SAG-AFTRA(actors) Strike

[Cannot think of a name]

He has in the past demonized people who take intimate photos for their partners and not instead the people who distribute those photos without consent, so it would track.

That person was a fictional character on a superhero show who was out to murder a guy. Just an FYI.

And of course that was a totally made up scenario that never happens in real life with real life consequences...

[Forsher]

He and you, by extension. It's a strange bit of anti-union agitprop that isn't particularly convincing - holding a flashlight under your chin and whispering 'user created content' while eliding the differences between platform and omitting figures.

I mean, again...Quibi.

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

[Ameriganastan]

I mean, again...Quibi.

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

Whoa...

[Ifreann]

Nah, you're just making up excuses to avoid admitting you were wrong.

I never think I'm wrong.

That's what I'm saying.

[Forsher]

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

Whoa...

It's not like he's been reported for doing this before or anything... oh, wait, he has.

[Cannot think of a name]

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

Whoa...

Dude needs to learn how the 'foe' function works. But also, if he's beefing with me you don't need to help it along. I live rent free in that dude's head and there's naught to do about it but make sure it's not everyone else's problem.

[Forsher]

Whoa...

Dude needs to learn how the 'foe' function works. But also, if he's beefing with me you don't need to help it along. I live rent free in that dude's head and there's naught to do about it but make sure it's not everyone else's problem.

No, you need to learn that you can't misrepresent peoples' posts because you don't read them without consequences.

I don't have with you. You have problem with being caught talking complete fucking nonsense about something you post endless essays about whilst insisting that you don't really care about and when this was pointed out to you, you put me in your foe's list.

You clearly don't want to talk to me so you should, you know, stop doing that.

[Cannot think of a name]

Moving on from whatever the fuck that was (hopefully)...it seems that targeted picketing to shutdown productions is having an effect.

Leight, drawing on connections from his long history as a TV writer and showrunner as well as his high profile on social media, has, along with a growing number of WGA counterparts, helped organize a series of successful labor actions — small groups assembling within hours, whose protest lines are often respected (and sometimes joined) by Teamsters, IATSE members and other sympathetic allies. The result is production shutdowns. “The whole idea is to empty the [content] pipeline,” he says.

The closures have crossed the country, from Loot and Good Trouble in Los Angeles to The Chi in Chicago and Evil in New York.

Earlier in May, writers picketed the on-location L.A. shoot of writer-director Aziz Ansari’s Lionsgate film Good Fortune for about two and a half days, until production was suspended indefinitely on May 19. Picketer Kyra Jones (Woke, Queens) says these actions “hit [employers] in the pockets harder than anything else that we’re doing. And so hopefully that will get them to get us back on track and get us back working.” Adds Lauren Conn (The Lost Symbol), who also joined the Good Fortune picket line, “We have to make sure that no writing is happening across the board.”

The focus on shutdowns, which rely on the cooperation of fellow workplace unions, is a remarkable shift for the Writers Guild. During its previous strike in 2007-08, when it found itself far more isolated and at odds with its nominal labor allies, there was no equivalent strategy. Now the guild finds itself the beneficiary of unity, in alignment with the fractious Hollywood worker caucus of other unions, each nursing their own set of at times overlapping grievances, and eager to soften the ground for their own contract negotiations. For its part, the WGA declined to “discuss the specifics” of the shutdown strategy.

On average, a lost day of production costs companies between $200,000 and $300,000. Insurance policies don’t cover shutdowns that are caused by the strike. Leading industry underwriter Allianz notes to THR, “It is still early days and too soon to speculate on any impact on future insurance premiums.”
...
Multiple high-level executives who spoke with THR on the condition of anonymity used the same word to describe the guerrilla-style activities: “effective.” It’s prompted an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Rapid-response units of WGA members mobilize to picket at studio gates and at location shoot sites based on tip-offs. Although L.A. location permits are public record (neighborhood filming notices are posted ahead of production, while production activity is released 48 hours after it has ended), at least some of the actionable information, especially the more last-minute intelligence, is originating from sympathetic members of other unions.
...
Key grip and stunt rigger Wade Cordts is the administrator of a Facebook group that has become a conduit for crewmember-sourced production information to WGA picketers. He believes brimming anger across the industry has created a unique moment of solidarity. “Right now, everybody’s ‘below the line,’ ” Cordts, a member of both SAG-AFTRA and IATSE, observes. “It’s these megacorporations that are trying to break labor.”

