10 Fan Service Movie Moments That Went TOO FAR
When "fan service" becomes downright obnoxious.
Fan service is one of the more divisive aspects of modern filmmaking. One school of thought is, "What's wrong with giving fans what they want? Quite literally serving the fans, you ask?"
The other is that studios often lean too aggressively on their past successes in an attempt to wring as much money from fans' wallets as easily - even lazily - as possible.
At its worst, excessive, overdone fan service suggests creative bankruptcy, that those in charge are fresh out of new ideas and so will just keenly recycle what came before under the guise of "homage."
Fan service can be brilliant when it's done right of course, but far too often it's a crutch for sub-par filmmaking, and recent cinema history in particular is absolutely littered with groan-worthy, eye-rolling cinematic pandering that verges on genuinely embarrassing.
These moments, from corny references to the source material to obvious callbacks to better prior movies, and everything else in between, fell totally flat.
Each scene, no matter the intent, ultimately ended up more offputting than warmly nostalgic, proving how runaway fan service can be to a movie's sure detriment...
10. The Origin Of Han Solo's Name - Solo: A Star Wars Story
Though Solo: A Star Wars Story ultimately turned out decently enough for a Han Solo origin movie few were actually asking for, its attempts to nudge the fanbase with its elbow often ended up missing the mark.
And this is never more apparent than in the laughably on-the-nose early scene where we learn the origin of Solo's (Alden Ehrenreich) surname.
At the start of the film, Han signs up for the Imperial Navy as a flight cadet, and the recruiting officer asks for his surname - who his people are.
Han simply replies, "I have no people, I'm alone," to which the officer curtly replies, "Han... Solo."
It's a Movie Prequel Scene so absurdly spoon-feeding as to border on self-parody.
Did we really need to know where Han got his surname? Couldn't Solo just be his family name? And did the reveal scene have be so corny? If the recruiting officer simply wrote the name down it wouldn't have come across quite so pandering.
Tellingly, though, this is apparently the very sequence which got the film greenlit by Disney's Bob Iger, which really tells you everything you need to know.