who has time to watch all this shit
It began around the time Transformers releasedin 2007 in my opinion and then it really ramped up once Marvel got going.
How does content's popularity increase its cost? And I thought reboots and side stories were symptoms of our entertainment glut - now that there's a long-tail model of choices, it's easier to reach for a familiar brand/IP than suffer the disappointment of digging through options that don't satisfy.
There is plenty of room for niche creators for niche audiences, but thanks to the studio system creatives are forced to obey the whims of rich nepo babies who don't have a creative bone in their body.
There are so many good ideas out there that get shot down because ceo Line Go Up talked to ceo Nepodork and CEO Slavedriver at the bar last night and THEY said NFTs tiktok anti-woke was in right now- so it's time to cancel everything.
Yes I'm bitter.
That glorious, wondrous, heartbreaking, heartwarming, and groundbreaking show is :meow-hug: incarnate.
Funny anecdote from a tv writer I spoke with:
Developer Exec pitched a new show:
"Taming of the shrew... but with furniture!"
Lead exec looks over the pitch board: "... ... genius. "
Also boss baby was because the execs wanted madmen... but with babies.
I love having art filtered through these dorks, this is the best system, no question.
It's absolute dog shit. Everything feels so plastic now. Most of this shit is just designed to be played in the background while you do other stuff, at least, that's what I've heard from some of the strikers in the writers guild.
As someone who lived in an artist town that had too many artists and not enough buyers, probably a lot of heartache and poverty for creators.
the explosion of streaming subscriptions is rent-seeking for movies. buy rights to a bunch of shit and corral it behind your tax booth. not really 'production' per-se and the few 'original' shows each new streamer puts out to prove their worth is a drop in the bucket, really.
what's happening is they're all drawing from the same well and it cannot sustain 100 different rentiers. so like cable, and theaters and movie studios long before, it's gonna consolidate when all these assholes start failing
I think there's something to be said for novelty, though. Modern productions reflect the culture they were produced in, and that familiarity is one less barrier for an audience to overcome. If we have "all this shit" to wade through, something new seems, to me, like it could be "relevant", "fresh", or oh no the marketing is working
I think there is a crisis of overproduction here, but in the context of entertainment the effect is that everyone gets atomized into smaller and smaller interest groups watching nicher and nicher forms of entertainment. Even the closest things we have to mass entertainment now - Marvel movies, professional sports, etc - feel like they're being consumed by shrinking and less mainstream fanbases every year.
The thing is, I think that the entertainment industry is somewhat insulated from the classical Marxist causes of a crisis of overproduction. This is because the money in the industry flows alongside the money from the Marketing industry, with the two creating a feedback loop into each other that causes them both to be able to grow without limit.
Marketing and Entertainment seem like they're growing forever, and I think that's because they're not really limited by a physical commodity the way that, say, producing plastic is limited by the availability of oil and the number of people who want to buy it. With a physical commodity there eventually comes a point in the crisis of overproduction where all of the plastic is sitting in warehouses not going anywhere, all of the factories that can turn it into crap are full, and all of the crap is sitting on store shelves, and everyone in the industry has to stop production and acquisition all at once, causing a crash.
But with entertainment and marketing, when is that realization reached? Perhaps it will be reached when the Marketing executives all realize that their ads are worthless - but we've seen research time and time again suggest that this is the case, and the corporations continue to spend on it. Perhaps it will be reached when the servers are completely full and the production studios are all churning out as much content as physically possible - but then again we've seen that there is seemingly no cost to mass-deleting old content to push people onto what's new.
Personally I think that this whole thing is like a game of chicken, and eventually someone is going to blink and cause massive earthquakes across both industries. It will have to be a major player, and I predict that the fallout will be the deaths of all minor corporations in those industries and monopolization by the large ones. But it's also possible that the timescale on this eventually happening is much longer than the timescale of some other crisis occurring that renders the whole marketing/entertainment crisis a moot point.
My friend was comparing it against the 50s-90s when mass media was adopted, the vast majority then was consuming the same media and thus the cultures of each decade had distinct separate characteristics.
But since the aughts we're back to before those times, we we've sort of made media so massive that there's all these little niche pockets you can find endless content in creating a bunch of separate co-existing cultures each with their own individual characteristics existing simultaneously.
Like we went all the way back around to before there was a mainstream by creating so many different niches of media and understandings.
