work back into the source text archive. The second important issue that the process of fan fiction creation raises is what happens after an amateur text is written and deposited into an archive. Derecho says that after being deposited into an archive a fan text becomes not lesser than the source text, which means that fan fiction texts become a part of an archive that does not differentiate its texts on the principle of hierarchy.87 This means that after being uploaded to the online archive, fan texts stand on the same hierarchical level with all previously uploaded texts and with the source text itself. At the beginning of the Harry Potter franchise, the same stories were told from different media channels (films, computer games, website, etc. were adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s novels). The audience got pleasure from buying the same story in different media and the producers were happy because with every other media the army of Harry Potter fans was increased with fans of this media. When all available channels were appropriated by the franchise but the desire of getting more audience was still present, producers decided to switch the cross-media storytelling model to a transmedia one. This meant that the whole story needed to be divided into parts for dispersion through different media channels. It worked because the audience that was tired of buying the same story all over again found interest in searching and combining parts of the story dispersed in different media. The transition happened like this: in 2001 Rowling releases the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them under the pen name of the fictitious author Newt Scamander. The book, which was just an encyclopedia of magical creatures, was represented as Harry Potter’s and Ron Weasley’s textbook on Care for Magical Creatures class. In 2016, the film of the same name was released, in which Newt Scamander obtains his story and becomes the main character of the Fantastic Beasts film series. After the first prequel, some video games expanded the story by giving players a role of the Ministry of Magic's worker at the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. Thus, two separate stories (the Harry Potter franchise and the Fantastic Beasts franchise) coexist on different media platforms and expand the boundaries of the audience’s ideas about the wizarding world within the framework of one transmedia universe. During all this process fans were actively writing fan fiction (so actively that even books written by fans were published). Once upon a time, a secret genius from the Franchise Development Department realized that fans know the story better than its creators. Thus, now this department works not on writing new parts of the Fantastic Beasts story for fans, but on appropriating fan labor. As Derecho was saying: fans deposit their works to an archive, they

87 Derecho, “Archontic Literature”, 73. 52 become equal with the source texts, both canonical and amateurish works form a pool of potential source works for the franchise next installments, creators of new canonical elements (J.K. Rowling and her team) refer to this pool and select useful from their point of view items for their future stories. As a result of this, fanworks become sources for the Fantastic Beasts film series and then the same cycle repeats. In this way, the hierarchy between fanon and canon is slowly being erased. The main element that the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald borrowed from the previous texts is the relationship between the characters of Dumbledore and Grindelwald. What connected these characters in the canonical novels is the search for the Deathly Hallows. However, fans became interested not only in the story of Hallows but also in the personal relationships between these two characters and began to create fan fiction on this topic. When this topic was the main one within the fandom, J.K. Rowling (who was aware of Dumbledore’s sexual orientation topic among fans) stated that Dumbledore was gay and very much in love with Grindelwald. Thus, the hierarchy between the unseen amateurish fan texts and the official statement of J.K. Rowling herself was erased and fanon in the Wizarding World franchise began to stand on the same hierarchical level as canon. In 2007, J.K. Rowling appeared at Carnegie Hall to answer fan questions about the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows publication. At this Q&A session, J.K. Rowling said that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay. It was her answer to one of the questions that were connected to Dumbledore’s sexuality.88 However, what is interesting in her response is not the revelation phrase itself, but what Rowling added after this revelation. She said: “You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! …Oh my god, the fanfiction now, eh?” This reference to the fan fiction works in two ways: as an to the amount of future ‘slash’ fan fiction that according to J.K. Rowling her revelation should boost, and to the already- existing pool of fan texts about Dumbledore/Grindewald relationships. On www.fanfiction.net the first of many stories that are connected to Grindeldore slash ship was published almost 2 years

88 Original wording of the question and the answer: “-Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself? -My truthful answer to you… I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that’s how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!” If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!” 53 before J.K. Rowling’s revelation.89 Moreover, the fact that J.K. Rowling admits to reading fan fiction90 gives me a reason to think about the possibility that her revelation was just pouring gasoline on an existing fire in the Harry Potter fan community. For example, the Mirror of Erised scene justifies why Dumbledore and Grindelwald cannot fight with each other in the Fantastic Beasts series. This scene is full of references to several texts in the franchise. I can divide them into those that are taken from the canon and those that are borrowed from fanonical texts. The canonical sources for the Mirror of Erised scene include the main book and film series, as well as supplementary books and paratextual material. However, fanon (‘slash’ stories about romantic and/or sexual relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald in particular) reveals Grindelwald’s behavior in this scene. is a piece of fan fiction that includes noncanonical homosexual relationships between certain characters of the Wizarding World franchise. It is one of the most popular forms of the Harry Potter fan fiction based on information that is not canon but is accepted by the fan fiction community as ‘true.’ Dumbledore ‘slash’ fiction focuses on a Dumbledore/Voldemort, Dumbledore/Snape or Dumbledore/Grindelwald pairings. I am interested in the latter group of fan texts as they not only ‘predicted’ Dumbledore's passion for Grindelwald before J.K. Rowling’s official revelation of Dumbledore’s sexual affair. They show that Grindelwald’s attitude toward Dumbledore that we see in The Crimes of Grindelwald contrasts with J.K. Rowling's conviction of fake relationships between Dumbledore and Grindelwald that in her books was based solely on mutual profit. Thus, when J.K. Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay some fans were shocked, but fan fiction enthusiasts were unsurprised. The readers and writers of slash fan fiction have heard it all. Some saw the connection between her announcement and slash fan fiction as an act of supplying fans with more information upon their direct request, while others saw a desire to control the interpretation of her books. However, the fact that “it is possible that Rowling's conviction that Dumbledore's homosexuality is ‘very clear in the book’ may be connected to her awareness of slash fans - a large, visible group of ‘sensitive’ readers” 91 sheds some light on the relationship between authors of canon and fanon in the contemporary media franchises. In the Mirror of Erised scene, we see how J.K. Rowling incorporated slash fiction in her conception of