Publicly they're putting on a brave face, but eh...

One programmer observes that the shutdowns are putting crewmembers out of work on projects for which the writers have already been paid. “Who is this really hurting?” they say. “Is it really hurting the studios? Not really.” The sentiment is echoed by a top production executive on another lot, who adds: “It’s all expense-driven. Saves them on taxes.”

One veteran showrunner and longtime WGA member doesn’t buy the notion that there’s any silver lining for the studios, considering that spin. “If it’s saving them money, shutting all shows down and getting out of showbiz will really save them all the money,” this person says. Another seasoned studio player agrees, pointing out that any financial upside is short-term: “The whole point of a studio is to be in production. There were projections of what those [stopped] shows would make for us. That’s a loss.”

Not mentioned is that the WGA has been directing those who want to help but aren't in areas where picketing is happening if they have the ability to donate to The Entertainment Community Fund (a link to an article about what it does, not the fund itself, not sure if that would break the rules-I'm not asking people to donate, I'm just providing the context of the situation)[/url] to assist workers temporarily out of work due to the writers strike.

Those days that they shutdown are expensive in part because all of the crew still has to get paid for the day. I've had a few of those where a phone call catches me before I head out the door, full day pay to go watch a movie or something.

Also that listed a bunch of shows I didn't know where still on, like The Chi.

[Nilokeras]

As I have explained, my actual argument really has nothing to do with "people aren't watching television" (your representation of it) but "people aren't watching television at someone else's beck and call and therefore they're harder to advertise to and that change in advertising affects what kinds of movies can be made". Hell, shifting to entirely ad-less platforms like Netflix just makes my actual point stronger and gives quite an interesting perspective to how keen all these platforms have been to develop ad supported tiers (it's like they have an advertising problem!).

Streaming-on-demand makes for better advertising, not worse. When you watch TV it's difficult to track viewership and attention on ads - there have been long struggles in the TV advertising industry about how and who measures the impacts of ads, let alone things like how many people watch a given program. When you watch Hulu on an ad-supported tier, Hulu collects very granular info about how much you watch, for how long and the impact of the ads you watch, such as if you go off and google something you just saw and ad for. Every person gets a unique set of ads that is targeted to them. That is a much better sell for advertisers than traditional, linear TV because Nestle or whoever can make an ad buy to target specific demographics and they can be confident that the people they want to see it will.

Even on subscription-supported services very granular user data gets collected and used to target series development, driving viewership, you name it. They all use the same technologies for similar purposes. The shift towards ad-supported tiers of users has less to do with peoples' dislike of ads than it is the demands for ever greater profitability - you can only hike Netflix's monthly subscription cost so many times before people start getting antsy, so you offer a cheaper tier with ads that people can opt for instead. But not all companies have, and that has a lot more to do with perceived brand prestige than anything - it's not surprising HBO Max never had ads or Disney didn't because they market their libraries as 'premium' content compared to, say, Hulu, which is a grab bag of media from across the television landscape. It's a new ecosystem shaking itself and different platforms differentiating themselves.

As to this article, I would, in particular, suggest that the figures I gave you yesterday borderline contradict the figures that he supplies:

In fact research agency Nielsen’s flagship Gauge chart now has YouTube as the single biggest channel in the US, with 8.1% of total viewing, meaningfully ahead of Netflix on 6.9%, and more than twice third-place Hulu on 3.3%. Perhaps more troubling again is the trend line. When the Gauge chart debuted in August of last year, Netflix had a handy lead over YouTube, meaning the UGC channel overtook its more conventional counterpart in a matter of months, even before the strike came along.

You will note that these figures don't relate to youth audiences from New Zealand (what I gave you yesterday) but, presumably, all audiences in the US. And you will further note that they demonstrate that, in fact, Youtube/UGC is now beating Streaming Video On Demand when it wasn't previously.

Of course, have SVOD channels lost audience? He does not say. But it doesn't matter to his point.

Streaming video is a much more fractured landscape than 'user created content'. If you add up Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Netlfix and Hulu you get a much larger share of the eyeball landscape than Youtube. That it beats the single largest streaming video platform doesn't really tell us all that much.

