Interesting post but isn’t entertainment audience-driven. If we don’t watch or listen to something then it flops. Right now audiences seem to be losing interest in ‘woke’.
My wife and I enjoy the enormous amount of older shows that are available. The writers, actors and management can fight it out. The outcome is of no concern to us.
All the good shows and movies and music, have already been made. There’s enough material now to last for years.
One of the strike issues, on which I agree completely with the writers and actors, is the demand for greater transparency on streaming numbers. The writers and actors have this odd belief, regarded as archaic and irrelevant by the streaming execs, that they have something to do with the success of a movie or show. The creatives do all the work. The streamers provide a distribution platform.
Before streaming, ticket sales and the secondary market of physical media purchases and rentals gave people real numbers for the purposes of negotiation. For the creatives, this was the gateway to becoming highly paid. Most of the writers and actors aren't A list. Most aren't rich. But the potential is there if they contribute to a couple or three huge successes. They may act for the love of acting -- it probably beats any number of more mundane, normie jobs -- but acting is very high risk with a very low probability of hitting it big. The dream is important.
Today the streamers derive most of their income from subscriptions, which most viewers let coast. While churn is increasing, the nation's couch potato viewers are still relatively passive. They signed up for Netflix or Disney or Amazon (many because they signed up for free shipping with Amazon Prime) and let it coast. And the actors and writers, like the trade press and the general public, are not allowed to see the streaming metrics. "How is my show doing?" is a reasonable question. "None of your business" is not a very good response. But if the streamers get away with not sharing the numbers, the creatives are seriously handicapped in negotiating for performance pay.
If I busted my butt to write or star in a show, I would think I'm entitled to know how the show is actually doing. Real numbers, not press release jabber or astroturfed buzz from media bought by the Borg. Real viewship data.
In the long run, entertainment should be audience driven. When ticket sales and the secondary market were the major revenue streams, the numbers were available. When streaming took off, the key performance numbers were kept secret. And the writers and actors aside, I don't think it's any accident that the wokeness disease metastasized to today's terminal levels at precisely the time that performance data disappeared behind the curtain.
The streamers now own most of the legacy studios. They dominate the industry from project development to distribution. Are they really audience/consumer driven? One of the chronic rants here at FR is that the industry now churns out woke garbage and backhands a huge chunk of the potential audience in the process. I think that's not a coincidence. The dominant revenue stream today is a huge passive income flow from subscriptions. It's not the same thing as making movies that succeed or fail on the basis of selling tickets, back when a movie had to be good enough to entice people to invest an evening and the price of a ticket. Nowadays, unless a movie is so bad that it sparks a backlash and drives people to cancel their subscriptions, the Borg just rolls on. The passive income stream, in turn, becomes a target for every grifting pressure group that wants a cut of the pie. For the grifters, there is no longer a need to actually put butts in seats. That would require talent, work, and enough discipline to not insult the audience. How old fashioned. Their current play is to mau mau the suits at Disney, Amazon, Apple and the rest, with the pitch being intersectionality scores, not viewership.
And for the streaming execs, opaque numbers are a way of evading accountability.
Sunshine is a very effective disinfectant. Let everyone know what the real numbers are. Back when the industry depended on ticket sales, attendance numbers were closely followed, and hot movies used good numbers in their advertising campaigns. Notice how that's disappeared, except for the handful of tentpoles? What do the streamers talk about? Glad you asked. They talk about how diverse their productions have become. That's not a coincidence.
P.S. Another issue, not involved in the strike as far as I know, is how the siloing of content on streaming platform penalizes the creatives. In the old days, the people who made a film wanted the maximum number of butts in seats. They wanted their films in as many theaters as possible, and they bargained hard with the theater chains for screens. Lots of ticket buyers, and everyone could make money.
Now the streamers put their new content behind subscription walls that exclude the substantial majority of the potential audience. Oh, sure: a good movie, if it has any legs at all, will usually (though not always) emerge eventually on other platforms. But that may take a long, long time — becoming generally available long after the buzz has passed and you and I have forgotten about it.
The streamers silo the content because they use it as bait for selling subscriptions. But that’s a revenue model that cuts the creatives off at the knees — especially when the viewership data isn’t shared so that the creatives have no basis for negotiating for performance pay.
I suppose in a perfect world, the creatives would declare independence, form their own production companies, and seek alternative distribution arrangements on their own terms. The independents have always done it this way. In ten years, looking back, we may see that the current angst is simply another stage in the death throes of a legacy business model.
The YouTube presentation that I linked earlier touches on this. The presenter, who is very good, hits this point hard. Yes, the whole industry is in freefall, but it is the suits who blew up the established system. The big companies all bet on the streaming model. They embarked on insane overexpansion and incurred huge debt trying to become the next Netflix. Most of the streamers have never broken even; they have accepted operating losses as the price of rapid expansion. Now the industry is oversaturated and starting to contract, with production cuts and a further wave of consolidations. Basically, the suits made a huge mistake. The execs got an epic case of groupthink and they made a huge mistake. Now they’re killing the creatives, who are the basis of their industry, to cut costs.
But not to worry, AI will replace all the people anyhow.