89 XcruciatusX, “The Life and Death of a Hero,” last modified January 3, 2006, https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2734446/1/The-Life-and-Death-of-a-Hero. 90 Darren Waters, “Rowling backs Potter fan fiction,” BBC News Online, last modified May 27, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3753001.stm. 91 Tosenberger, “Oh my God, the Fanfiction,” 205. 54 the Wizarding World. This scene can also be considered as the first cinematic approval of fanon that will be used in the further development of the Wizarding World franchise. Mirror of Erised is a magical artifact that appears in the middle of Philosopher’s Stone to explain the plot denouement of the first installment in the Harry Potter franchise. The name ‘Erised’ comes for ‘desire’ spelled backwards, as if reflected in a mirror. The main purpose of this artifact in the wizarding world is to see the viewer’s deepest desire. Thus, in the Philosopher’s Stone Harry sees his parents’ face and Ron sees himself as the Gryffindor Quidditch Captain. Before Dumbledore takes the Mirror from one of the Hogwarts classrooms and makes the Mirror the final guardian of the Philosopher’s Stone in its Chambers, Harry asks Dumbledore what he sees when he looks in the mirror. Dumbledore says that he sees himself holding a pair of thick, woolen socks. In the first Harry Potter book and film, it shows that Dumbledore was so satisfied with life that such small things like socks were the only things he could wish for. Later in the franchise, we understand that in the Philosopher’s Stone Dumbledore was lying to Harry, because what he really saw in the Mirror was a very personal matter. In chapter 35 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry knows that in 1998 Dumbledore saw his family whole and intact, free of any pain or suffering. However, till the Mirror of Erised scene in the Crimes of Grindelwald, nobody knew that before coming to terms with his guilt over his sister’s death, Dumbledore’s greatest desire was to be with Grindelwald. In this scene, we finally see that Grindelwald was not only using Dumbledore but felt something about him. When Dumbledore closes his eyes, Grindelwald does not smirk or show his devious intentions in any other way. Moreover, during the blood pack sealing process Dumbledore and Grindelwald did not have to hold their hands together, but they did, and both looked insecure and overwhelmed during the whole flashback scene. This scene shows Grindelwald not as a manipulative and selfish wizard like Voldemort but as a human being able to love, understand and reach out to people on a seemingly personal level. And, as I mentioned earlier, this is exactly how the character of Grindelwald is depicted in slash fan fiction. Thus, in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald we can see numerous cinematic approvals of fan fiction. However, the Mirror of Erised scene shows us the next level of delineation of canon and fan fiction that previously were linked but always in clear opposition to each other. It also gives me a reason to argue that this J.K. Rowling’s initiative blurred the lines between static and authoritative canon and ever-changing and expanding fanon in the Wizarding World franchise. Producers and consumers of popular media franchises have both pushed to expand the fictional universes in which these stories are told. The peculiarity of this development is that the 55 canon becomes large, unwieldy, constantly open to edits and excess. Those edits and excess come from fan fiction being filtered by producers for future consumers’ consumption. When we watch the Fantastic Beasts films, the first thing we see on the screen is the Wizarding World logo - an open book (reflecting the literary origins of the universe) with fanned- open pages-wands pointed inward (reflecting the idea that the story of the whole universe now consists of the stories of its numerous characters, and not only Harry Potter). As the Wizarding World website says, J.K. Rowling’s stories continue to be the foundation upon which the Wizarding World is built, but the new logo signals a new era of limitless possibilities. Thus, even the appearance of the Wizarding World logo in Fantastic Beasts films warns the viewer that these films relate not so much to the fictional universe of Harry Potter, which was written exclusively by J.K. Rowling, but to the fictional universe of the Wizarding World, which works as an archive written by both J.K. Rowling and her fans. J.K. Rowling's continuous interest in fan fiction is a rather unique phenomenon in contemporary media space. While other franchises forbid fan fiction based on materials of their fictional universes and even sue fans for this, J.K. Rowling not only allows fans to write and publish texts that fill gaps of her books, but also encourages the activity, passion, and inventiveness of her fans, and keeps an eye on their creativity. J.K. Rowling's first attempt to engage fans in the franchise development was the launch of the www.pottermore.com website. Before Pottermore was demoted to an archive of articles written by hired writers, the site should have looked like a fan portal through which J.K. Rowling planned to hand the reigns of her universe to her readers. The original purpose of the site was not to enlighten fans about what is going on outside the novels and films, but to give fans a chance to create the future of the universe by their user-created materials in the form of drawings, commentary, and even stories. Roughly speaking, the original goal of the site was to allow J.K. Rowling to harness the power of fan-generated content to ensure that the world of Harry Potter will not die, and she will not stop getting paychecks when the last Harry Potter film is pulled from theaters. However, the cross-media storytelling model, which was relevant to the Harry Potter franchise at that time, sought to extend the involvement of the audience in the franchise and increase the total number of its fans by repeating and broadcasting the content of the same story through different channels. As a result, in less than the first 10 years of the franchise, J.K. Rowling received a noticeable increase in the number of fans and an incredible commitment of the audience to the franchise development. However, this model did not give J.K. Rowling a chance to collect material for future installments. The website was structured as an interactive online game consisting of mini quests. Quests in various forms were available for a 56 predetermined time and chronologically corresponded to a specific book and its number was limited by the plot of J.K. Rowling’s books. In 2015, Pottermore started to publish content that went beyond the Harry Potter books and finally made it possible to include the audience in the creation of content. For example, the first version of the website had an Exploring the books section, which significantly limited the published content. The second version of the website transformed it into Explore the story section, where the audience was given new information about the story of the magical universe. For authors, the second version of the website meant the possibility of maintaining the users’ attention to the Wizarding World after the last interactive episode was launched on it. For users, it meant the continuation of a favorite story after the last novel was written, and all quests on the first version of the website were completed. However, even when the original idea of transferring the right to develop J.K. Rowling’s story to fans through the website failed and the new one has not been developed yet, J.K. Rowling continued to track and filter fanon into canon through her Twitter account. There are numerous cases of J.K. Rowling's reactions to fan theories. Sometimes these reactions prove her original ideas. For example, in 2018, J.K. Rowling confirmed a fan theory that correct Hermione pronunciation in the Goblet of Fire book was included to warn the readers against saying HER- MY-OWN like Viktor Krum.92 This reaction did not conflict with the cinematic canon, where this name was correctly pronounced. However, J.K. Rowling confirms in Twitter not only fan ideas that fit in her story. For example, in 2015 she confirmed a fan theory supposing that Death in her Tale of The Three Brothers might be Dumbledore.93 That is, she said that the legendary wizard Dumbledore, who all his literary and cinematic life was fighting against evil, had committed many crimes in the form of unsubstantiated murders in the search of the Deathly Hallows. That is, J.K. Rowling confirms not only theories that fit in what she wrote but also theories that contradict with the literary and cinematic canon. Therefore, the fact that, for example, McGonagall appears in the Crimes of Grindelwald before her birth is not so much the authors' mistake. In the universe emanating from fan labor, stories in which McGonagall departs from canonical information are not uncommon. And the Fantastic Beasts series just refers to the Wizarding World archive, where J.K. Rowling's novels coexist with fan materials on an equal footing and are waiting to be used in films like documents on a shelf of a large archive.

92 Joanne Rowling (@jk_rowling), “Theory correct,” Twitter, September 18, 2018, https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1041946302215593984. 93 Joanne Rowling (@jk_rowling), “Dumbledore as death. It's a beautiful theory and it fits,” Twitter, September 21, 2015, https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/634666937990152192. 57

In the article “Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon,” Lelia Green and Carmen Guinery explore the cultural work of fandom in relation to fan fiction by seeing Harry Potter fans as second authors and participant observers. The authors of this article show that the growth of the Harry Potter fame as well as the growth of its fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and the middle-class readers’ access to it. A significant engine for that growth is partly located in the fans creativity with which they fill in the gaps. However, now the relationship between authors of canon and fan writers is developed to the stage when J.K. Rowling with her assignees might approve fanon in the official installments of the franchise.94 The purpose of my work is not to identify all edits of J.K. Rowling’s canon in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald but to prove the presence of edits that with high probability came from fan labor. One of the most beautiful examples that prove Fantastic Beasts being a series of film adaptations of the Wizarding World fictional universe, powered by fans and guided by its author, is the already-addressed Mirror of Erised scene in the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. This scene shows that in 1927 in the Mirror of Erised Dumbledore sees Grindelwald and we understand that both those characters desire to get back to the stage of their lives when they were best friends. The scene shows us that the blood pact was meant to ensure that nothing will be able to set Dumbledore and Grindewald apart in their grand endeavor to ignite the revolution between the magical and the non-magical worlds because the vial made in the process of sealing the pact was supposedly impossible to destroy. However, what is important in this scene for my project is that this scene shows us that Dumbledore does not regret sealing the blood pact even in the run-up of the World War as well as that his feelings to Grindelwald are mutual. Therefore, I am interested in this particular scene because it shows not only fan texts that predicted Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s relationship before J.K. Rowling’s official revelation of Dumbledore’s sexual affair but also shows the content that was not proved by J.K Rowling as canon previously in any other media. Thus, the Fantastic Beasts film series shows us that writers participate in the process of fandoms’ activities because they desire to go back in for another shot at their creations for commercial reasons. However, fans write fan fiction because they want to pick and choose the creators’ updates. And what is interesting here is that it becomes possible in the social media age we are living in. On October 1, 2019, the third version of the Wizarding World website was launched. Not all sections of the site are functioning at the moment. However, we can notice some changes in

94 Lelia Green, and Carmen Guinery, “Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon,” M/C Journal 7, no. 5 (November 2004): 2. 58 the involvement of fan labor in franchise development even now. The site has changed the address from www.pottermore.com to www.wizardingworld.com. Thus, during the first version of the franchise website, a small group of professionals could generate content. This group included J.K. Rowling and her creative team. The second version started to encourage the audience to provide feedback. However, the third one wants fans to create content for the website and the whole franchise in general. This shift reveals the change in the question of to whom the franchise’s world belongs now as well as who can influence its development. There is no more J.K. Rowling's world. It is a shared world that belongs to J.K. Rowling as much as it belongs to her fan community. Therefore, I can conclude that in the Crimes of Grindelwald, J.K. Rowling mixes original content written by her with fan labor. However, it is also important to note that original content created by J.K. Rowling for the Crimes of Grindelwald is written like fan fiction (for example, many new characters and undeveloped subplots), as well as those parts of the film that are derived from the fans’ ideas are written like a very specific form of fan fiction: the fix-it fiction that takes elements of canon that the author is unhappy with and writes them away so that they are either no longer a problem or never happened in the first place. Thus, such fan fiction is based not on the premise “what if something that did not appear in canon happened,” but on the premise “what if something that I did not like in canon did not happen?” The Crimes of Grindelwald film puts J.K. Rowling in one row with a myriad of talented fan fiction writers who create work that not only adds to the original fiction but in some cases surpasses it. In the Crimes of Grindelwald, J.K. Rowling mixes original content written by her with fan labor in a way that it feels like she (as well as some of her fans) resents materials that she wrote. Thus, the Crimes of Grindelwald makes some massive changes to the Harry Potter canon, which results in intentional retcons that retroactively try to butcher the established canon written by J.K. Rowling herself, which makes her a perfect example of the ‘fanboy auteur’ figure that are understood as “simultaneously one of ‘us’ and one of ‘them’.”95 Therefore, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts fan fiction in movie form. 2.2. “Fan”-tastic Business Model for Contemporary Media Franchises Until recent times, any kind of collaboration between film producers and film consumers were considered as things to be avoided. That happened due to the still present traces of the Auteur Theory influence that considers manifestations of a director's creative genius in all aspects

