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Some brands don't want you to understand their ads — and that's exactly the point. From cryptic drops to deliberately broken campaigns, a growing wave of companies is borrowing Wonderland's nonsense logic to cut through the noise and build genuine cult followings. Here's how they're doing it, and why Gen Z is eating it up.
Forget the library. Forget the film studies class. The new home of Alice fandom is a 47-second TikTok, a podcast recorded in someone's spare bedroom, and a Discord server with 12,000 members who have very strong opinions about the 2010 Tim Burton movie. Digital platforms haven't just amplified Alice fandom — they've completely rebuilt what it looks like.
Wonderland has always been a little too familiar — the arbitrary rules, the rulers who demand loyalty without earning it, the endless performance of civility over actual fairness. Modern adaptations have figured out that Carroll's nonsense kingdom maps almost perfectly onto corporate culture, political theater, and consumer capitalism. Here's a look at how Alice-themed franchises have turned the rabbit hole into a funhouse mirror for real-world systems.
Filmmakers and novelists keep trying to give Alice a love story, and Wonderland keeps eating it alive. From clumsy love triangles in gritty reimaginings to the total romantic vacuum of the original text, something about Carroll's world is fundamentally hostile to hearts of the non-playing-card variety. We're ranking the attempts, calling out the disasters, and hunting for the rare few that actually worked.
American McGee handed us a bloodstained Alice with a kitchen knife in 2000, and the fandom basically never recovered — in the best way. The gravitational pull toward dark, twisted, and morally complicated versions of Alice in Wonderland is one of the most consistent patterns in the franchise's fan community. But why? What is it about Carroll's original that keeps inviting us to break it?
From black-and-white silent films to viral TikTok rabbit holes, Alice's story has been retold in more ways than the Mad Hatter has hats. We ranked 15 adaptations on a pure weirdness scale — because in Wonderland, 'faithful to the source material' is the most boring thing you can be.