Image: Still from the movie Star Wars: Beggar’s Canyon
Post was updated: September 23, 2026
If you want to know what the future of fan fiction looks like, watch Star Wars: Beggar’s Canyon. As someone who likes Star Wars - I watched the original trilogy in the theatres in the 80s - I found it very well made in terms of my investment in the story. Judging by the comments, many of the folks who watched Star Wars in the 80s had the same feeling; the common comment was “This is what Star Wars used to feel like.”
Since I wrote this, Beggar’s Canyon has added six more episodes, and it now has 1.7 million views across all episodes. Why is Beggar’s Canyon so popular and loved? I guess it’s because it dives into “empty” space: “An ongoing, long-form Star Wars series on YouTube, weaving one original story from across eras of Star Wars lore into a thrilling adventure between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.” And the comments support that. I went through 388 of them, which is not a scientific sample, but it gives you an idea - at least 32 comments explicitly talked about childhood, the original trilogy, the 1970s or 1980s, or feeling like a kid again. That was my impression of the movie too; it brought me back to Kino Zagreb, where I watched The Return of the Jedi - the crowd was so excited that the cinema’s glass doors were actually broken.
Only 27 comments explicitly mention AI, and 25 are positive or accepting. People talk about story, characters, pacing, dialogue, music, and, above all, how the films made them feel. Some said they cried, got chills or briefly felt like children again! One viewer wrote that, for nine minutes, they were seven years old again. Another said they forgot they were watching an AI-generated film. Interestingly, that was my experience at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), where, at a CapCut event, I saw three AI films: They Came When We Left, The Closet, and The Fall. Not one felt like an AI - nor was I thinking about it as AI, as the stories were so inviting.
The 70s and 80s heroes
Image: Still from The Lost Indiana Jones Movie: Eye of Poseidon
Beggar’s Canyon clearly hit a nerve and found the sweet spot in terms of what people want, story-wise. I wondered if this is Star Wars-specific, and whether other fan fiction movies have the same vibe and sentiment. Interestingly, another 80s franchise is getting fan fiction versions: Indiana Jones. The Adventures of Short Round imagines the life of one of the supporting characters - Short Round - from the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (played by the fantastic Ke Huy Quan, who many years later won an Oscar for the amazing Everything Everywhere All at Once). The Adventures of Short Round is a great example of a fan fiction film that continues the story. This 6-minute short got 40,000 views, while another movie from the same author, The Lost Indiana Jones movie: Eye of Poseidon, has 392,000 views (Sept 21).
Sentiment around Indiana Jones is similar to that around Beggar’s Canyon - the audience loves that the Indiana Jones they know is back (and that’s the one from the 80s). In the comments, people point out AI mistakes and glitches, but they tend to forgive them. So, the love for the known characters and story is strong enough that the audience tolerates mistakes. The audience also talks about the story, music, one-liners, cinematography, and pacing, which shows it’s not just seeing old Indy again that keeps them engaged.
Different fan films fill different gaps
Looking beyond Beggar’s Canyon and Indiana Jones, I found that AI fan films were filling very different gaps. Beggar’s Canyon seems to give some viewers the feeling of the original Star Wars they remember. Shadows of the Empire, a fan adaptation of the 1996 Star Wars multimedia story, gives fans a story they have wanted to see on screen for decades. The Adventures of Short Round continues the life of a supporting character. Duel of the Fates, based on the abandoned Episode IX screenplay, attempts to visualize a movie that almost existed but was never made. And Till Morning, a Star Trek fan film imagining a final goodbye to the original crew, gives some Star Trek fans something different again: a goodbye. These films are not filling one gap, but many different ones.
Clearly, most of these AI fan fiction movies did something right, which made me wonder if AI is the future of fan fiction. Of course, fan-made movies aren’t new. Only a year after Star Wars, in 1978, Hardware Wars came out. Star Trek has a long history of fan films, including Paragon’s Paragon (1974) and Yorktown: A Time to Heal (2022). Some super cool kids even remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot! Many of us had that moment, myself included: I wrote a fan fiction story set in the world of Doogie Howser M.D. when I was around 15.
Needless to say, the desire to get more from the shows and movies we love is as old as they are. I went down a rabbit hole by doing some research and reading Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, which covers Star Trek fan fiction from 1967 to 1987. I also read Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Both clearly show what we know - sometimes, we want more of that world or us in it.
Lower barrier to make a fan fiction movie
Until recently, we couldn’t imagine making a convincing fan film without huge support from friends and fans. To write a fan fiction piece, you need to know how to write and, of course, the world you are writing about. For movies, you needed actors, cinematographers, costumes, a sound designer, a video editor, and even with all of them, you needed some money - at least for lunch. That barrier is much lower today. You do need money or time, but it’s definitely much easier. Whoever wonders what happened to some character from their favourite show can now answer that question themselves.
In the “olden days” before AI, fan fiction was mostly writing, not filmmaking, and now AI could change that by giving filmmaking tools to a broader audience. Just as Wattpad, AO3, and FanFiction.net became tools for fan fiction writers, AI is becoming a tool for those who want to share stories from the worlds they love. Another thing that struck me as I contemplated this is that the next generation will grow up with AI filmmaking tools, and for them, these tools will be a way to express themselves. Yes, some will write, but some will make films easily, just like I wrote my fan fiction piece.
As we saw with Star Wars and Indiana Jones fan fiction movies, the audience seems to care little about how the movie was made (this is subjective, not a fact). They notice how the movie made them feel, which is characteristic of traditional movies, where you rarely think about how they’re made unless it’s Mission: Impossible, where Tom Cruise does a bunch of cool stunts, or you are a movie geek. While AI tools let us create some really cool spectacles, without a story that pulls us in, we will not care as much.
The future will bring many small fan fiction movies, and some of them may even influence studios, just as a poem in a Star Trek fan magazine helped inspire the idea of Kirk returning to Genesis in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. So, not much is changing - just the medium of fan fiction.