95 Suzanne Scott, “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling.,” in The Participatory Cultures Handbook, ed. Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 44. 59 of a film as the main criteria in defining artistic value in films. However, even though the Auteur theory was developed during the time of the French New Wave, it is still influencing the film industry. Thus, now the vivid example of Auteur Theory's influence on contemporary filmmakers can be seen in George Lucas and his Star Wars films as well as in some of his Star Wars followers such as Rian Johnson, who directed The Last Jedi in 2017 under the influence of the French Auteur theory. The concept of Johnson’s film is condensed in the following quote that Johnson said during his interview at Radio.com: “I want to be shocked, I want to be surprised, I want to be thrown off-guard, I want to have things recontextualized, I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater.”96 However, not all contemporary filmmakers share Johnson’s idea of how films should be made in the 21st century. J.J. Abrams, for example, who directed the latest Star disagrees with this conception of filmmaking. The Rise of Skywalker that was released in 2019 is nothing but an adaptation of YouTube fan theories. Thus, Abrams treats fanon better than canon and consequently respects fans’ ideas are given more weight than his own. Such collaborations that we see in The Rise of Skywalker is the exaggerated version of adequate viewer-producer relationships in cinema. However, it is far from being the first or the only film in the creation of which fan labor was actively used. I argue that nowadays collaborations of film producers with fans should not be considered as a thing to be avoided anymore. The most effective example in this field can be found in the Fantastic Beasts film series that is partially based on original content created by J.K. Rowling but also includes the results of the work of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development – a structural subdivision of Warner Media, LLC. The department’s main task is to read and analyze Harry Potter related fan fiction so major fan ideas can be implemented in the future installments of the franchise. The work of this department is very important to the franchise development as, due to the generational characteristics of modern youth that were shown in the first chapter of this thesis, a portion of the current audience of contemporary film franchises expects some things to appear onscreen even before the film is released. The department works well as we see fan-sourced materials in both Fantastic Beasts films. However, the way in which fan fiction is collected by the department is far from ideal. The department faces two problems: 1) the lack of a single source from where they can take fan fiction, 2) legal issues connected with fan labor that was used in films without permission of its creators. Thus, my work

96 “Star Wars Writer/Director Rian Johnson Full Interview,” Radio.com, uploaded December 13, 2019, https://www.radio.com/media/audio-channel/121319-star-wars-writerdirector-rian-johnson-full-interview. 60 in this section is focused on the optimization of the work of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department. “A set of ethical guidelines for use in digital storytelling has been developed by StoryCenter and addresses issues including: storytellers’ rights; consent, approval and release; confidentiality, anonymity vs having a voice; informed consent; editing and editorial control; support (for storytellers). These guidelines have developed into a code of practice and storytellers’ bill of rights and inform the practice of many digital storytelling facilitators around the world.”97 In compliance with existing ethical guidelines in the field, I propose the following solution for the Wizarding World media franchise (see appendix 2). In the already existing official website of the franchise - www.wizardingworld.com - we need to create a section where fans can upload their fan fiction for its potential usage in films. By this, we solve the first problem that I identified in the previous paragraph: the development department will receive a legal source of fan materials, although they will not be allowed to use any fan fiction uploaded anywhere other than on the official website. The second problem will be solved by including a mandatory acknowledge checkbox that will ask fan fiction authors their permission regarding the potential usage of their works in the future installments of the franchise (see appendix 4). I see this solution as ideal for the company as with it Warner Media will have their own source of fan labor that, it its turn, will make the work of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development easier as its workers will not need to spend time on gathering fan fiction from the side websites such as www.wattpad.com or www.fanfiction.net. Moreover, they will be able to fearlessly use all the materials posted to the website by fans with their permission – through a mandatory terms and conditions agreement explaining that the Wizarding World franchise would hold the copyright to the stories so that the stories could be potentially used in commercial films without any material compensation paid to the original author. However, this solution will cost quite a lot for the company. For this, first, Warner Media programmers will need to code the fan fiction section then it must be designed in a way that will get along with all the other sections of the website. Moreover, despite human resources, this solution will require a cloud service where all the gathered fan fiction could be stocked.

97 Aline Gubrium, Hill Amy and Harding, Lucy, “Digital Storytelling Guidelines for Ethical Practice, including Digital Storyteller's Bill of Rights,” accessed November 11, 2020, https://www.storycenter.org/s/Ethics.pdf. 61

Warned Media, of course, has such resources. However, as Osterwalder notes on his Business Model Canvas: “Costs should be minimized in every business model.”98 Thus, I propose the second variant that can be implemented before the above proposed one. This will require a strategic partnership of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department with one or several fan fiction websites. In this scenario, I propose including the same acknowledge checkbox but in the structure of the Harry Potter section on, for example, www.fanfiction.net and www.wattpad.com. In this case, the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department will have legal access to materials they need in their work without any manipulations on the official website of the franchise. Of course, this solution is not free too (as I highly doubt that www.fanfiction.net or www.wattpad.com will agree with such a partnership for free as well as will these websites want to essentially become a research arm for Warners at all, because the proposed modification can potentially change their image and place in the fan fiction community). However, these costs can be taken from the money saved from salaries of the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department employees, because with implementations of the innovations that I describe here the department will need only ‘readers’ of fan fiction (and not both ‘readers’ and ‘collectors’) of fan fiction because fan fiction will be gathered automatically (see appendix 3). This variant seems more logical to me at the moment as it also will solve the problem of introducing the new technology to fan fiction authors that were already submitting their stories to specialized sites such as www.fanfiction.net or www.wattapad.com for a long period of time. However, over time the first variant can be brought to life. There are different questions regarding the problem of attribution of fan material. The first question is whether fans need to be paid for their work. Several years ago, Valve - an American video game developer and owner of the largest digital PC game store Steam - allowed modders to monetize their Steam Workshop for third-party games. Independent teams were creating visual game content that did not affect gameplay. Community members could create, vote, and ultimately even buy in-game items, and some of the sales went into the modders' wallets. The example of Valve was the first time when a developer recognized and integrated third party's content into their games. However, as practice has shown, such a content production model was effective until Valve introduced the monetization of this model. Of course, Valve’s intention to reward modders for their efforts was a poor idea built on good intentions. They have given creators a canvas and tools to create content for the games they loved. However, quality control, the question of ownership and a

98 Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (New York: Wiley, 2010): 34. 62 fracturing of the modder community led Valve to take down the monetization for now. Thus, when it comes to fan fiction, the answer to the question of monetization depends on what kind of fan labor commodification exists in this or that franchise. If we base the film on a book - like E.L. James' one - only, then it seems that we need to pay the author of this book. However, royalties should not go only to the author of the book, as this book is derivative. And here comes the question of what this or that book was derived from. In the case of Fifty Shades, it is 's books and films based on them. However, it is also other fan fiction stories, the number and the authorship of which is hardly possible to identify. The second question refers to non-monetary incentives. Several media law scholars insist on the idea of including names of fans to the Fantastic Beasts films' credits. However, I do not think that this is a good idea, because it will form a hierarchy in fandoms, the hierarchy between ‘cool’ fan fiction writers whose texts were used in films and those fans whose ideas were ignored. Of, course, the fan fiction community will know whose stories get picked up, even if they are not officially credit, thus already creating an internal hierarchy. However, this hierarchy will not be between trusted names in the community (like the name of M. Clifford in the community of PotterHeads) and untrusted ones. It will be between those who supported the stories picked up and those who were against them. Ideally, there always should be several fan fiction tendencies in films, so if a fan was against this or that theory and it was used in films, there will be other theories ‘approved’ by the film that he or she supported. Moreover, I think that not only concrete fannish texts are (and should be) used. I support the idea of identifying trends in fandoms (like Grindeldore fan fiction, etc.) and combining them with original material written by a professional author, like J.K. Rowling. Thus, even if fans should be included in films' credits, there should not be concrete names of fans, but a quick reference to the whole fandom in ‘Special Thanks’ sections of films’ closing credits. However, despite these formalities “fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be presented as a guarantee of quality media-making.”99 2.3. Conclusion The mono-media and cross-media concepts of storytelling no longer meet the requirements and challenges of our time. Transmedia storytelling itself is not the answer either. Media franchising is constantly changing, and these changes come from the adaptation of franchises to the current state of the media environment. I need to admit that in recent years, media conglomerates have become more aware of how fan labor activities can add to and affect the effectiveness of media product development, marketing, , promotional activities,

99 Salter and Stanfill, A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy, 9. 63 and distribution. Thus, the phenomenon of close fan labor inclusion in a commodified economic system of transactions, which emerged as a result of media convergence in the modern popular culture, should be seen as helpful to its creation, development, and widespread distribution.100 Jackson’s problem with using retcons in The Hobbit was that fans carried him away from Tolkien’s novels. Lucas’ problem was that he transferred rights to develop his franchise not to fans, but to hired writers. James’s problem was that she insisted on films’ commitment to her literary original so much slack and improbable dialogue can be enjoyed only by her die-hard fans. However, J.K. Rowling gave the right to develop her franchise to her fans but at the same time became a sort of filter for fans' ideas retrieved by the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Department of the WarnerMedia company. Her work as a filter is based on the analysis and visualization of the use of content tags and categories, along with other metrics, such as hit and word counts in order to discuss and forecast trends and variations within and across fandoms.101 Therefore, J.K. Rowling’s scripts for the Fantastic Beasts series are guided by the results of fan labor and not vice versa. This makes Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald the most progressive attempt of fan labor usage among the contemporary film franchises.102 A business report called The Future of Independent Media stated that “the media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists [….] A new generation of media makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.”103 The film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald shows us the current stage of textuality in contemporary culture, where mutually beneficial commodification means the whole new world that the producers of the contemporary media franchises and their fan enthusiasts are going to discover together in the near future.