Besides which the trends in how large channels on Youtube work these days point towards the conclusion that 'user streaming content' is not really how we should be defining Youtube's business model. The largest channels on Youtube by subscriber counts are media production outlets, star Youtubers that became media production outlets and mainstream artists. Much of the real 'user created content', if we're defining it as amateur productions by regular-ish people. lives on platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels these days. It's not so easy to draw a neat line in the sand anymore - streaming is a big business these days.

[Forsher]

Moving on from whatever the fuck that was (hopefully)...

You don't want to talk to me. So don't talk to me. Or about me. It's that simple.

[TheKeyToJoy]

Moving on from whatever the fuck that was (hopefully)...

You don't want to talk to me. So don't talk to me. Or about me. It's that simple.

Just block him.

[Forsher]

As I have explained, my actual argument really has nothing to do with "people aren't watching television" (your representation of it) but "people aren't watching television at someone else's beck and call and therefore they're harder to advertise to and that change in advertising affects what kinds of movies can be made". Hell, shifting to entirely ad-less platforms like Netflix just makes my actual point stronger and gives quite an interesting perspective to how keen all these platforms have been to develop ad supported tiers (it's like they have an advertising problem!).

Streaming-on-demand makes for better advertising, not worse. When you watch TV it's difficult to track viewership and attention on ads - there have been long struggles in the TV advertising industry about how and who measures the impacts of ads, let alone things like how many people watch a given program. When you watch Hulu on an ad-supported tier, Hulu collects very granular info about how much you watch, for how long and the impact of the ads you watch, such as if you go off and google something you just saw and ad for. Every person gets a unique set of ads that is targeted to them. That is a much better sell for advertisers than traditional, linear TV because Nestle or whoever can make an ad buy to target specific demographics and they can be confident that the people they want to see it will.

Except, no, it doesn't. Not for movie studios.

Suppose you are Disney and you are selling your midbudget movie... ChatGPT give me a midbudget movie title and description in the format of "X is about ..." which is a sentence long... "Lost in the City" is about a group of friends who get separated on a wild night out in a big city. Is Netflix really going to offer you ad space? What about Paramount? WB/HBO/Max? Peacock? Or are you stuck with only your ad supported tiers on Disney and Hulu?

We're not talking about whether Apple or Tesla or Huawei or whatever are getting a better deal than they used to. We're talking about whether a fractured media landscape is a good place to advertise movies. And it isn't. You have to find someone who's going to host your ads and the people who are hosting your ads would be... advertising a rival streaming platform by doing that. Youtube will host your ads, but there's a bit of a contradiction here isn't there? It used to be said that 50% of an advertising spend is wasted but we don't know which. The value proposition of Google, Facebook etc. is as you've just described: we will use data to target ads to your actual prospective consumers, which will result in more efficient advertising. Targeted ads have been around since the DVD era, but mid budget movies started dying off then. Reality has spoken... targeted ads don't work for movies. Is this because targeting ads doesn't work for a product where people want to be surprised? Is it because having to target ads on new platforms has actually increased advertising spends rather than decreasing them? A combination? Something else? Who knows. But it's evidently not working.

But the bigger problem with this theory that ad supported tiers are better for the movie studios is that the ad supported tiers haven't existed for very long! They don't contradict the narrative that chasing eyeballs has got more expensive because they're new. We're not describing a market change that has developed alongside a static condition, we're describing a market change that predated a new condition. More to the point, I actually suggested that ad supported tiers have been created because the movie studios need to be able to advertise to a captive audience. That's kind of insane because obviously they just want the revenue from selling ad space... but probably not to their competitors.

As to this article, I would, in particular, suggest that the figures I gave you yesterday borderline contradict the figures that he supplies:

In fact research agency Nielsen’s flagship Gauge chart now has YouTube as the single biggest channel in the US, with 8.1% of total viewing, meaningfully ahead of Netflix on 6.9%, and more than twice third-place Hulu on 3.3%. Perhaps more troubling again is the trend line. When the Gauge chart debuted in August of last year, Netflix had a handy lead over YouTube, meaning the UGC channel overtook its more conventional counterpart in a matter of months, even before the strike came along.

You will note that these figures don't relate to youth audiences from New Zealand (what I gave you yesterday) but, presumably, all audiences in the US. And you will further note that they demonstrate that, in fact, Youtube/UGC is now beating Streaming Video On Demand when it wasn't previously.

