Starting today, a discreet multiplex in Glendale, California, will host an influx of action movie fans eager to watch fight films on the big screen. Some selections are exclusive premieres, like Bangkok Dog out of Thailand. Some are beloved hits that have been restored to new heights, like a 4K treatment of the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. And some are direct-to-video pictures getting a rare chance at a theatrical exhibition, like The Night Comes for Us, which lives on Netflix.
At each and every showing, many rows of seats will be populated by folks who first connected with each other and with this event, the Big Bad Film Fest, by bonding on Twitter—swapping GIFs of favorite fights and bulging-muscle reaction memes—over their shared passion for this undersung genre.
“The love for action is about as big and movie-theater-deserving as it can get,” Big Bad cofounder Patrick Young tells me over a Zoom call in the weeks leading up to the festival’s second-year rollout. “I can name 20 horror-specific film festivals off the top of my head, and we got to the point where I couldn’t name a single action one. We saw that gap, and there’s clearly a massive audience for action.”
In case it seems incongruous to think of our biggest spectacle genre as something that doesn’t get the celebration it deserves, consider how far most people will ever dig into these movies when they don’t feature caped crusaders or Keanu Reeves. Where many would think first of Michael Bay or vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger as figureheads of the genre, mainstays of Action Twitter honor titans while also being able to spout the gospels of workhorses like filmmaker James Nunn and stunt-pro-turned-actor Scott Adkins.
While mainstream moviegoers were deciding whether to see Fall Guy in theaters, the regulars of Action Twitter—and yes, they still call it that; “Action X” doesn’t quite pass the smell test—were there for its opening weekend, before heading home and chasing it with Life After Fighting, 2024’s IYKYK streaming gem starring and directed by an Australian martial artist who your dad hasn’t even heard of. (His name is Bren Foster, and, yes, the movie rules.) It’s a two-hour heart-and-fist love letter to the fighters, and it will be playing at Big Bad on Saturday afternoon. It’s one of those Action Twitter treasures that was only released onto small screens, and that the festival’s cofounders wanted to see blown up huge.
Beyond Big Bad, Young is among the Hollywood multi-tools who write, direct, and produce. His cofounder and filmmaking partner Powell Robinson is a cinematographer who also pulls directing and producing duties. Together they have codirected two horror features, Bastard (2015) and Threshold (2020), for their own production company, Big Bad Film. Coming up through the horror circuit, both experienced firsthand the power of film festivals to build fan relationships and boost the careers of filmmakers who are invited.
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 stand-alone 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 5 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 to 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 an 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 LA 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 legwork 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.
For this, Young and Robinson needed to do their own version of a putting a team together montage. Since they didn’t have enough short film submissions the first time around, they reached out to the Action Twitter guru Genre Film Addict—who regularly posts new action shorts he’s discovering online—for recommendations about who to connect with to solicit submissions.
One of the people they reached out to was James Newman, a stunt professional and filmmaker who’s been shooting stuff with friends since he was about 10. As an adult he started working in production, and eventually he wanted to merge his love of movies and action with his extensive training in judo and jiujitsu. Some of his short work started circulating among Action Twitter regulars, which got him in front of the Big Bad team. They were looking to book out BBFF’s first shorts program, and Newman’s “Negative Space,” which he directed and did action design for, ended up playing at the festival last year. Now in 2024, he will be showing off his new short, “Fury Has an Anthem,” alongside this year’s opening night feature, Eye for an Eye 2.
Newman says Big Bad is exciting because blockbuster Hollywood has a reputation for undeserving action at times in its big franchise properties. So, he says, “It’s nice to see a community that actually cares about how action is captured, the quality of action, and really celebrates moments in underrated and unheard-of projects. [Big Bad Film Fest] is at the top of the list of those filmmakers, and I’m just excited to be a part of it.”
Enter the Pod
Once they actually had a program and a location secured, Robinson and Young then needed promotion, and here, too, the community assembled. A cornerstone of the meat squad (a complimentary name) has become the podcast Action for Everyone (A4E), which started in 2021 and feels like a perfect encapsulation of the Action Twitter community via its three hosts: an IT professional in New York going by the name Vyce Victus, whose experience as a service veteran undergirds his specialization in war films; a lawyer-by-day and low-key action encyclopedia named Michael Scott; and Liam O’Donnell, a writer and director best known among followers for his independent sci-fi action film franchise, Skyline. (He took over the property after the first movie bombed and proceeded to revive it with two more core films and a spin-off on the way.)
All together, they’re like the ambassadors of Action Twitter, but of course they weren’t the first podcast about action movies. Scott himself had a prior show dedicated entirely to the filmography of Adkins, and because Action Twitter is a small world with superstars that still measure as under-the-radar by Hollywood standards, Scott even became pals with the stunt icon and would have him on to examine his own filmography. The A4E cofounder is an evangelist for DTV and independent action cinema, and his testimony is that the future of action is currently coming alive on YouTube.
