Social media has become an incredibly important and useful tool in Hollywood, one that’s exponentially increased the reach of the marketing blitz for every movie and TV show under the sun, proving especially helpful for projects which don’t possess the financial resources to launch a tradition campaign full of trailers and TV spots.
The increased online presence of the biggest names in the industry has also brought them closer to their fans than ever before, which has often proved to be a double-edged sword. It feels like somebody new becomes the target of cancel culture on an almost daily basis, while petitions, campaigns, boycotts and negative hashtags are also among the more modern pitfalls of fame and success.
However, Twitter turned out to be hugely beneficial for Rosario Dawson after the actress admitted in a recent interview that fans naming her as an ideal candidate to play Ahsoka Tano in live-action directly led to her being cast as the beloved character in The Mandalorian.
“Actually, it first came from fans online. Someone tweeted me and fancast me. I retweeted back and I was like, ‘Absolutely, yes please’, and ‘#AhsokaLives’. And apparently that got the attention of someone who has been doing the Star Wars press for years. She forwarded it to Dave Filoni. That kind of started a whole thing. I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, did I just get fancast in something?’. And then nothing happened.”
Of course, there was also the wave of inevitable backlash when Dawson was first confirmed as Snips, with many folks upset that longtime voice actress Ashley Eckstein wasn’t given the opportunity to continue playing Ahsoka when Katee Sackhoff was recruited to reprise her role as Bo-Katan.
Since debuting in “The Jedi,” though, Dawson has publicly praised her predecessor to show there are no hard feelings between the live-action and animated Ahsokas, while her debut in The Mandalorian definitely won over the fanbase in a huge way, and it appears more than likely that the Sin City star will be sticking around the Star Wars franchise as Anakin Skywalker’s former Padawan for a long time to come.