100 Eli Noam, “Two Cheers for the Commodification of Information,” in The Commodification of Information, ed. Niva Elkin-Koren, Neil Netanel, C. Edwin Baker (: Kluwer, 2002), 49. 101 Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, “Unpacking the unofficial fanfiction census,” The Daily Dot, last modified March 2, 2020, https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/fandom-fanfiction-ao3-tumblr/. 102 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and The Crimes of Grindelwald were solely scripted by J.K. Rowling. However, in 2019 it was announced that the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts 3 will be co-written by J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves. 103 Henry Jenkins, “Afterword: The Future of Fandom,” in Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 362. 64

Conclusion The 21st century can be rightfully considered as the era of long-term media franchises, because now on the whole planet you can hardly find a person who would not know anything about what was happening far-far in the Galaxy, Middle-earth, or Hogwarts. Much has changed within our beloved franchises because of transmedia franchising: fictional worlds expanded, and with them, storytelling models changed, new media channels were included, intramedial transformations took place, etc. These changes did not occur spontaneously, but as an adaptation to the requirements of the current state of modernity. The Wizarding World franchise has more than a 20 year history. The first book about the boy who lived was published in 1997. In 2018 the second part of the cinematic prequel of the Harry Potter franchise premiered. It established new changes in the history of transmedia franchising by explicit inclusion of fan labor into the films of this franchise. The presence of fan labor in the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald shows a new tendency in information commodification that changed the meaning of such concepts as labor, production, and value in contemporary film production. It happened as one of the consequences of the digital revolution that affected many spheres of our life. Therefore, it is important to see the causes and effects of newly established transactions of information in media. The inclusion of fan labor in the development of film franchises is used by all three most popular fantasy franchises. However, adherence to fan feedback does not always lead to the most slavish adherence to the ‘original’ text. Sometimes it leads to divergences from the canon based on fan desire. Thus, now, most of the fan labor inclusions to films are in the form of a retroactive continuity - a deliberate change in previously established facts in franchises of multiple installments. The first confirmed use of the term ‘retroactive continuity’ can be found in the book “The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg,” written by Frank E. Tupper in 1973. The author thought that “Pannenberg's conception of retroactive continuity ultimately means that history flows fundamentally from the future into the past, that the future is not basically a product of the past.”104 In the sense of new facts retroactively added to the plots of cultural products the term ‘retroactive continuity’ was first used in DC Comics All-Star Squadron comic book in 1983. The story of this comic book took place in an alternative universe called “Earth-Two” during the Second World War. Since events occurred in the past of the alternative universe, all its events had repercussions on the contemporary continuity of the DC multiverse. The opinion of one of the

104 Frank Tupper, The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), 69. 65 readers was published on the pages of the comic strip dedicated to the publication of readers’ letters. The reader said: “your matching of Golden Age comics history with new plotlines has been an artistic (and I hope financial!) success.”105 Roy Thomas – the editor-in-chief of – replied: “we like to think that an enthusiastic ALL-STAR booster at one of Adam Malin's Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best name for it a few months back: 'Retroactive Continuity'. Has kind of a ring to it, don't you think?"106 Subsequently, the term was strengthened among fans of American comics about superheroes. ‘Retroactive continuity’ was shortened to ‘retcon’ by Damian Cagley, who first used it in 1988 in his post on the Usenet network which reinterpreted the origin of the main characters and revealed facts that were not previously part of the story in “Swamp Thing Saga.” Retcons are similar to plot inconsistencies, that arise either accidentally or from insufficient attention to details, but unlike them are created intentionally. They also differ from direct revisions. For example, by reworking the original trilogy of the Star Wars films to add computer-based special effects, George Lucas made changes in the source material without creating new material. Retcons are not the same as reboots or reimaginings, that completely cancel the original storyline, as it was, for example, in the Battlestar Galactica series, that re- started the story in 2003, ‘canceling’ the 1978 series. Retcons reflect a meaningful phenomenon of global capitalism. It emerged because of the current stage of media franchises’ development allowed media conglomerates to shoot fillers. The second reason for the popularity of retcons and their appropriateness in the contemporary media franchising is that now not only producers try to sell visual media, consumers want to buy them, but they want to buy only what they like. Thus, the dedication of fans that these franchises gained through their development is involved in fan labor inclusion in the development of the contemporary film franchises. The main element that the Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald borrowed from the previous texts of the Wizarding World franchise (the relationships between the characters of Dumbledore and Grindelwald) was only hinted in the main series of books and films but was highlighted and developed in the fan discourse. This happened due to the emergence of the participatory culture in transmedia storytelling of the J.K. Rowling’s franchise, where readers’ ideas about Dumbledore’s sexual orientation developed into an important source for the second prequel (a material whose importance in the new film is as valuable as the content created by J.K. Rowling herself). Thus, the logical chain of the author-text-reader relationships in this film was transformed from “author – text – reader” into “author – text – reader – fan fiction – author – new

105 Roy Thomas, “Vengeance from Valhalla,” All-Star Squadron 18, February 1983, DC Comics, 25. 106 Thomas, “Vengeance from Valhalla,” 25. 66 text,” where readers inspired by the original text write fan fiction that in combination with the author’s materials becomes the base to the next installment of the franchise. The term commodification began to be applied to information not so long ago. It refers to the control of communication by large media firms. The most common negative interpretation of commodification is usually associated with information massification that suggests that mass- produced information is lower in quality than more selectively created information. However, in fan communities, a growing number of materials on a particular topic should be viewed as a positive trend. Moreover, commodification is a necessary element in a certain stage of long- lasting franchises, when they are aimed not at expanding their target audience, but at maintaining the interest of the already existing army of dedicated fans. The results of fan-generated content integration in a system of economic transactions of contemporary media franchising helps, as they say, both the wolves to eat much and the sheep not to be touched. These results can be formed into the following two groups. Mel Stanfill says that industry’s embrace of fandom rests on “normalizing desire for licensed or franchised extensions of an object of fandom.”107 However, fan fiction commodification also means free labor and a new source of income for producers. With the development of fan culture, fans started to create good products and continued to give them away freely to absolutely everyone. I think that this cheapness of labor that can be easily turned into profit should interest media producers a lot due to its quality and, of course, cost. Of course, now fan communities are no longer as enthusiastic about fan sites as when they first started. Today, only the most engaged fans continue to write stories. However, some of them – like, for example, Mike Clifford with his Fred and George books or Norman Lippert with his James Potter book series - do it professionally.108 The producers do not need to be afraid of what will be of interest to their audiences anymore. They just need to look at what is happening in their fan communities and selectively return it to fans, which means commodifying information and selling it back to its creators.

107 Mel Stanfill, Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 89. 108 James Potter Series - fanonical project written by American author G. Norman Lippert. It consists of 5 books about the adventures of Harry's first-born son, James, eighteen years after the events of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The series has become an international success, garnering millions of readers worldwide and has been translated into nine different languages. The first book was published 9 years before Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that was based by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Thorne on the same character - James Potter. 67

For fans commodification of fan labor means satisfaction of the desire of being heard/viewed. Since the only reason for commercial authors to create artworks is to gain profit, some for-profit producers ban sharing fan fiction through fan fiction websites. J.K. Rowling never addressed fan fiction websites with requests to delete fan works based on her fictional universe. Her literary agent once said that her only concern about fan fiction “would be to make sure that it remains a non-commercial activity, to ensure fans are not exploited and it is not being published in the strict sense of traditional print publishing.”109 Therefore, even though J.K. Rowling’s current approach to fan labor is exactly the exploitation of her fans, public ownership of infrastructure is needed not only for film producers to make a profit from their fans but for fans themselves to achieve greater visibility for their creative works even if their works do not gain affective value of the auteur’s ‘stamp of approval’ in films. Media franchising has developed and till now remains to be “a logic of multiplied cultural production alongside an increasing industrial focus on niche groups and their social capacity for participation.”110 Thus, I believe that successful franchises simply can no longer opt out of the phenomenon of fan engagement. All the changes that I described in my thesis allow me to conclude with a high degree of certainty that in the coming years we can expect more films continuing the tradition of fan labor usage in films to appear on big screens. Therefore, in the light of the so-called ‘geek turn’ that we currently have in contemporary culture, it is time to proclaim a new type of director that works in close cooperation with his or her fantastic fans.