As such, Scott sees BBFF’s emphasis on its block of short films as evidence that the fest will make its mark on big event movies in the years to come. “The Martial Club, who did Everything Everywhere All at Once, they got their start on YouTube,” Scott explains.
Twitter is also where Scott met O’Donnell, who was having the same experience, just from the other side of the fan-filmmaker divide. O’Donnell found the “online action community,” as he calls it, while promoting his 2017 movie Beyond Skyline anywhere he could. It got into a variety of film festivals, and its blend of horror, science fiction, and action meant it could get programmed for a lot of different audiences. But the action fans turned out to be the ones most excited by his work. The filmmaker found champions in writers like Lee Golden, founder of the well-established specialty site Film Combat Syndicate, and Brad Curran at Kung-fu Kingdom. Writers like these have been faithfully reporting on the genre for years, and their output can be considered the ur-texts of what eventually sprang up as Action Twitter.
From the perspective of a filmmaker trying to get his movies in front of the right people—and a lot of them—O’Donnell sees the fervor of the online action community as an organized demographic with every bit as much marketing potential as horror devotees. That group has an entire network of festivals meant to cultivate filmmakers as well as fans, with commensurate targeted marketing from big-name studios like A24 and Blumhouse and Neon that know exactly where and who to sell their movies to.
London hosts the Fighting Spirit Film Festival, but that’s too far for most American fans to access. ActionFest out of North Carolina ceased to operate more than a decade ago, and there hasn’t been a Fantastic Fest equivalent that’s risen with the explosion of the genre’s energetic base of enthusiasts. Can Big Bad Film Fest be that change? O’Donnell sees the fest as a new home for action fans and action makers to get the same specialized treatment he sees in other pockets of genre media.
“I think what happens to a lot of these great movies by Jesse V. Johnson and John Hyams and Scott Adkins is that the people who market them don’t make it feel as special as it should be,” O’Donnell says. “There’s no reason why something like Avengement did not get the red carpet treatment and have festival releases around the world. It’s better than 99 percent of the movies that got those slots. That’s a thing where Big Bad is like, ‘We’re the place where that movie gets its day in the sun,’ and that is what’s so cool about it. Look at what the horror community does. Look at the way companies market to that community. They support this whole ecosystem, which is really how most people break into filmmaking, period.”
As O’Donnell got more and more tapped into the action enthusiasts, he sought out what Young and so many other regular, non-filmmaker Joes online were looking for: people to talk with about cool movies. Enter Action for Everyone, which has become a watercooler for Action Twitter, as its cohosts frequently invite guests that range from film writers to filmmakers to fight choreographers. They perform close readings of movies and have deeply technical conversations, but they also just bullshit like friends discussing movies do. A4E is the perfect platform to get the word out about the Big Bad Film Fest, which is basically real-life Action Twitter. Scott, with only a hint of kidding in his voice, says he expects to know at least half the people in the audience.
Community Driven
The Boys, as listeners know them, have done teaser episodes for BBFF each of these first two years, and some of the writers Young met on Twitter, like Streussnig and Page, have contributed pieces to the festival program both times. From the lovingly labored-over shorts program that’s meant to give up-and-coming stunt pros a chance to network with each other and expose their skills to a wider audience to the celebration of perhaps less reputable Bond films, seeing the buzz around Big Bad as a movie event and a fun hang is like watching Film Twitter take corporeal form.
“I’ve been very intentional with who I’ve reached out to and who I’ve wanted to get involved,” says Young. “These are all voices who have been instrumental in building the audience that we are now supposedly helping to feed, so I want it to feel like this is this community’s film festival. It’s all community driven. People connecting with other people has been everything.”
With one year of film festival wisdom and experience behind them, Young and Robinson have tuned up Big Bad a little for its second go. The inaugural event was four days long, and this year’s schedule has been tightened to three so more resources could be put to marketing. This time around, the pair got more short film submissions than they could program, and the inroads with stars are getting more established too. Michelle Yeoh and Barbara Broccoli will be providing an introduction for Tomorrow Never Dies. And the hometown heroes, The Boys of A4E, will be running a Q&A session for Life After Fighting. (Well, two-thirds of them will; O’Donnell is in South Africa to prep his next movie, the shark thriller Alphas.)
It’s a massive lift, getting a film festival off the ground, and it’s even harder to keep one going. Robinson and Young are largely pulling it off on their own dime and running every aspect from wrangling talent to managing media to running a marketing campaign. But it was the response to the festival from Ramin Sohrab, who did a Q&A for his movie Layers of Lies during year one, that gave them the confidence to keep the Big Bad Film Fest fires burning. “As long as people like you are doing something like this,” Sohrab told them, “I am going to keep making movies.”