Thus there's no real prevailing culture either
I'm pretty sure this is the Long Tail theory in play. As long as consumers have the appetite for new films & shows, and the storage & distribution are cheap, we can continue to churn out media to meet that demand. Amazon has acknowledged that it's part of why they're successful.
I thought the marketing was necessary to reach a big enough audience though. I don't quite understand how industry money flowing alongside marketing money props this all up?
The marketing thing doesn't apply to streaming services that don't have ads. Purely subscription-based services are, IMO, going to eventually reach a hard limit of subscribers when they fully saturate people's disposable incomes - and when that happens they'll be forced to turn to advertisements to make up for the lost growth potential, thus becoming bound up in the game of chicken. If you're dependent on ad money, and then the ad money stops, better hope you've got the reserves to last long enough to reorganize yourself.
As for the necessity of marketing, its effectiveness is a hotly debated topic. I think that there's a baseline level of effectiveness that marketing has, but the sheer amount of marketing we're exposed to on a daily basis waters its effectiveness down significantly. What's more important than whether or not it works though is whether or not CEOs believe it works, and they are currently acting as though it does.
I think that there’s a baseline level of effectiveness that marketing has, but the sheer amount of marketing we’re exposed to on a daily basis waters its effectiveness down significantly.
competitive commercial advertising is a complete waste of humanity and it's all about being the last fast food ad somebody saw on tv when they're hungry on the way home from work
oh gosh I was thinking marketing for the media itself, nvm I get it.
who has time to watch all this shit
Me. I have real bad insomnia and frequently watch like five hours of TV in a night. I end up watching just about every moderately interesting sci-fi or fantasy show made, as well as tons of other stuff. If it wasn't for an endless backlog of anime I would run out of things I have any interest in. And I do go back and rewatch stuff.
im like this except when im in that insomnia time i cant handle serious plot or anything. so i have comfort youtube channels i watch. around 2016 or so, i'd seen every nerdcubed video ever released, and a good 40% of them multiple times. some of those 10+ times. like, easily thousands of hours of just that one channel.
these days it's northernlion who gets me through hard times.
Yeah I tend to wind down for the night with more serious shows then when I realize it's going to be another hard night switch over to whatever dross I'm into at the moment. Not gonna fall to sleep watching Andor but Wynonna Earp is dumb enough I don't care if I sleep though it.
I was talking to my friend about this last night. There's so much garbage and I'm too low key depressed and high key anxious to sift through it to find the good stuff and commit the mental energy to appreciate it. I just keep going back to stuff I've already seen and played.
I feel this comrade :meow-hug: I use the "official" lists on icheckmovies.com to help sift through the heaps. Lists curated by directors, institutes, critics, etc.
...commit the mental energy to appreciate it
Word. idk if this is you, but sometimes I gotta turn off expectations for the film and myself. It's not a waste to just let it wash over you. You don't owe anyone a take. :shrug-outta-hecks:
The bread was there but they just cut a lot of it. Miss COVID level food share already
I think centralized high-cost productions have become too saturated. Social media seems to be doing a good job at creating and filling niches that take less labor to create and are more engaging. The feedback loop is more like days instead of years.
What is true is that the attention economy is a generalization of the phenomenon see in fast fashion. Development cycles need to get shorter so people can consume more. I think there’s a real niche to be had for a social-media-like platform that allows mid-tier productions to gain widespread appeal. Classic movie companies can’t shit out thousands of months-long projects because people would hold them directly accountable for all the failures. But YouTube is much less likely to be held accountable for one of the partnered creators being shitty. The blame is distributed by the expectations of the format. Obviously, the market for the days-long feedback loop is highly competitive between these handful of social media giants. And the market for the years-long feedback loop is highly saturated by the big American movie studios. But the months-long feedback loop is still something that you have to put a lot of effort into curating your feed for and opting into it.
On YouTube, the activities and formats that were able to be done by small teams on that tight schedule were honed over years. That tends to pump out 10-20 minute videos daily. You see a similar thing with nightly shows having giant staffs to make a cable-safe live broadcast every night. They get about an hour a night. I’d imagine you could hold people’s attention for about 40 minutes a night with a medium sized writing/editing staff and have success. But that path to learn through failure on that front is one no one wants to take. Cable isn’t going to green light shit if you can’t get past their gatekeepers. And establishing a team of that size and trying to get them to compete for attention with the people who are shitting out bright flashy ten minute YouTube videos every day is hard. Even people who post high-effort content once a day on TikTok don’t necessarily have a huge advantage over an individual person who’s just walking around talking to their phone.
