New Social Movement in the Cancel Culture of the Indonesian Film A Business Proposal

Digital media have reorganised mass communication into a participatory arena in which audiences can withdraw support from a cultural product collectively and at speed. Cancel culture is the clearest expression of that capacity, yet existing scholarship explains why cancellation is possible without following a single case through its life course, and Indonesian studies have inferred participants' reasoning from platform texts rather than eliciting it. This study therefore asks how the stages of a new social movement unfolded in the cancel culture surrounding the Indonesian adaptation of A Business Proposal (2025), the first Korean-drama remake in Indonesia to be boycotted by its intended audience, and which communicative mechanisms carried the movement from one stage to the next. A qualitative case study within a constructivist paradigm generated data through two digital focus group discussions with 11 purposively selected participants, analysed with the interactive model of Miles, Huberman and Saldaña. Three stages were confirmed: emergence, produced by the circulation of a high-arousal clip; coalescence, by a shared evaluative standard grounded in fan identity; and decline, by the reading of commercial failure as success. Coordination was emergent, decentralised and template-driven rather than organisationally formalised, so bureaucratisation does not describe it and connective action does. The study contributes to communication scholarship by specifying the mechanisms through which fan publics convert affective grievance into commercial and reputational pressure, and by locating the explanatory limit of New Social Movement theory in platform-mediated boycotts.