Online Action Movie Fandom Birthed a New Film Fest Era

Young and Robinson weren’t planning on entering the exhibition space back when they were touring their movies, but those experiences did end up planting seeds for Big Bad later on. “The napkin scribbles were really our experiences with Kay [Lynch] at Salem Horror Fest and Mitch [Harrod] at Soho Horror,” Robinson says. “They’ve been really great resources for us in terms of how to put together a semi-home grown festival.”

Group Chat

Besides being the ultimate in communal cinematic experiences, another way action movies mirror scary ones is the infinite shareability of bite-size nuggets pulled from their choicest scenes. A standalone clip of a fight scene or even just a GIF of a single, eye-popping kick to the face can be thrilling enough to draw people into watching a whole movie so they can catch that one moment. This makes Twitter, where you have the speed of a scroll to grab someone’s attention, fertile ground for action movie fandom. Sometimes, entire conversations are built around fans just saying names back and forth to each other with awesome media attached.

Boyka! *GIF of spinning kick through the air*
Fist of the Condor?! *clip of Marko Zoror destroying a guy*
CYNTHIA ROTHROCK! *still of her with Michelle Yeoh in Yes, Madam!*

Dropping into the right Action Twitter thread can feel like falling into a greatest hits playlist of the coolest looking movies you’ve never heard of. You can either sink your teeth in and go the deeply technical route with accounts like Shogun Supreme, an Action Twitter megamind known for their granular color grade and audio comparisons across the various physical media releases for a single film. Or you can just punch in and have a ball with handles like Exploding Helicopter, which truly exists to document every time a helicopter has ever exploded in a movie.

Young says that account expanded his personal watch list by “hundreds” of titles when he first wandered into Action Twitter, and it was one of the feeds he got hooked on back in the days when everyone was living almost exclusively online: the 2020 Covid lockdown. “I was waking up very early and throwing on the El Rey Network,” says Young, referencing the genre-heavy cable channel. “From five in the morning to 10 in the morning all they played was Shaw Brothers films, and I got obsessed with them and started looking for people to talk about them.”

From there Young started following writers on Twitter like Brandon Streussnig, who spearheads the now-annual Vulture Stunt awards; Priscilla Page, who does rigorous close reads into movies like Top Gun: Maverick and Mad Max: Fury Road; and Outlaw Vern, a veteran of Ain’t It Cool News and independent critic who has written books on the movies of Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis. Young discovered accounts like One Perfect Headshot that were spreading the gospel of things like Chinese DTV action movies. He started learning about how those Shaw Brothers classics he was mainlining “go hand-in-hand with the Scott Adkins and Isaac Florentines of the world.”

We’re Gonna Need a Montage

Twitter was teaching Young the language of action beyond what gets the most showtimes at your local AMC theater, and even though Big Bad Film Fest wouldn’t go live until 2023, it was those terrible, halcyon days of pre-Elon Twitter that spawned the idea of a festival made just for action fans. A prompt went around on the platform at one point for people to create their own month of dream programming at Quentin Tarantino’s famous L.A. repertory theater, the New Beverly Cinema. Young’s slate ended up being almost entirely action movies, and that got him thinking enough to message Robinson about it.

“Patrick just texted me one day. I feel like all of our collaboration has been the drunken theme of talking to your buddy and you’re like, ‘We should start a bar!’ Except we do it dead sober and go ‘We should start a film festival!’” But unlike most bros who dream of opening a bar, the longtime creative partners started doing the leg work to figure out actual logistics: which theater to set up at (one they live close to!), getting DCPs (Digital Cinema Package files that play on projectors) made of movies so they weren’t just putting Blu-rays up on a screen; and corralling enough filmmakers to say yes to their unknown, untested festival to build out a whole weekend of programming.