109 Darren Waters, “Rowling backs Potter fan fiction,” BBC News Online, last modified May 27, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3753001.stm. 110 Derek Johnson and Jonathan Gray, “Introduction: The Problem of Media Authorship” in A Companion to Media Authorship, ed. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson (New York: John Wiley & Sons), 6. 68

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Films I) The Star Wars franchise 1) Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (Lucas, 1999) 2) Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Lucas, 2002) 3) Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (Lucas, 2005) 4) Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Lucas, 1977) 5) Star Wars Episode V: (Kershner, 1980) 6) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983) 7) Star Wars Episode VII: Awakens (Abrams, 2015) 8) Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017) 9) Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (Abrams, 2019) II) The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit franchise 1) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson, 2001) 2) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Jackson, 2002) 3) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Jackson, 2003) 4) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012) 5) The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Jackson, 2013) 6) The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Jackson, 2014) III) The Twilight Saga + Fifty Shades franchise. 1) Twilight (Hardwicke, 2008) 2) The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Weitz, 2009) 3) The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Slade, 2010) 4) The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Condon, 2011) 5) The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (Condon, 2012) 6) Fifty Shades of Grey (Taylor-Johnson, 2015) 7) Fifty Shades Darker (Foley, 2017) 8) Fifty Shades Freed (Foley, 2018) IV) The Wizarding World franchise 1) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Columbus, 2001) 2) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002) 3) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004) 4) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005) 5) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007) 74

6) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009) 7) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010) 8) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011) 9) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Yates, 2016) 10) Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Yates, 2018) 75

Appendices Appendix 1: Segmentations 1.1. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (P. Jackson, 2013) Film segment Sources (Fan complaints, Fan fiction, Fan theories) - Thorin and his company are being pursued AZOG: In the book, Azog is not at Dol Guldur, by Azog and Orcs. Gandalf ushers them and the confrontation between Sauron and along to the nearby home of Beorn. Gandalf does not occur as in the film. When - The Necromancer summons Azog to Dol Gandalf confirms the Necromancer is Sauron, Guldur, commands him to marshal his he convinces the White Council to attack Dol forces for war, delegates the hunt for Thorin Guldur, forcing Sauron to retreat. Sauron, to his son Bolg. having been ready for this attack, however, - Beorn escorts the company to the borders flees to Mordor and openly declares himself. → of Mirkwood. Gandalf discovers Black In the film, the storyline of Azog is changed. He Speech imprinted on an old ruin. Galadriel survives the Battle of Azanulbizar, loses his arm sends a telepathic message urging Gandalf to Thorin instead of his head to Dáin, and thus to investigate the tombs of the Nazgûl. lives to become one of the three main Gandalf warns the company to remain on antagonists in the series (the other two are the path and leaves them. Sauron and Smaug).

Speculative theories that Azog is alive on www.theonering.net. → Retcon: Azog does not die in T.A. 2799 but survives until T.A. 2941.

- Thorin and his company enter the forest, MIRKWOOD: The company does not simply lose their way, are ensnared by giant spiders. get lost in Mirkwood. Mirkwood messes with Bilbo sets about freeing the dwarves with the minds of the company. → The Enchanted the help of his invisibility ring, subsequently Forest theory. drops the Ring, brutally kills a creature to retrieve the Ring, begins to understand its DWARVES: All the dwarves are given some dark influence. personality, instead of functioning as one collective character.

- The Wood-elves led by Tauriel and THRANDUIL: In the book, Tolkien did not Legolas fend off remaining spiders, capture write a lot about Thranduil. Thranduil did not the Dwarves and bring Thorin before their guess the purpose of Dwarves’ mission was the king Thranduil. reconquest of Erebor and did not try to make a - Thorin confronts the Elvenking about his deal with Thorin. → In the film, Thranduil neglect of the Dwarves of Erebor following receives a good portion of screen time much of Smaug's attack 60 years earlier, is which shows fan theories. consequently imprisoned with the other Dwarves. THE STORY OF WHITE GEMS OF - Bilbo arranges an escape using empty wine LASGALEN → Thranduil does not just like barrels that are sent downstream. white jewels, he has specific white jewels he wants from the treasure hoard under the Lonely Mountain

THORINDUIL fan fiction → In the book, there was no dragon attack on Doriath 76

during the First Age as well as there were no wars between dragons and elves in the Second Age. None of the Middle-earth elves took part in the War of Wrath either. In the film, Thranduil angrily tells Torin that he fought the Great Serpents of the North, showing his burnt face as evidence.

ORCS: The barrel escape becomes a fight against Orcs.

- Thorin and his company are pursued by the ELVES: In the book, there was no pursuit by Wood-elves, then ambushed by Bolg and elves after the escape from Thranduil’s halls. Orcs. Kíli is wounded with a Morgul shaft. - Thorin and his company engage in a ORCS: In the book, there was no Orc attack as running three-way battle down the river. The the barrels floated down the Forest River. Dwarves can escape both groups of pursuers.

- An Orc captive reveals an evil entity has RADAGAST: the book, Radagast is just being returned and is amassing an army in the briefly mentioned, → In the film, he appears as south. Thranduil seals off his kingdom. a character. Tauriel decides to leave and assist the Dwarves. Legolas goes after her. - Gandalf and Radagast go to investigate the tombs of the Nazgûl, which they find to be empty.

- Bard smuggles Thorin and his company BARD: In the book, Bard did not meet the into Esgaroth. Dwarves on the river → TALES OF BARD - Thorin promises the Master and the people fan fiction → more screen time. of Laketown a share of the mountain's treasure. - Thorin understands that Bard is a descendant of the last ruler of Dale. He possesses the last black arrow capable of killing Smaug. - Kíli is forced to remain behind, he is tended to by Fíli, Óin, and Bofur. The remaining company receives a grand farewell.

- Gandalf travels south to the ruins of Dol ORCS: In the book, Orcs played no role at all Guldur. in Tolkien’s novel. In the film - many - Radagast leaves to warn Galadriel of their impalements and beheadings. discovery at the tombs of the Nazgûl. NECROMANCER: Fans liked Necromancer - Gandalf finds the ruins infested with Orcs, who has begun forming his armies of darkness is ambushed by Azog. in the first film. → The identity of the - The Necromancer overpowers and defeats mysterious necromancer is explicit in the Gandalf, reveals himself as Sauron. second film. 77

GANDALF: Sauron and Gandalf meet, talk, fight →Gandalf slash fiction.

- Thorin and his remaining company reach THE LONELY MOUNTAIN: In the film, the the Lonely Mountain. Bilbo discovers the gate into The Lonely Mountain opens under hidden entrance. different conditions to create a new dramatic - Bilbo enters the Lonely Mountain to failure-into-success scene. retrieve the Arkenstone, he accidentally awakens Smaug. - Smaug reveals his knowledge of both the dwarves' plot to retake the gold and the return of Sauron.

- Bard fears what may happen when the LEGOLAS + TAURIEL: In the book, neither Dwarves enter the mountain, attempts to Legolas nor Tauriel appears. → The SHE-ELF bring the black arrow to the town's launcher, (female warrior elf) complains. → Tauriel's is arrested in the process, leaves his son to character was invented for the film →. hide the arrow. INTERSPECIES LOVE TRIANGLE FAN - Bolg and Orcs infiltrate the town, attack FICTION → Legolas reappears as a the four Dwarves, are quickly dispatched principal character. following the arrival of Tauriel and Legolas. BARD: In the book, Bilbo tricks Smaug into - Tauriel tends to Kíli. Kíli openly admires showing his chest, and he notices the weak Tauriel's beauty, wonders if she loves him. point personally → In the film, the weakness in Legolas leaves in pursuit of Bolg. Smaug's chest is linked to Girion's attack on - Gandalf helplessly watches as Azog and an Smaug to strengthen Bard's role. Orc army march from Dol Guldur towards BARD: According to Tolkien, Bard has only the Lonely Mountain. one child, a son named Bain (never appears in the book). → BARD'S CHILDREN fan fiction → In the film, Bard has three children, along with Bain, he also has two daughters - Sigrid and Tilda.

- Bilbo and the Dwarves rekindle the SMAUG: In the book, the Dwarves never see mountain's forge using Smaug's flames to the dragon at all; by the time they head create and melt a large golden statue. downstairs to the dragon's lair, Smaug is - Bilbo and the Dwarves bury Smaug alive long gone → Smaug fics on in the molten gold. www.fanfiction.net → Dwarves and Bilbo’s - Smaug emerges from the gold, stumbles attempts to kill Smaug. out of the mountain, flies off to destroy Lake-town. The black arrow is not Bard's personal relic, but custom ammunition for a 'dwarven wind-lance'. 1.2. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (J.J. Abrams, 2019) Film segment Sources (Fan complaints, Fan fiction, Fan theories) - Kylo Ren obtains a Sith Wayfinder; goes In previous episodes, fans disliked Kylo Ren for to Exegol; finds Palpatine. his appearance and hysterical fits. In Episode 9, - Palpatine reveals that he created Snoke as Kylo Ren regains his mask and does not show a puppet to control the First Order and lure excessive emotions like he does, for example, in Episode 8. 78

Kylo to the dark side; unveils the Final Order; tells Kylo to find and kill Rey. Palpatine alive – J.J. Abrams' apologies for - Rey is continuing her Jedi training under R.Johnson who took Snoke out of the plot Resistance leader Leia Organa. leaving only one antagonist - disliked by fans Kylo Ren.

‘Palpatine ’ theory - Snoke was a clone of other Snokes, created in vats and controlled by Palpatine. The theory contradicts the novelization of The Last Jedi, where the readers can see the world from Snoke's point of view, and he neither knows that he is Palpatine nor that he is a clone.

