If you want Marxist analysis specifically, there’s a reason that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall. As laborpower becomes more efficient, it makes firms more able to scale, which in turn makes labor a bottleneck to be further squeezed for profit.
Think about a web server. A simple server will use roughly as much energy to respond to 100 requests as it uses to respond to 100k requests. (Sorry if the exact numbers are wrong, devops people). At the very least, the power usage will not be 1000x greater. So now your bottleneck to scaling that large is the engineer team who will upkeep that server. As the ability to optimize decreases (once the low hanging fruit is captured and the industry has matured) the only way to keep profits going is to squeeze labor.
In the case of a lot of media industries, younger and younger talent is brought in to produce works which are increasingly designed by committee to leverage established intellectual property.
This is why intellectual property is so important to modern capitalists. The average direct-to-video Disney sequel made at least an order of magnitude less money than the originals they were based off of. But the originals were such hits that those sequels still outperformed their original-IP flops. This pattern has propagated all over the place to the point where even the MCU’s flops performed like moderate hits.
In other words, labor is less of a bottleneck for these properties because the companies have figured out how to create them with lower-skilled labor.
I don’t want to perpetuate the myth of unskilled labor. If labor didn’t involve skill, no one would need to specialize in it. But in the case of media, a decade or two of experience in the craft and the ability to exercise artistic license tends to create a more enjoyable product.
Maybe a better way to put it is that the “meritocracy” of media industries increasingly defines “merit” as having less to do with artistic skill and more to do with a desire to work long hours with shit pay and no complaints. Because they already have the “art” figured out
Yes. Cultural symbols can be very strong and very motivating, which is why capitalists have put so much time and energy into disrupting the means by which we create, reify, and interact with them.
A symbol as simple, ingrained, and significant as “skull = death” will now be a commodified element for the brand guide of an ad campaign to target a statistically identified marketing demographic cluster, which some shitty marketing startup running out of Oregon has oh-so-wittily titled “Witches & Bitches” based on some obscure AI algorithm which claims the “anonymized” health data they just bought en masse indicates these people have an interest in countercultural clothing
And if this algorithm can provide a 10% YOY increase in click through rate KPIs these trust fund tech bros will make millions off of Witches & Bitches
Friend, it's about to get a lot worse. Now that Netflix and other streaming services anticipate losing access to cheap credit as it's expected the FED will raise interest rates, that's going to show up in the amount of funding their shows get and what kind of shows get produced. I imagine we're going to see another wave of reality tv shows.
Netflix said they were gonna end their wasteful spending on projects like The Irishman in favour of trash reality tv or something like that, like directly in a tweet or at a conference call or something.
Idk about Apple TV but HBO legitimately doesn't miss often. They put out such good shows
Yes I believe they canceled a few shows to make some reality show about streamers or something
It’s gonna just be YouTube vlogs and curated Twitch streams now 😂
David Harvey's Anticapitalist Chronicles has an episode that touches on this, I believe it's related to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. I think the episode title is something like "Rate versus Mass" and its at least a year old. I won't be able to reproduce the logic exactly but as the rate of profit falls capitalists are forced to produce things that last less and less, or for which the consumption time is continually being reduced
Treating artistic media in particular as disposable is alien to me, especially digital stuff that takes no space or energy to store. It's all unique and even recreations lose "something" in the transition.
It's the most artificial of artificial scarcities and I hate it so much
Declining quality is a corollary to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
yeah, if profits are falling because revenues are falling, then the costs of production have to be cut too.
i also think there's a not-strictly-marxian aesthetic critique to be made of the way capitalist realism has disemboweled our capacity to believe in the viability of genuinely new or novel ideas, or of how the cultural fragmentation brought about by the neoliberal turn has paradoxically reduced the variety of artistic expression allowed by the marketplace, since there's no longer a dialectical cycle of culture and counterculture, just a constantly cranked sense of self-awareness and self-defeatism as everyone tries to be their own antithesis.
El problemo es capitalismo
Falling rate of profit means you gotta squeeze harder and harder to get the profit out
I can't believe people even watch new TV and movies. Every time I see something, I'm amazed at what lousy slop it is.
There are a lot of other reasons but I like to point at CGI-driven shows as a vector for schlock because the producers place so much focus on it and how it works into the stories to the exclusion of everything else. It's expensive, but cheap enough that they can (1) get it and (2) micromanage it.
Source: I know basically just this one thing about the topic, disregard anything else that I say.
The simple version is that CGI creates another way for producers to override writers. There are shows and movies that are 80% constructed around CGI fight scenes or space battles and so on. The CGI usually isn't even good (example: that CW or whatever version of The Flash). But you can viscerally tell that every episode is constructed around a fairly simple formula that's just waiting for the CGI scenes to happen.
CGI doesn't make a show or film bad, but it does offer another way for a show or film to be made badly but still be perceived as marketable.
Outside of the big brains in this thread with their fancy book learning, I think this specific instance is partially due to how streaming services have pretty much taken over the industry.
There's little reason to focus on quality since people are paying for subscriptions anyways, just needs to be good enough not to get people to get pissed and unsubscribe. And I think that's probably an incredibly low bar, like look at Netflix lmao. They're basically trying to get people to unsubscribe and still doing mediocre.
Movie reviews used to forewarn audiences, but now it's a bit different since the audience has already bought the ticket.
Same for those games you mentioned. Those IPs are owned by those companies, and the fans are buying them no matter what. It's similar to a captured audience.
This is a solid analysis. With subscription services they already have your money. It's kinda like how in the last few years g*mers have had to reconcile with how their obsession with pre-ordering has allowed companies to release shit games. They already have your money.
To put both movies and games together: if the movie shot doesn't work they can just "fix it in post" with CGI. Same with games. You release a broken game? They'll patch it. Patch after patch until they work out the kinks. Just so long as it hits release date for all the pre-orderers who are demanding their slop.
Disney fixes their shit on their subscription even after it's been released lately lol. Yeah hard agree
Really? They're patching movies and shows now? Fucking incredible.
Yerp check it:
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/disney-plus-is-editing-bloody-violence-out-of-a-surprising-marvel-show
Not even close to the only example, they're even doing it to older movies. Just a quick google find
They're also not just censoring, they do it to match up with movie "canon" better:
https://thedirect.com/article/wandavision-halloween-episode-edited-disney
They're minor edits so far technically, but yeah they're definitely testing the potential
Youtube fan videos have better production than what Disney is putting out these days. Disney is a souless corporation that will destroy anything you once loved.
Watch this darth maul fan film, way better than anything put out by Disney in years, and there's several more on youtube just as good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey68aMOV9gc
Star Trek continues is all free, all 17 episodes, all better than anything put out as NuTrek.
Idk but did you see the new matrix? Perfect example of this. The dojo scene looked like pure shit. The fight choreography was God awful, whereas in the first film it was incredibly inspired. Bad fight choreography really makes me mad
See I kinda hated the winky meta jokes of the matrix, just felt like pure smarmy bullshit. The original matrix was so good because it took itself and it's world seriously. Also the CGI really looked terrible where's my squibs :matt-jokerfied:
not really an answer just an observation but going off of what you said about obi wan, anything live action that disney has made in the past 5 years (with the exception of the star wars sequels surprisingly) has some of the worst lighting, color grading, and cgi i’ve ever seen. like the mcu movies and disney+ shows, star wars disney+ shows, all those live action remakes like dumbo or aladdin, and random shit like jungle cruise are some of the worst shit i’ve ever looked at on screen and i feel like the average person doesn’t notice it at all which drives me crazy
