Star Wars Event: Together, ‘Fortnite’ And ‘Disney’ Seek To Swallow All Of Pop Culture

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

Earlier this year, I watched DJ Marshmello perform. I wouldn’t be caught dead inside a club and I don’t really listen to that kind of music, but I showed up inside of Fortnite to watch the cylinder-headed avatar spin a jaw-dropping show that never could have happened in reality, complete with towering holograms, anti-gravity effects and towering light shows. It felt, for a moment, like watching the future. And if that was one side of that future, Saturday’s Fortnite event was a distinctly different angle in on that same future: the same millions of people gathered inside of the same game, this time to watch a very big ad for Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. It was magic in its own way, too.

It started with error messages: there were so many people around the world trying to watch this ad that Fortniteâ€"no stranger to massive crowdsâ€" strained under the load. When as many players as the game could manage logged in, they were treated to an aerial display of the Millenium Falcon shooting down some TIE Fighters. After that, things got weirder: a virtual version of Geoff Keighley interviewed a virtual version of JJ Abrams, joined by a virtual stormtrooper played by Ben Schwartz. Some more riffingâ€"a lot more riffingâ€"and virtual Abrams showed us a sort of forgettable clip from the movie on a virtual widescreen.

When all was said and done everyone grabbed a lightsaber and chopped each other to pieces. That was my favorite part.

These sorts of grandiose ads are the sort of thing that Epic has been clear about pursuingâ€"at the Game Awards the other night, creative director spoke about the company’s vision of the game as a place where all intellectual property could live together. The game’s first “crossover” was probably an unlicensed John Wick-style character back in Season 3, but it wasn’t until a smaller Avenger’s event in Season 4 that the game began its transformation into the grandest advertizing vehicle since early Facebook games. Since then we’ve seen in-game events celebrating Batman, Borderlands, the actual, licensed John Wick, Stranger Things, the NFL and Nike Shoes.

Fortnite

Credit: Epic Games

On its face, this is the sort of effort that could be more about Fortnite than anything else. And if it was just Fortnite, it might be a smaller story: the game was the biggest thing in the world last year, it made some extra money with elaborate in-game ads, end of story. But Epic Games appears to have a powerful ally here, and that could well change how this concept progresses both inside and outside of the game. This Star Wars crossover is arguably Fortnite’s biggest event yet, with the Avengers crossover comes in at a close second. And it’s worth noting that both are really the same crossover, part of what appears to be a growing Disney partnership. When it comes to pop culture, there is currently no more powerful ally.

It feels easier to read into Disney’s intentions here because it’s already tried this once. The late Disney Infinity was meant to house all of Disney’s rapidly growing stable of licensed characters, from Elsa to Iron Man to Kylo Ren, all of them translated through a particular cartoony lens in much the same way Fortnite smooths out recognizable characters to look at home inside of its battle royale. When new movies came out, Disney was going to promote them inside of Infinity and sell some toys along with them. Disney Infinity was shelved in 2016â€"making video games is hard, and the toys-to-life genre sort of went bustâ€"but the idea is reborn here in Fortnite. Disney still hasn’t really figured out what to do with video games overall, but Fortnite offers it the sort of easy, one-size fits all solution that it has always seemed to pursue in the past.

The fact that Fortnite also does ads for other properties clearly isn’t a problem for Disney. It actually helps, to a certain degree, drawing more people on a consistent basis and helping the game stay relevant for when it’s time to drum up excitement for the next generation of Marvel movies.

Fortnite is on its way to becoming a sort of digital version of Funko Pops, those collectible figures that manage to collapse the entirety of pop culture into an endless series of large-headed, dead-eyed statuettes that have this powerful way of calling out the empty space next to them: I see you have a single Funko Pop, they say to you, what if you had so many more. It’s because there’s not much too them, in and of themselves: their goal is to call to mind an idealized version of the thing they represent.

There’s a flattening that happens with both Funko Pops and Fortnite. To make these things consumable and palatable inside of the same medium, you need to more or less get rid of everything that makes them unique, everything that drew us to them in the first place. Rey is not Rey, Rey is a Fortnite skin trying to grab a tactical shotgun and stock up on resources before making its way to the final circle and square off against Fishstick. A Kratos Funko is every bit as cute and strange as a Cthulu Funko, as a Funko based on that one episode of The Office where they watch Michael’s movie and Jim plays Goldenface. They both offer a kind of pure concept of fandom, where the icons of a movie, TV show or video game are empowered to exist purely as icons outside of their original context.

It’s a handy concept for a company like Disney, which seeks to make these icons profitable and relatable without the hassle of context. Building out more context is tricky and riskyâ€"The Last Jedi was a major controversy, but Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyworld is immune to controversy outside of overpriced drinks. Darth Vader is a genocidal maniac inspired by nazis, but you can elide all of that in action figure form. People might critique The Mandalorian’s episode structure, but Baby Yoda toys can rake in millions. It’s the same basic idea that turned Mickey Mouse into a profitable character for decades after more or less everyone stopped watching him in cartoons.

That’s the allure of Fortnite’s “all intellectual property” vision: it offers Epic a stream of infinite content, and it offers advertisers a low-risk, high reward way to get people hyping themselves over upcoming releases and buying virtual action figures. It’s not hard to imagine how it goes from here: you could build whole games out of the basic building blocks in Fortnite for a lot less than it costs to build something like Jedi: Fallen Order, and with less risk to boot.

This feels like it’s going to be Fortnite’s third act. The phenomenon was bound to burn out at some point, and the Epic now appears to be adjusting to the next phase, when Fortnite remains a highly popular game but one that doesn’t command the sort of cultural attention that it once did. But by building itself as the location where other companies can find a safe place to make their ads it could reinvent as cultural capitalist paradise. It already reinvented itself once, after all.

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