Time discovers that devotees of geek culture — fanboys or, as the magazine calls them, alpha fans — wield a lot of power in Hollywood, influencing decision-makers through blogs, podcasts, message boards and websites.

Avi Arad calls them the “new tastemakers”: “Hard-core fans represent a small piece of the viewing public, but they influence geek culture, journalists, Wall Street. You don’t want them to trash your project.”

The magazine then tracks some of these tastemakers to one of their strongholds, Comic-Con International, where they help to create buzz for films like 300. JoBlo.com’s Berge Garabedian admits the movie “wasn’t even on our radar” until footage was shown at last year’s convention.

And lest we begin to think the alpha fans are all-knowing, Time trots out the box-office disaster that was Snakes on a Plane.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:17 am and is filed under Comic Books, Conventions, Fandom, Movies, Pop Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.