The question of fans: incorperating them into "Atlas".

This week’s lecture and reading centered upon the idea of fandom and, more importantly, the creation of fan-based cultures. Our group discussed a variety of ways in which we plan to tap into different cultures with the release of “Agents of Atlas” in theaters, but ultimately chose to narrow our scope to what we consider to be our main demographic of fans: that of marvel comic book readers and also the wider fan base of super-hero film enthusiasts. While these particular audiences do comprise a smaller percentage of the general populace, fans of either group do tend to be more vocal and enjoy having some sense of interaction with the production of new franchises. 

Hardcore fans of "Agents" will always been keen to see adaptations of their favorite characters

                 But the question of how to successfully create a strong fan base from fairly unknown characters still lingers. “Agents” has never been a truly well-known franchise, even though the initial miniseries was well-received (only just failing to break the 100 most-issues-sold of august 2006 with a count of 19,256 distributed as seen on http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2006/2006-08.html). As such, we discussed a variety of different ways in which make the franchise more appealing to our target fandoms but felt that the idea of cameos fell within the scope of our franchise. That is to say we are still a marvel property and, as such, do have the added advantage of being part of the ever-growing marvel film universe (which has added emphasis upon building continuity between movies) giving us license to potentially use well-established characters as extra incentive for fans to see the film. For example, Marvel’s recent seeding of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury throughout the recent ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Iron Man 2’ films or Robert Downey Jr’s cameo after the credits in ‘The Incredible Hulk’ work to build anticipation within the audience of future movies and character interactions. Especially as we’ll be coat-tailing the ‘Avengers’ film in 2012 we feel that even brief cameos of characters established in that film could boost anticipation within fans and draw more people to the cinemas to see the film (and seeing as most actors are signed with exclusive character contracts we feel it is in our ability to procure the specific actors necessary for such cameos). We feel this would appeal to both our target fan bases without alienation as there will be adequate knowledge of the characters involved both from extensive comic-book history and the more recent film adaptations. 

“A Rogue. A Scientist. A Spy. A Hunter. A Vampire. A beast. An Immortal”

                While this will inspire anticipation in such niche audiences, we also considered the much larger percentage of people who will know next to nothing about the franchise and how we could potentially get them intrigued as well. We feel comfortable in the fact that while new franchises can have difficulty in finding and exciting their audiences, the super-hero team concept has constantly been met with good filmic-reception in the past. A nice parallel with our film is the release of “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” which was also a fairly unknown franchise with a strong and vocal fan base of comic book readers that managed to gross $$179,265,204 worldwide, with a budget of only $78,000,000. Such success seemed to draw from the notoriety of such iconic literary figures that comprised the “League” (such as Dorian Grey and Tom Sawyer) which more or less reflects aspects our own team (in the iconic sense of character archetypes that is). Such literary references also add a certain academic weight to the concept: helping the film to transcend the general stereotype of other super-hero films, giving the fans a justification for their enjoyment of it.  Moreover, to publicize on the unknown quality of the franchise, the “league’s” tag-line was “A Rogue. A Scientist. A Spy. A Hunter. A Vampire. A beast. An Immortal”, which more or less reflects the “Agent’s” own line of “A spy. A robot. An alien. A goddess. A mermaid. A gorilla”. By just listing the archetypes, the tag-lines work effectively to emphasize that these characters are “new” essentially, yet grounded in popular culture and literary knowledge, showing potential fans that this is something they can easily be integrated into without prior knowledge.