One interesting example here is Joker. It seems like the filmmakers did not like the audience they attracted with the first film, nor the messages that this audience took away. So the sequel seems like it was intentionally designed to piss that audience off.
The Matrix is an earlier and I think more impactful example of this. That is a movie made by two trans filmmakers and with hindsight it is clearly an exploration of their own identities. Yet somehow it has been co-opted by people with diametrically opposed political and gender ideologies[1]. That has to be incredibly frustrating as an artist and I bet many people have seen that sort of reaction and go out of their way to make it more difficult for people to be that wrong about their art.
This is an ironic reply as like those fans of the Matrix, you appear to be reading something different in what I said than what I intended.
I'm not saying the trans reading of The Matrix is the only valid reading of that movie. However, anti-trans folks and their ideologically peers reading the movie as supporting their worldview is objectively not the intended reading and therefore is likely incredibly frustrating to the trans creators. It is easy to imagine other authors seeing that and wanting to avoid that type of gross misreading of their work.
I think I agree with that. It was not the first movie where I remember talking with people who said that it was a bad movie because it could be interpreted in a harmful way. However, it was the first movie where that seemed to be the prevailing opinion in my social group. People complained about toxic readings of the movie, and when I asked them how well they thought those readings were supported by the movie, and what readings they personally took away from it, they wouldn't answer those questions, because they regarded them as distractions from the more important phenomenon of toxic people enjoying the movie.