For real. It’s such an unsustainable level of consumption and high level of waste. Polyester could be a great material to manufacture textiles with if we actually used those products for decades at a time. That’s very possible with clothes, especially because the material’s pretty resilient. But instead the secondhand market is absolutely flooded with clothes to the point where only 20% of what’s donated to thrift stores is ever sold and most shelters actively refuse clothes outside of winter jackets and unused socks. The rag houses are overflowing and what they can’t sell to vintage pickers or make into industrial rags gets thrown in a landfill. And yet people are still buying more clothes per person every year.
I get so mad at people who think degrowth is inherently a neoliberal project. Like, really? Yeah, the hollowing out of society performed by neoliberalism means that even the imperial core could use some growth in the healthcare industry. But clothing? That shit could shrink exponentially and none of us are gonna go without. It’s absolute capitalist brain to think otherwise.
Unfortunately, high-plastic fibers are often the ones that last a long time. Or maybe that’s fortunate if you enjoy wearing your clothes until they’re falling off your body, which I do. Cotton, meanwhile can start to degrade through regular use in just a couple years. But it’s really common with modern designs to see high-plastic stretch fibers woven into the fabric, which also degrades really quickly. So it’s kinda the worst of both worlds.
I’ve been shopping on eBay, just going to Buy It Now and sorting low to high. Shit’s pretty cheap, it’s not contributing to fast fashion, and it’s more accessible for me than thrifting because I’m big in several senses of the word. And a lot of 70’s and 80’s polyester is still in great condition and just sitting in people’s closets.
I think there’s a real niche to be had for a social-media-like platform that allows mid-tier productions to gain widespread appeal.
What do "mid-tier productions" look like? A regular show with all the trimmings, just shot with no-name cast and an phone?
Classic movie companies can’t shit out thousands of months-long projects because people would hold them directly accountable for all the failures.
I think studios wouldn't be held accountable for failures more than they are now - aren't profit and engagement the feedback they're after? I think it's just expensive af.
I think you're right about the expectations of the format. I'm not bothered by a youtube video that is a patent waste of time, but I'm genuinely upset by wasting twenty minutes trying to get into a crap film.
Imo, a mid-tier production is higher production quality and length than you'd expect to be reasonable on a platform like YouTube. Not budgeted like or necessarily as high end as prestige tv, but still full length regular productions. YouTube premium originals were sort of like this, and there have been some platforms that have distributed a handful of shows in this way, like seeso or vrv, but mostly their original content was just throwing pasta at the wall to see what sticks.
If a platform came along that hosted a number of lower budget but higher production quality series which were actually good, that would be pretty neat imo.
A lot of Western animation is targeting this sort of budget and distribution channel, a good example being Vivziepop distributing Helluva Boss via YouTube, and the various Cartoon Hangover series. There seems to be some trade back and forth between streaming services and these midrange productions, with creators and series flipping back and forth based on whether or not they can get a service to pay for a series or whether they need to crowdfund it.
What do “mid-tier productions” look like? A regular show with all the trimmings, just shot with no-name cast and an phone?
In seriousness, technological advances can't be ignored. I carry around a compact camera that doubles as a 4K video camera that can basically see in the dark in my daily-carry bag, and it cost less than a month's rent. A few of those, some Zoom sound recorders, and Kdenlive makes for a really inexpensive yet capable setup for indie movie type projects.
Oh I don't doubt the viability. I'm genuinely curious what changeling means by "mid-tier".
I agree with you. Youtube and TikToks bear a strong resemblance to early film and Nickelodeons. Cinema is in a rough patch and probably will be in this current model for a lot longer than they should be. In the meantime, digital media will probably hit the same strides TV and film did in their early years.
Economics aside, a crisis of overproduction from a broader perspective is a tragedy of capitalism. "Poverty in the midst of plenty" definitely describes whatever stage of spectacle we are at now.
The ability to capture the motions of life is such an amazing thing humanity has achieved. But a lot of it now is people going through the motions of producing a commodity for profit, and people going through the motions of consuming it because "culture" told them they need to keep up with the trends. Interestingly, these motions are now what life is, but it isn't reflected on the screen anymore, because that is boring. "Poverty in midst of plenty"
