Once upon a time, film-makers were mysterious sorcerers hunched over Steenbecks and smoke machines, conjuring cinematic magic from the recesses of their cerebellums. These days it seems they spend half their time on Reddit, fighting like gremlins to stay one step ahead of the hive mind.
This week, Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts revealed that his original plan for the grand entrance of the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of Spider-Man in the blockbuster Marvel epic was to have them turn up following the death of Aunt May, just as Spidey was at his lowest point. As our hero sheds tears on a grimy New York rooftop, the pair would enter through Doctor Strange portals at the perfect moment to reset the film and set Peter Parker on the path to redemption.
It was a perfectly serviceable plan to get the film moving again quickly before the entire multiplex ruined their popcorn with salty tears. But there was one tiny, weeny problem: the internet had thought of it first. “I was on Reddit, and I was looking at people who had already made fan art of, ‘This is probably what it’s going to be like when the two Spider-Men get revealed’,” Watts told Collider. “It was on a rooftop. It was sad. Two Doctor Strange portals were open and two Spider-Men are stepping out. I was like, ‘Well, we can’t do that. If that’s exactly what everyone thinks we’re going to do, we absolutely can’t do that.’” Watts reconfigured the screenplay so that Maguire and Garfield turn up in Ned’s grandmother’s flat instead, after Spider-Man’s right-hand man starts messing with Strange’s sling ring and accidentally ushers them both into the MCU.
As an example of the fandom hivemind guessing the plot of a movie from the quantum rear seat, this is both deranged and depressingly effective. But it’s also far from the first time fans have managed to manipulate the plot of a high-profile film before the trailers have even been released. The great-grandaddy of internet-powered cinema interference, long before Reddit got involved, was the 2006 action thriller Snakes on a Plane, a movie that was almost entirely reshot to meet fan expectations. After early online hype snowballed into full-blown meme fever, producers added more reptiles, more over-the-top absurdity and more supposedly iconic lines such as Samuel L Jackson’s: “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”
In 2015, Fantastic Four brought us a subtler, though equally telling, course correction. Fans were outraged by reports that Toby Kebbell’s Doctor Doom would be renamed “Victor Domashev” and – even worse – would be a sad tech bro with a blogspot (rather than the usual Latverian aristocrat with diplomatic immunity and a murder cape). Faced with backlash before the film had even finished shooting, 20th Century Fox panicked and quietly reinstated the classic “Von Doom” moniker. A tiny change, but a telling one.
At that point we were fully into the era of pre-release plot clairvoyance, where no trailer dropped, no casting announcement landed, and no cereal-box leak went unanalysed by Reddit sleuths with conspiracy corkboards and access to 480p set photos. And just like studios, and directors, the fans get it wrong as often as they get it right. Without a massive Reddit campaign, Sonic the Hedgehog might have been a kids’ animated movie starring a version of the beloved video game critter who looked like a taxidermy experiment. Thumbs up there to the screaming mob. In contrast, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ended up switching Daisy Ridley’s Rey from the child of “filthy junk traders” she had been labelled in previous film The Last Jedi to the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine – purely because fans who had probably built elaborate genealogies on Reddit had got their geeky knickers in a twist.
Since then we’ve had the almost complete deletion of the villainous Serpent Society from Captain America: Brave New World, and now the revelation that No Way Home was rewritten to avoid getting Reddited. It seems that in modern Hollywood, entire tonal shifts are now being driven by fan reaction, real or anticipated.
At their best, these pivots can improve a film. There’s a kind of chaotic crowd wisdom to large-scale fan response: if millions of people agree your CGI hedgehog looks like he drinks Monster Energy, maybe it’s worth reconsidering. And when audiences accurately predict major plot beats months in advance, maybe it makes sense to tweak the scene. But there’s a point here where all this stuff starts to eat indelibly into the very concept of authored film-making. Maybe in a decade or so we won’t need directors and studios at all, just a bunch of data analysts and Reddit mods using AI to make films that everyone loves because they’ve already seen them in their heads.
And even if that’s a dystopian future we’re not quite facing just yet, such algorithmic appeasement exposes the mounting anxiety of studios that now live in a kind of quantum dread – terrified of being too online, yet even more terrified of not being online enough. Every plot point is a potential leak. Every costume reveal is a referendum. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is safe when your screenplay has to survive both internal rewrites and a Reddit spoiler thread before it can even be filmed. Think of it as Schrödinger’s Cameo: the twist exists in a weird quantum state until the lights go down and your mate leans over and says: “Told you Tobey was in this.”