- Finn and deliver intelligence ‘Finn has the Force’ theory - Finn being Force- from a spy that Palpatine is on Exegol. sensitive is something that fans have theorized - Rey learns from 's notes about since the former stormtrooper ignite a that a Sith Wayfinder can lead them there. lightsaber on Takodana in episode 7. In episode - Rey, Finn, Poe, Chewbacca, BB-8, and C- 9 he is aware of Rey's death. 3PO depart in the Millennium Falcon to Pasaana, where a clue to a Wayfinder is Johnson showed beloved by fans Luke hidden. Skywalker in episode 8 as a coward and killed him. In Episode 9, Luke returns as a Force ghost and acts as a brave Jedi giving parting words to Rey.

- Kylo initiates a Force bond with Rey to Knights of Ren - were in episode 7 - were not discover her location, travels to Pasaana used in episode 8 - present in episode 9. with his warrior subordinates - the Knights of Ren. ‘The dagger is a Wayfinder’ theory- the dagger - Rey and her friends find a dagger inscribed was thought by fans to be an ancient weapon with Sith text, which C-3PO's programming that would be key to defeating Palpatine. forbids him from interpreting, and the Though the dagger is not the Wayfinder perse in remains of a Jedi hunter named Ochi and his episode 9, it acts as a map that leads to the ship. actual one, and it is never wielded as an actual - Rey senses that Kylo is nearby; goes to weapon. confront him.

- The First Order captures the Falcon, ‘Dark union vs. divine couple’ theory - the Chewbacca, and the dagger. Emperor's coveting of Rey (the ‘Dark Union’) - Rey attempts to save Chewbacca; in opposition to Rey's more natural affection for accidentally destroys a First Order transport Kylo Ren, someone closer to her in age, with Force lightning. temperament, and nature. - The First Order believes Chewbacca to be Many fans wanted Rey to go to the dark side, dead; escapes on Ochi's ship. but in previous episodes, there are no prerequisites for this. Episode 9 adds such prerequisites: in a fit of rage, Rey blows up the transporter that is carrying Chewbacca; Dark Rey's vision.

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- The First Order travels to Kijimi; a ‘Rey’s staff is a lightsaber’ theory - fans droidsmith extracts the Sith text from C- assumed that Rey made her staff into a 3PO's memory, revealing coordinates to a lightsaber given her preternatural ability with Wayfinder. the weapon and so she could retire Luke's blade. - Rey senses Chewbacca is alive; the group On Tatooine, Rey ignited her new lightsaber, mounts a rescue mission to Kylo's Star with a yellow blade emanating from the staff. Destroyer.

- Rey recovers the dagger; has visions of ‘Rey Palpatine’ theory - fandom called Rey Ochi killing her parents with it. for her talent for everything. In - Kylo informs Rey that she is Palpatine's episode 8, Rey turns out to be nobody (she has granddaughter (the Sith Lord had ordered non-name parents from Jakku) - fans did not Ochi to recover Rey as a child, but her like it because R.Johnson declines all fan parents hid her on Jakku to protect her). theories about Rey's kinship with one of the famous characters (‘Rey Kenobi’ theory and ‘Rey Skywalker’ theory). J.J. Abrams gives Rey a famous family.

- General Hux saves Poe, Finn, and Fandom did not like how Admiral Akbar died in Chewbacca from execution, revealing episode 8. Abrams adds Akbar's son to episode himself as the spy; permits the group to 9. escape on the Falcon, but is discovered and killed by Allegiant General Pryde. Fandom did not like the rebel in - The First Order flies the Falcon to the episode 9. In episode 9 she has minimum screen Wayfinder's coordinates on a moon in the time. Endor system. General Hux: fascist manners in episode 7 - a laughingstock in episode 8 - is killed in episode 9.

- Rey retrieves the Wayfinder from the ‘Bendemption’ theory (The Redemption of Ben remains of the second Death Starshe; is met Solo) - Kylo by Kylo, who destroys the Wayfinder and Ren abandons the dark side of the Force duels her. motivated by the immense regret he felt after - Leia calls to Kylo through the Force, killing his father and join forces with the good distracting him as Rey impales him; dies. guys to defeat the Emperor after he converses - Rey senses Leia's death; heals Kylo and with a memory of his father. takes his ship to exile herself on Ahch-To. - Luke's Force spirit encourages Rey to face In episode 7, beloved by fans Han Solo is Palpatine and gives her Leia's lightsaber. killed. Episode 9 has a scene with Han Solo in - Rey leaves for Exegol in Luke's X-wing Kylo's flashback. fighter, using the Wayfinder from Kylo's ship. ‘Leia becomes one with the force’ theory - the - Kylo converses with a memory of his Resistance General eventually joins her brother father, Han Solo; throws away his lightsaber as a Force ghost watching over Rey. Leia's and reclaims his identity as Ben Solo. passing happens almost off-camera as her body - Palpatine senses Leia's death and Ben's vanishes under a sheet to become one with the return; sends one of his superlaser-equipped Force. Star Destroyers to obliterate Kijimi as a show of Force. Flying Leia in episode 8 - the explanations were in episode 6 where she turns out to be Luke's 80

- The Resistance, led by Poe and Finn, sister and thus has Force abilities - 1983 film is prepare to attack Palpatine's armada. old for a new generation of fans - Abrams explains that Luke taught Leah to be a Jedi, she even had a sword, but she has given it to Luke with the words that someone would continue her Jedi path in future.

‘Sith fleet and superweapons’ theory - the massively sized fleet belongs to the Emperor and not to the First Order.

- Rey transmits her coordinates to R2-D2, ‘Reylo’ fan fiction - episode 8 gave fans hope allowing the Resistance to follow her to and a galore of romantic imagery – episode 9 Exegol; confronts Palpatine. confirms that the Force bond between Rey - Palpatine demands that Rey kill him for and Kylo Ren was not only a fascinating his spirit to pass into her. power but also the Star Wars equivalent of a - Lando brings reinforcements from across soulmates' link. the galaxy to join the battle. - Ben overpowers the Knights of Ren; joins ‘Game of Thrones death’ theory – there was a Rey. Throne Room death precedent in episode 8. In - Palpatine drains their power to rejuvenate episode 9, Kylo dies when Palpatine threw him himself; attacks the Resistance fleet with into the hole so he smashes into a rock on his Force lightning; incapacitates Ben. way down. - Rey hears the voices of past Jedi, who lend her their strength. is not in episodes 7 and 8 - - Palpatine attacks her with lightning; Rey added in episode 9 only as fanservice (his role deflects it using Luke and Leia's lightsabers, could be played by any other character) killing Palpatine and herself. The Holdo maneuver in episode 8 left - Ben uses the Force to revive her at the cost uncertainties among fans. J.J. Abrams creates of his own life; Rey kisses Ben before he Beaumont Kin (Dominic Monaghan) just to give dies. information about Holdo maneuver in episode 9 - The Resistance defeats Palpatine's armada; (Beaumont Kin proposed to use the Holdo people across the galaxy rise up against the maneuver against the Sith Eternal fleet, but the First Order; the Resistance returns to their former stormtrooper Finn dismissed it as a base to celebrate. ‘one-in-a-million’ shot).

‘Ancient sith play a role’ theory - all the Sith will enter the body of Rey as she kills Palpatine. Episode 9 - the ritual of transferring the Sith souls to Rey.

Episodes 7 and 8 did not have big-budget battle scenes with special effects. Episode 9 has a lot of fight scenes with fast cuts.

- Rey visits Luke's abandoned childhood ‘The twin suns of Tatooine’ theory - the twin home on Tatooine; buries his and Leia's suns of Tatooine rise (instead of set) behind Rey lightsabers, having built her own. to mirror episode 4 and show a new era rising in - A passerby asks Rey’s name; as the spirits the galaxy. of Luke and Leia watch, she replies, ‘Rey Skywalker.’ 81

1.3. Fifty Shades of Grey (S. Taylor-Johnson, 2015) Film segment Sources (Twilight, Twilight fan fiction, other films) - Anastasia Steele is a 21-year-old Anastasia Steele = (clumsy, undergraduate student, studies English virginal, bookish brunette with a lip-biting literature at Washington State University, habit). works at the hardware store. - Kate Kavanagh is a journalist for the Kate Kavanagh = Rosalie Hale (confident and university newspaper and Anastasia’s beautiful blonde who is in a relationship with roommate. She needs to interview Christian the main male character’s adoptive brother). Grey for the newspaper. Kate becomes ill, Ana agrees to go in her place. Christian Grey = (rich, - Christian Grey is a 27-year-old billionaire handsome, intense, possessive, controlling entrepreneur, that year's WSU person with a secret). commencement speaker. He takes an interest in Anastasia, visits her hardware store. Jose Rodriguez = Jacob Black (the main female - Paul is the son of the owner of the character’s good friend who has romantic hardware store. He gives Ana an intense hug feelings for her). - Christian offers to do a photoshoot to accompany the article for which Ana had interviewed him. - Anastasia meets her friend Jose Rodriguez - a photographer and has a crush on Anastasia. Anastasia is not interested in him. Jose takes photos of Christian.

- Christian invites Anastasia for coffee, The Office () is a fan leaves abruptly after Ana confesses to being fiction text written by Christina Lauren a romantic, says he is not the man for her, before E.L. James which reimagined the walking Anastasia to her car. Edward Cullen-Bella Swan relationship as a - A cyclist almost hits Anastasia. Christian steamy love/hate romance between a boss pulls her out of the way. Anastasia tries to and his assistant. kiss Christian, Christian refuses her and warns her to stay away from him. - Christian sends Anastasia first edition copies of two Thomas Hardy novels as a gift, with a quote about the dangers of relationships on an accompanying card.

