It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan kept his distance from the fanboys during the making of his “The Dark Knight” trilogy, never once stopping by the infamous San Diego Comic-Con or doing much in the way of pandering to the geek audience. In a recent interview with Spinoff Online (via Slashfilm), “Batman Begins” co-writer David Goyer revealed himself to be simpatico with the chilly auteur.
No doubt still feeling burned by the response to “Man Of Steel,” Goyer told the site that he doesn’t much care for fanboy complaints or “internet chatter” saying: “You’re dealing with an incredibly vocal but incredibly tiny sort of [group]. That’s a mistake that I think a lot of networks and movie studios make, is sort of listening too much to [them]. I mean, it’s important to listen to the fan chatter but you’re really talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of your audience that may not be representative of what your mainstream audience actually thinks or feels.”
Goyer eventually boiled down his view to a paraphrase of a Steve Jobs quote: “You don’t give the audience or the consumer what they want, you give them what they don’t even know they want.”
We have to say, despite not being the biggest Goyer fans, we very much agree with his warnings against catering to such a small, details-obsessed fanbase, as we outlined in our defense of Josh Trank’s changing of the “Fantastic Four” canon. If there’s anything the box office failures of “Kick-Ass” and “Scott Pilgrim vs The World” have proven, it’s that satisfying the fanboy community does not have as direct a correlation to real-world success as both the studios and fans would like. Then again, the ever-pandering Marvel Studios are doing quite well by every rubric that matters, the all-mighty dollar, so what do we know?