There is an unprecendented degree of coverage of big budget productions, like LOTR, and yet, despite the range of interactive technology available to the production, most of these products are passive. Few are dynamically derived, direct from the source material.
The gap between film fan and film fan who plays games is not supported by these products and arguably open for exploitation in the future.
At the same time, Hollywood studios continue to resort to legal action on fans whenever they tamper with film licenses. Only recently have certain fan films been tolerated by license holders but only if they re-create (not sample) film art purely for non-commercial use. Warner (e.g. Superman) and Viacom (e.g. Star Trek) have been known to shut down web sites with fan-sampled IP. The largest community is fanfilms.com (part of theforce.net Star Wars fan site). As of 20/11/2003, there are 36 Star Wars short films and 15 animations on fanfilms.com. There is also one Batman short (the highly acclaimed Batman: Dead End and 3 Matrix shorts).
Posted by .M. at March 10, 2004 12:31 PM | TrackBack