- Anastasia celebrates graduation at a local Elliot Grey = Emmett Cullen (laid-back and bar, drinks too much, calls Christian, says fun-loving older adoptive brother of the main she is returning the books. male character). - Christian goes to the bar to find Anastasia. Anastasia passes out, wakes up the next Emancipation Proclamation that is a fan morning in Christian's hotel room. fiction text written by Kharizzmatik before - Elliot, who came with Christian, is dancing E.L. James about Bella being a slave that is and flirting with Kate. freed by Edward whose family is in the mafia. - Ana and Christian begin seeing each other. Grace Grey = Esme Cullen (the main male Christian insists that Anastasia sign a non- character’s caring adoptive mother). 82 disclosure agreement preventing her from revealing details about their relationship. - Christian explains that he has bondage relationships clearly defined in a contract between the participants. - Ana reveals that she is a virgin, considers the agreement, negotiates her own terms, visits the ‘playroom,’ have sex with Christian, fixes breakfast for herself and Christian, meets Christian's mother - Grace.

- Christian plays a sad song on his piano, Elena Lincoln as ‘Mrs. Robinson’ - a reference reveals Elena (Anastasia calls her Mrs. to the 1967 film (Mike Nichols). Robinson), sends gifts – car and laptop - to The nickname means an older woman pursuing Anastasia. someone younger than herself. - Kate informs Anastasia that her dad called while she was with Christian to tell her that Wide Awake that is a fan fiction text written her mother can't make graduation because by AngstGoddess003 before E.L. James her husband, Bob, has a minor injury. about the dark pasts of Bella and Edward - Paul asks Anastasia on a date. Anastasia that leave them severely emotionally scarred, meets up with Christian at the bar, gets into with nightmares that force them to stay a discussion about the contract. awake. - Ray – Anastasia’s stepfather arrives, goes with Anastasia to the graduation.

- Anastasia and Kate move to Seattle. Mia Grey = Cullen (bubbly, talented, and - Anastasia continues seeing Christian, outgoing adoptive sister of the main male mentions that she is leaving to visit her character). mother in Georgia during dinner at Christian's parents. - Ana goes to her interview at Seattle Independent Publishing, SIP, they offer her an internship. - Anastasia says that she wants more than the one-sided relationship Christian proposes. Christian becomes frustrated, arrives in Georgia, takes Anastasia flying, leaves to tend to an emergency in Seattle.

- Anastasia returns home, continues seeing The Submissive is a fan fiction text written Christian, invites him to go to Jose's by TaraSueMe begore E.L. James about a photography show. Christian wants further domineering Edward with a dark past who sexual experimentation, keeps emotionally seduces an innocent Bella into the practice of distant. Anastasia initially consents, asks BDSM. Christian to demonstrate how he would "punish" her for rule-breaking. Christian whips Anastasia with a belt. Anastasia breaks up with Christian. 83

1.4. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (David Yates, 2018) Film segment Sources (Fan complaints, Fan fiction, Fan theories) - MACUSA transfers Grindelwald to Europe ‘Creedence is alive’ theory: Credence – one of to stand trial, Grindelwald escapes. the most vivid characters of the first film - had - Newt visits the Ministry of Magic to appeal been killed at the end of the first film → Fan his international travel ban, runs into Leta theory about Creedence’s fake death based on Lestrange. the fact an Obscurial cannot be killed when - The Ministry agrees to grant Newt's they're in their Obscurus form. This fact never request if he helps Theseus locate Credence appeared in canon. It was found in the book Barebone in Paris. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald: - Newt declines after learning he must work Movie Magi, written by Jody Revenson. with Gunnar Grimmson. - Dumbledore believes Credence is Leta's Dumbledore’s occupation: in all Harry Potter long-lost half-brother - Corvus Lestrange, books, Dumbledore was Transfiguration asks Newt to save Credence from Professor before becoming Hogwarts' Grindelwald and the Ministry. Headmaster. In The Crimes of Grindelwald film, he is in charge of Defense Against the Dark Arts which comes along well with fans’ interest in Dumbledore’s search of deathly hallows (this discipline is also very popular in fan discussions due to the Boggart scene with Lupin in The Prisoner of Azkaban).

- Newt Queenie and Jacob visit Newt, tell ‘Jacob has feelings to Quinine’ theory: in the Newt that Queenie's sister Tina is seeing first Fantastic Beasts film, Jacob gets his someone after mistakenly believing Newt memory wiped out, however, the film, in and Leta were engaged. general, left this bit ambiguous → retcon in the - Newt deduces from Jacob's strange second film based on fan theories that behavior that Queenie enchanted him into Obliviation may only effect negative memories eloping to circumvent MACUSA's ban on (which is not correct due to the old cannon). marriage between wizards and non-magical people, lifts the enchantment. - Jacob refuses to marry Queenie, fearing the consequences she would face. - Queenie, Newt, and Jacob leaves to find Tina. - Tine is looking for Credence in Paris.

- Credence escapes the Circus Arcanus with ‘Nagini a human’ fan theory was just a popular Nagini, searches for his birth mother, locates fan theory before J.K. Rowling confirmed that half-elf servant Irma Dugard, who brought Nagini is a human and a Maledictus on Twitter him to America for adoption. in 2018. - Grimmson reveals to be a follower of Grindelwald, kills Irma.

- Tina meets Yusuf Kama, who is also * No fan labor was identified in this segment hunting Credence. (only original content by J.K. Rowling is - Newt and Jacob follow Yusuf to Tina. present). 84

- Yusuf imprisons Tina, Newt and Jacob, explains he made an Unbreakable Vow to kill his half-brother, whom he believes to be Credence.

- Queenie fails to find Tina, is brought to * No fan labor was identified in this segment Grindelwald. (only original content by J.K. Rowling is - Grindelwald allows Queenie to leave while present). manipulating her into joining him through her desire to marry Jacob.

- Newt and Tina infiltrate the French Polyjuice potion appears twice in The Crimes Ministry of Magic for documents to confirm of Grindelwald: as a part of Grindelwald's Credence's identity. dastardly plan to escape the clutches of the - Leta and Theseus discover Newt and Tina. American Ministry of Magic, and when Newt - Tina and Newt reconcile, Newt explains he whips some up so he can pose as his brother, was never engaged to Leta, their search Theseus. Potions and spells are topics that leads them to the Lestrange family tomb, always appear in fan discourse. where they find Yusuf. - Yusuf reveals that he is carrying out his father Mustafa's request to avenge his mother Laurena. - Leta reveals that she unintentionally caused Corvus V’s death. - Newt, Leta, Tina, Yusuf, and Jacob follow Historical fan fiction about Hitlerian ideologies a trail to a rally for Grindelwald's followers, (the genocide of muggles and half-bloods): in Jacob is looking for Queenie. Pottermore, there were several articles about - Grindelwald shows a vision of a future the Global Wizarding War → fans made global war, rails against the laws prohibiting connections of this magical conflagration with them from preventing such a tragedy. World War II and the dropping of the atomic - Theseus and the Aurors surround the rally. bomb → similar to visuals in the Grindelwald’s - Grindelwald prompts his followers to vision scene. spread his message across Europe, conjures a ring of blue fire that kills the retreating Aurors: appear rarely in Harry Potter films, Aurors, and allows his most loyal followers but very often in Fantastic Beasts to safely cross. - Queenie and Credence cross the fire. in response to fan complaints - Leta sacrifices herself so the others can about the first Fantastic Beasts film: a visit to escape. Hogwarts, McGonagall, Nicolas Flamel (from - Grindelwald and his followers depart. the beloved first book and film - Sorcerer’s - Nicolas Flamel and the remaining wizards Stone). extinguish the fire. - Newt chooses to join the fight against Grindelwald.

- Newt presents Dumbledore with a vial ‘Young Grindelwald’ fan fiction - in the stolen from Grindelwald, containing a blood Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the pact Grindelwald and Dumbledore made in first appearance of young Grindelwald in their youth that prevents them from dueling photographs happens. In The Crimes of each other. 85

- Dumbledore believes Grindelwald can be Grindelwald, this character appears young destroyed. in the Mirror of Erased scene. - Grindelwald presents Credence with a wand, informs Credence that a phoenix ‘Grindeldor’ slash fan fiction about sexual appears to any Dumbledore in need of it, relationships between Dumbledore and reveals Credence’s true identity - Aurelius Grindelwald → Dumbledore's longing look Dumbledore, Albus and Aberforth's long- in the Mirror of Erised. lost brother. - Credence demonstrates his newfound ‘Dumbledore Had Another Brother’ theory: power as a wizard by using his new wand to from the Harry Potter and The Deathly blast apart a mountainside. Hallows book, we knew that had only two siblings. Moreover, there’s nothing in the first Fantastic Beasts film that hints at Credence possibly being the blood of someone special. However, in fan fiction, there were different scenarios, including Creedence’s belonging to the Dumbledore clan.

