Wil Wheaton on reports that Hollywood execs were using last week’s Comic-Con as a focus group:

For those [Hollywood] executives [who almost always seem to screw up movie adaptations of the things fanboys love], I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because we’ve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. We’ve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.

 

These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.

I concur. The whole essay is a passionate battle-cry that’s worth reading if you’ve ever salivated at the thought of your favorite superhero coming to live-action life, only to be crushed when the movie turns out to be colossal dud like, well, 98% of the superhero movies that come out. Be warned, though — Wil can get pretty potty-mouthed when he’s worked up about something, and he’s very worked up about the upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen…