Fan Service vs Geek Service

From the Iliad to Mission: Impossible, creators have wrestled with the question of how much universe-building is too much.

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To some commentators, Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was an exercise in “fan service.” Tom Cruise made the film he thought his audience wanted him to make. There were, as in the original, lovingly shot dogfights over the ocean. Val Kilmer, the icy yin in Top Gun to Cruise’s hot-headed yang, returns to the screen, in his last film role, to give the movie an emotional core. Maverick’s co-pilot dies in the first film so, by the second, his son, who blames Cruise for his father’s death, has become a fighter pilot himself, thus providing a personal conflict to be resolved by the end of the movie. There is a love interest. There are shots of Cruise riding a motorbike in a bomber jacket. There is, in short, everything middle-aged men in cinemas across the world need to briefly feel as if they were twelve years old again.

If fan service is the recreation of an original property sufficiently faithfully to allow the audience to re-experience their earlier emotions, to riff on earlier events, and to answer the question of what happened next, Top Gun: Maverick is fan service par excellence. Perhaps that’s why it was so successful, becoming 2022’s second most popular film, and the highest grossing of Cruise’s career.

Fan service is not a recent phenomenon. Only a year after The Three Musketeers (1844) was published, Dumas published Twenty Years After, in which his protagonist D’Artagnan is once again involved in a dastardly plot and must put the band back together to defeat the machinations of Mordaunt, the son of Milady de Winter, the femme fatale of the previous novel. As before, there is a dubious cardinal, there is swashbuckling and, in the end, there is justice—all the elements that made the original so successful.

Perhaps the greatest act of fan service, however, was performed sixty years later when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle re-animated Sherlock Holmes. Having come to believe that the stories were a distraction from the serious, important works he thought he could write, Conan Doyle sends his hero over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in 1893’s The Final Problem, having hastily invented Professor Moriarty as a worthy nemesis. Eventually, the public clamour led him to return to his famous detective, with The Hound of the Baskervilles (implicitly set before Holmes’s demise) in 1901 and The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1903, a collection of short stories, the first of which, The Adventure of the Empty House, explains how the detective cheated death. Four more anthologies and another novel followed.

Like his peers, however, Conan Doyle was reticent about his creation, providing the reader with information about his professional life, but not much backstory. We know that Holmes’s ancestors were “country squires” and that he has been to university, but little else. We know that he has solved some crimes that are not detailed in the stories Watson narrates—one being the mystery of The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which is tantalisingly alluded to in The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire as a story “for which the world is not yet prepared.”

But where Conan Doyle stood aside, others stepped up. There are at least two novels telling the story of the oversized rodent and countless others reciting tales that escaped the doctor’s notice. Chris Columbus provides the history of Holmes’s schooling—and provides a basis for his smoking habit and, indeed, for Moriarty—in his 1985 film The Young Sherlock Holmes. A character who, to his creator, had no existence outside his stories has, through the efforts of others, become a fully-fledged person with a past and a future (1942’s Sherlock Holmes and The Voice of Terror sees him take on the Nazis).

This completist tendency is not new. A lot of Classical Greek literature either extends (The Oresteia) or fills in gaps (Sophocles’ Ajax) left by Homer. Aeneas is a minor character in the Iliad, albeit one who enjoys divine protection and is destined to be King of the Trojans. The Romans decided that this led him to be moved around the Mediterranean against his will so his descendants could found their city. To the anonymous author of the 9^th-century Historia Brittonum, one of his lesser-known progeny would go on to found Britain. Later, Medieval Oxford scholars, engaged in the traditional rivalry with Cambridge, claimed him as the founder of their university.

Some authors, particularly those in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, have not been content to leave these matters to their audiences—choosing instead to provide completist geek-service works, which leave no thread hanging and offer answers to every question that even the most obsessive fan might think up. For example, in Appendix A to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien traces the genealogies of the Kings of Gondor and Rohan and in Appendix B, gives a timeline of Middle-earth. Linguists can learn about the roots of Elvish tongues in Appendix F and detailed information about their grammars and vocabularies in the posthumous The History of Middle-earth and The Peoples of Middle-earth, while those interested in the complete mythology can consult The Silmarillion.

Similarly, George Lucas, a student of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, set out to create a modern myth cycle in the Star Wars universe. The prequel trilogy was always part of the story, though its cinematographic realisation was delayed until technology allowed the creator’s vision to be filmed. The Expanded Universe, which Lucas loosely oversaw but did not, in the main, directly create, answers fans’ questions from “How did the Sith begin?” and “How does a lightsabre work?” to “What happened to Wedge Antilles (a rarely seen pilot in the original trilogy)?”

Cruise’s approach in Top Gun: Maverick is fan service. He gives the audience the familiar thrills and no more. The hostile nation whose nuclear facility must be destroyed is, for example, never even named—though the presence of snow and a ready-to-fly F-14 make me think that it must be Iran. His other franchise, however, Mission: Impossible, has adopted the completist, geek-service approach of Tolkien and Lucas.

The 2018 film Mission Impossible: Fallout answers the question of what happens to the wife Ethan Hunt acquires in MI:3, while the subsequent Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I (2023) confirms the previous film’s hint that the White Widow is the daughter of a character from the first instalment. Another minor character from that episode is also brought back, and we learn details about the team’s hitherto unexplored pre-IMF (Impossible Missions Force) lives. The recently released Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (2025) continues this trend, bringing back another, even more minor character from the first film, revealing that a new character is once again the offspring of a previous one, and that the Entity—an Artificial Intelligence, the object of the search that forms the central plot driver of the last two movies—is actually the never-explained MacGuffin from another, earlier film. Final Reckoning may be the last film in the franchise—if so, its creators seem intent on leaving no loose ends.

The Mission: Impossible franchise is not the first thriller property to adopt this universe-building approach. Tom Clancy does something similar in his Jack Ryan novels. Although the main character’s backstory is told in the first novel, The Hunt for Red October, the novel Red Rabbit, written eighteen years later, adds a new, previously unknown, episode to his life, while Without Remorse does the same for another series regular whose daughter marries yet another recurring character. The same names continually reappear: the submarine captain who finds the Red October has become Chief of the Pacific submarine fleet by 1994’s Debt of Honor, while Ryan’s Annapolis instructor friend in Patriot Games has become an admiral who commands Task Force 77’s operation to retake the Marianas Islands. Loose ends are tied up: for example, what appears to be an isolated Iranian plot in Executive Orders is revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy in The Bear and the Dragon.

Mission Impossible and the Ryanverse are examples of retrospective geek service, in which creators try to link different threads as the series progresses, explaining old mysteries with reference to new features—AI technology of the kind depicted as The Entity had not yet been invented when the first film was produced in 1996. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, by contrast, like Tolkien’s, is an example of planned geek service: cameos and hints of what is to come are planted throughout the series. The Tesseract is first unveiled in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger, though its full significance is not clear until it becomes the driving force of the plot of 2012’s The Avengers, as well as making later appearances in Thor: Ragnarök (2017), The Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Captain Marvel (2019). We also, however, increasingly see imposed geek service, in which a new universe is created around an existing cultural property, no matter the original author’s intention—indeed, sometimes in contradiction to it.

In Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), for example, Phileas Fogg undertakes the journey as the result of a bet. The men of his club have been debating whether such a feat would be possible, so he decides to find out. There is no more to it. There is no more to him. The most recent TV adaptation (of 2021), however, reveals that Fogg was not simply an intrepid Victorian deciding to explore the world, like some mountaineer “because it was there” but a modern man, motivated by regret at having pulled out of an earlier trip, a decision that cost him his fiancée—though he meets her again later in the film, which provides him with closure. The series ends with a scene in which Fogg is reading about a mysterious sea monster that is attacking ships—seemingly setting up a new version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea despite the fact that the original features an entirely different cast of characters. Like Conan Doyle, Verne was happy for Fogg to have no existence outside his novel but his successors have decided otherwise. Similarly, to Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot was simply a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep” by nature—as he is depicted in the 1974 film of Murder on the Orient Express. By the time of Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 Death on the Nile, however, Poirot’s behaviour and personality were felt to need an explanation, so the film opens with a flashback to his service in WWI.

There are sound commercial reasons behind geek service. Hollywood movies are expensive to produce and franchises often have dedicated fanbases on whom they can rely to buy tickets to the latest release. The more stories in a property one can cover, the more money one can make. The more in-universe details one describes, the more invested the fans are likely to become. Completism also adds an air of cleverness—creators show off their intelligence by weaving together seemingly disparate threads and paying attention to every detail, no matter how unimportant. You may think a character or episode trivial, but they know better. There is a naïve belief that the significance of the whole will be elevated if every part turns out to be significant.

Completism can, however, come at the cost of plausibility. This is a problem in fantasy and sci-fi, genres that often present radically different societies and worlds—and even more so in thrillers, which are ostensibly set in our familiar reality. In real life, many events are trivial one-offs with no further consequences and many people briefly cross our paths once and afterwards we never see or hear of them again. The more coincidences, reveals, and reappearances creators insert into their films, the harder it becomes to suspend our disbelief. Does Jack Ryan really know no one who messes up?

In addition, if there can be a pleasure in knowing, there can also be a pleasure in not knowing—in speculating, debating, wondering. Art often survives not because of what it says, but because of what it does not say. Dumas tells us what happens to the Musketeers but, like Homer with Aeneas, he does not tell us what happens to the Count of Monte Cristo when he sails over the horizon. Does he lead a life of idle luxury? Does he use his money to right wrongs? Could he be a shadowy figure occasionally putting his finger on the scale to see justice done? Geek service provides us with facts to learn, but fan service leaves us with questions to ponder.