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Appendix 2: Business Model Canvas – The Wizarding World Franchise Goal: to allow the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development to legally work with fan labor implementation in the development of the Fantastic Beasts film series and other media of the Wizarding World (WW) franchise Tool: step 1 – optional terms and conditions checkbox on www.fanfiction.net and www.wattpad.org → if successful - step 2 - fan fiction section on www.wizardingworld.com (with terms and conditions agreement and mandatory acknowledgment checkbox) Customer Customer relationships Value propositions Key activities Key Partners segments Harry Potter Customer retention: Newness: Reviews from the WW franchise creators Alliance with and Fantastic 1) Formation of the The possibility to (JKR + actors + WarnerMedia workers, www.fanfiction.net Beasts fan community of WW fan work with the etc.) identifying previous use of fan fiction + www.wattpad.org fiction writers fiction writers official in the Fantastic Beasts film series (reduction of risk 2) Collective creation of the representatives of and uncertainty beloved franchise the franchise during step 1 + Customer co- acquisition of Channels creation: Key resources recourses) 1) www.fanfiction.net + Status of a potential 1) Physical - WarnerMedia's Burbank www.wattpad.org developer of the office 2) www.wizardingworld.com franchise 2) Financial – cloud storage 3) Promotion: WW social 3) Intellectual - JKR (publishing and networks accounts at YouTube theatrical rights) + Warner Bros. + Facebook + Instagram + Entertainment (film-related rights) Twitter 4) Human – fan fiction readers in the Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team Cost structure Revenue streams

- Fan fiction section development on www.wizardingworld.com - Box office receipts from films produced with commodified (coders + designers) fan labor - Cloud storage - Other sales (books, merchandise, museum, amusement parks, etc.) 87

Appendix 3: Budget and Communication Strategy for Legal Commodification of Fan Labor in The Wizarding World Franchise I. Budgeting: Costs Staff Salary($/y)r (Number of specialists + Regular/Temporary employee) Human / Talent Employees to join the Harry Potter Global Franchise Estimated Development Team: - Initial readers (5/R) 85,959*5=494,795 Existing Internal Staff from Warner Bros. 111 Entertainment - Burbank / LA (not included in total costs): - Director (1/R) 98,682112 - Publicist (1/R) 49,196113 - Writer (3/R) 51,395114 - Social Media Producer (3/R) 56,286115 - Programmer/Coder (1/T) 33,716116 - Web-designer (1/T) 52,691117 - Finance Lead (1/R) 118,296118 - Lawyer (1/R) 82,315119 External Stuff from Wattpad and FanFiction.Net (not included in total costs): - Programmer/Coder (1/T) 33,716120 Hardware Computing Resources (5x) 11,995121 Cloud storage 14.28122 Network Infrastructure N/A Software Microsoft Office Home and Business 2019 249.95*5=1,249.75 123 Total New staff + Computers + Software + Cloud Storage $500K (508,054.03)

111 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/reader-salary-SRCH_KO0,6.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 112 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/director-salary-SRCH_KO0,8.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 113 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/publicist-salary-SRCH_KO0,9.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 114 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/us-writer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,2_IN1_KO3,9.htm 115 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/social-media-producer-salary- SRCH_KO0,21.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 116 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coder-salary-SRCH_KO0,5.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 117 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/web-designer-salary-SRCH_KO0,12.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 118 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/finance-leader-salary-SRCH_KO0,14.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 119 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/lawer-salary-SRCH_KO0,5.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 120 https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/coder-salary-SRCH_KO0,5.htm?clickSource=searchBtn 121 https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch 122 https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing 123 https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HP7A2LL/A/microsoft-office-home-and-business-2019-1- mac?fnode=2ae6e6d3ba54eab728167bf763d805149c30a858f0bb6b29e312f2b729abbf18b2ace30bd9416ac e9735373ca9aba2dbc1de8af8cc8e72fd88f2345c0b38060872655eadfc2328cb613d24d7271f1dd19474b484 e7a6d4374ce5e6ca72b17892 88

II. Communication Plan: The information about innovation should successfully reach the audience: the existing number of fan fiction writers and readers must remain the same + ideally innovation should increase the number of active fan fiction writers and readers. Audience Fans who consume and produce (= fan fiction writers) Fans who only consume (= fan fiction readers) Goals and Objectives To make commodification of fan labor legal To increase the number of fans involved in the development of the Wizarding World franchise (=to create official participatory fandom): - To increase the number of fan fiction writers - To increase the number of fan fiction readers Key Messages of fans and fan fiction texts (=fanon) into official developers of the Wizarding World franchise / =canon. Tactical Plan: - A special section in the weekly wizarding world newsletters - Mass media - Existing social networks accounts of the Wizarding World franchise - Official website of the franchise – www.wizardingworld.com III. Evaluation: The commercial success of products in the development of which fan labor was used should be higher than without collaborations of official producers with fans. Short-term (collaboration The quality and number of fan fiction texts uploaded after the with Wattpad and creation of the terms and conditions checkbox should not be FanFiction.Net) significantly lower than the number of fan fiction texts submitted to the Harry Potter sections Wattpad and FanFiction.Net now. - Fans’ activity on social networks (use of hashtags, comments, etc.) - Wattpad monitoring (quantitative and qualitative analysis) - FanFiction.Net monitoring (quantitative and qualitative analysis) - Comparison of the quality of published fan texts before and after the implementation of innovation Long-term (separate The number and the quality of fan fiction texts submitted to section for fan fiction on www.wizardingworld.com should be about the same that www.wizardingworld.com) submitted to the Harry Potter sections at Wattpad and FanFiction.Net. - Fans’ activity on social networks (use of hashtags, comments, etc.) - Comparison of the quality of fan texts published on Wattpad and FanFiction.Net a www.wizardingworld.com 89

Appendix 4: Terms and Conditions Agreement Welcome and thanks for using a Wizarding World service provided Wizarding World Digital LLC, as well as service provided by our third-party partners, FanFiction.Net and Wattpad Corp. This policy explains how we collect, use, and disclose the content uploaded by you. These terms form a legally binding contract. They apply to your use of the Wizarding World website (www.wizardingworld.com) as well as Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts sections on www.fanfiction.net + www.wattpad.org. Please read these terms carefully. They affect your legal rights and obligations and include waivers of rights, limitations of liability, and your indemnity to us. By using the service, you agree to be bound by these terms, and you acknowledge the collection and potential use of the content uploaded by you. If you do not wish to be bound by these terms and any relevant additional terms, please do not use the service. 1. Our service The service is run by Wizarding World Digital LLC, a limited liability company, whose registered office is at 1209 Orange Street, Wilmington, New Castle County, Delaware 19801, USA and with company registration number 6798095. Our principal place of business is at 4000 Warner Boulevard, Burbank, CA 91522, USA. We grant you a limited license to access and use the service (along with any related support resources) for your personal, non-commercial use, solely as provided by these terms and any relevant additional terms and as permitted by the features and functionality of the service. That license is non-exclusive and revocable, and it cannot be transferred, assigned, or sublicensed. It is also conditional on your full compliance with these terms and any relevant additional terms. The service may allow you to view, preview, select, stream and access certain content, including video, audio, graphics, photos, and text protected by , trademarks, service marks, or other rights that are owned by us or our licensors. Except for the limited license we grant in this section to access the service and create derivative works for non-commercial, personal, entertainment use only, we do not grant any other rights to you. Any breach of these terms will automatically terminate the license and require you to stop using the service and its content. 2. Solicited user submissions The service allows you to submit original and derivative textual, audio, visual, or audiovisual content including but not limited to stories, polls, profile images, forum messages, submissions of concepts, creative ideas, suggestions, scripts, or other potential creative content. You shall be solely responsible for your submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. You affirm, represent, and/or warrant that you own or have the necessary 90 licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize us to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other proprietary rights in and to any and all your submissions and have all necessary consents to collect, use and disclose any personally identifiable information. By putting the checkmark, you waive all of your ownership rights in your user submissions and grant us a license to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform any or all parts of your submissions. You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your submissions and grant a non-exclusive license to access your submissions through the service. You understand and agree, however, that we may retain, display, distribute, or perform your submissions, even those that have been removed or deleted. We do not guarantee that your submissions will be used in any of our products or services. This is to avoid the possibility of future misunderstanding when projects developed by our staff or representatives might seem to others to be similar to their submitted concepts, creative ideas, suggestions, stories, scripts, or other potential creative content. Thus, if you waive all of your ownership rights, you understand and agree that your submissions do not create any fiduciary relationship between you and us and that we are under no obligation to refrain from using the unsolicited submission (in whole or in part), to keep it confidential, or to compensate you if we make any use of it. We have the right to retain your submissions for as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy. This means that the retention periods will vary. We have put in place reasonable controls (including physical, technological, and administrative measures) designed to help safeguard your submissions that we collect via the sites. If a dispute arises between you and us, you agree to provide us with notice of your complaint by email to [email protected] so that you and we can try to resolve the dispute informally within 60 days from the date when we receive your complaint. If you want to waive all of your ownership rights in your user submissions and grant us a license to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform any or all parts of your submissions, please put a mark in the following checkbox. I waive all my ownership rights in my user submissions and grant Wizarding World. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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