Last Game You Played

Damien said:
especially since the big guns are snapping up so many smaller publishers/developers, so they all end up under the same evil umbrella.
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One of my main ongoing concerns with stuff like Disney TV is they keep locking down talented actors and directors who might be making new and interesting stuff and have them churn out another aggressively mediocre season of a tentpole franchise instead.

A whole generation of talent is going to wasted on that stuff. Hardly any of it will be allowed to be weird enough to break out on its own, and in the meantime we're missing masterpieces that might've been.

end rant.
 
JakeEkiss said:
One of my main ongoing concerns with stuff like Disney TV is they keep locking down talented actors and directors who might be making new and interesting stuff and have them churn out another aggressively mediocre season of a tentpole franchise instead.

A whole generation of talent is going to wasted on that stuff. Hardly any of it will be allowed to be weird enough to break out on its own, and in the meantime we're missing masterpieces that might've been.

end rant.
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I get you, and I largely agree.

But, maybe a little bit of Devil's advocate here, and only because we are living in late stage Capitalism where this is even a concern; the other side of that is that these huge companies can afford to fail, and therefore can afford to sometimes take risks doing weird things. Netflix ran 7 seasons of The Dragon Prince, saved The Last Kingdom from being cancelled at Season 2 (allowing it to run to completion and get a movie), made that awesome House of Usher show, and has done some other crazy stuff I really enjoyed. Most of their output is slop. They cancel a lot of shit for no good reason. They are not a good company that I like. So none of this is a defense of the current system.

Just saying that in the current system, it's becoming the big guys that can actually afford to take risks because no one else can anymore. The modern world is poison to art in basically every way.
 
Damien said:
I get you, and I largely agree.

But, maybe a little bit of Devil's advocate here, and only because we are living in late stage Capitalism where this is even a concern; the other side of that is that these huge companies can afford to fail, and therefore can afford to sometimes take risks doing weird things. Netflix ran 7 seasons of The Dragon Prince, saved The Last Kingdom from being cancelled at Season 2 (allowing it to run to completion and get a movie), made that awesome House of Usher show, and has done some other crazy stuff I really enjoyed. Most of their output is slop. They cancel a lot of shit for no good reason. They are not a good company that I like. So none of this is a defense of the current system.

Just saying that in the current system, it's becoming the big guys that can actually afford to take risks because no one else can anymore. The modern world is poison to art in basically every way.
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I sort of feel two ways about it. While yes, the bigger guys can take bigger swings, they are, by and large, not doing that. At least, not relative to the stuff they shovel out at speed which is just more of that thing you remember liking when you were 15. I think Netflix is the outlier in that they don't own a deep back catalog of legacy brands to draw on like Disney or HBO/Warner. They have to try new things because they'd have to pay to have the privilege of making a season of Daredevil.

It's not so much that good stuff can't happen in the current system (I mean, I LOVE Andor and think it's arguably the best writing Star Wars has ever had, and I'm really interested to see where Common Side Effects is going) it's that those things feel mostly to me like escapees. Some zookeeper left the gate unlocked too long and a tiger got out into the park. Common Side Effects, if it has one bad ratings season will be gone (see Scavenger's Reign). But we will continue to get Batman TV and movies until the sun burns out. It won't matter if the next one bombs because the folks in charge have already decided to give it more chances than anything else.
 
@JakeEkiss Oh yeah, you're not wrong on any of that. Against my usual nature, I'm trying to look at the bright side and say that, at least in our Capitalist dystopia, 'sure thing' brands allow companies to do weird stuff sometimes. I will say in Disney's... ew.. defense... ew... that they own so much it's hard to say they don't take -any- chances. They just don't take nearly enough compared to how much power and money they have.

It's also fair to say that, like it or not, people fuckin' love the legacy brands. If a Batman movie bombs they'll make more because they know it's kind of an anomaly. Like how a cancelled Batman comic doesn't end all Batman comics. It's Batman. People are going to show up. And even the 'bombs' are only bombs because they did 'under expectations' and not, almost ever, because they actually lost money. These legacy brands that do badly still outperform so much else just on name recognition.

And never forget that bullshit fraudulent 'creative accounting' allows movie and TV studios to ALWAYS say they lost money when they basically never do.
 
@Damien

Yeah. The other thing about the legacy brands though, sometimes the reason they're big is because they got a resurrection. X-Men never would be what it is now if it wasn't handed to Claremont when it was otherwise a dead title. Like, the reason a lot of those big brands exist now is because they already had a few extra chances at bat, and eventually had more hits than misses.

And definitely Disney and Warner can afford to take chances. Way more than they do. They essentially own or purchased the male 18-34 demo over the past two decades, they don't need to churn out as much slop as they do. They could turn out a less at a higher quality while taking more chances on smaller stuff that could blow up. You only need one thing to hit like Star Wars and it'll cover ten others that don't.

But yeah, what're you gonna do? The landscape is where it is, and it'll be a while before new paradigms emerge. I'm actually a lot more hopeful about games since the gaming audience has shown they don't necessarily require every game to be a massive open-world graphics hog to be happy. That means smaller studious with smaller projects can see more success. That gives me some hope.
 
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