Of course, have SVOD channels lost audience? He does not say. But it doesn't matter to his point.

Streaming video is a much more fractured landscape than 'user created content'. If you add up Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Netlfix and Hulu you get a much larger share of the eyeball landscape than Youtube. That it beats the single largest streaming video platform doesn't really tell us all that much.

Yes, and that's precisely what I've been talking about. The audience is everywhere. It is vastly more expensive to advertise to multiple places than to one place. The money is still attached to people... you have to go to the people and you have to pay more now than you ever used to.

Besides which the trends in how large channels on Youtube work these days point towards the conclusion that 'user streaming content' is not really how we should be defining Youtube's business model. The largest channels on Youtube by subscriber counts are media production outlets, star Youtubers that became media production outlets and mainstream artists. Much of the real 'user created content', if we're defining it as amateur productions by regular-ish people. lives on platforms like TikTok or Instagram Reels these days. It's not so easy to draw a neat line in the sand anymore - streaming is a big business these days.

Which really has nothing to do with either what I'm saying or what the article was saying. The article's point was simply "people are choosing to watch things that the WGA has no relevance to, which reduces the bargaining power of the WGA". My point is "people are choosing to watch things in so many places that film studios have had to rely on IP to keep marketing budgets under control".

You don't want to talk to me. So don't talk to me. Or about me. It's that simple.

Just block him.

Which solves the problem how? He'll keep misrepresenting what I'm saying but I won't be able to see it. That'd be fine if the problem was I could read his posts. The problem is that he's misrepresenting what I'm saying. Just like Nilokeras here. You might not care if people make up bullshit about what you're saying. I fucking do.

[Ethel mermania]

I would be getting popcorn right about now, but in support of the writers I will not.

[Katganistan]

Just a little history lesson: The last time these guys quit working, it sparked a boom of reality TV that resulted in TV cancer like those Real Housewives shows.

You know, fun trivia for anyone still supporting these guys. I mean if you want more shows like that...

The writers deserve a living wage. You'll live without your shows temporarily.

[Northern Socialist Council Republics]

The argument of "we should not support workers agitating for better working conditions because we benefit from them continuing to work without complaint" is certainly a chilling indictment of just how capitalist society these days sees the people that keep it running.

I consider myself a very selfish sort of person, but even I put abstract morality ahead of my own personal best interest from time to time.

[Des-Bal]

The argument of "we should not support workers agitating for better working conditions because we benefit from them continuing to work without complaint" is certainly a chilling indictment of just how capitalist society these days sees the people that keep it running.

I consider myself a very selfish sort of person, but even I put abstract morality ahead of my own personal best interest from time to time.

"Better conditions" what a cool nebulous concept. It requires no analysis of whether what they want makes any fucking sense.

[Audioslavia]

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

If you two have a problem, find a way to solve it that isn't an all-caps stfu. Your last warning was caused by you losing your cool during a discussion. That needs sorted.

[Forsher]

YOU DON'T READ MY POSTS SO SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THEM.

If you two have a problem, find a way to solve it that isn't an all-caps stfu. Your last warning was caused by you losing your cool during a discussion. That needs sorted.

It's pretty simple: he stops strawmanning posts by players he's refusing to read. He does that, I don't have a problem with him. As evidenced by the many, many months where I have no problems with him despite his constant ignore gloating.

Because whatever Farn says this:

The problem with this is that the two activities (watching Youtube/tiktok/what have you) and TV/movies are not interchangeable. They fill different roles in peoples' media diets - movies as activities to go see with friends, TV as a water cooler activity, TikToks as something you watch on the bus on your phone screen, etc. The transition to an IP, tentpole-dominated landscape has way more to do with who owns/has majority stakes in the studios and what they demand from them (increasing year-on-year profitability, predictable production schedules, etc) than anything else.

Belief that tick-tock etc was reshaping audience expectations is what gave us Quibie...

A lot of peoples misconceptions come from the belief that the industry has been led by the same people the entire time with the same kinds of goals.

Some perspective gets lost. First of all, with the domination of large IP based movies now creates the idea that this is significantly different when it's really just a variation on a theme that has been present all along.

There are a lot of Golden Age movies that themselves are IP. All of Disney was based on fairy and folk tales. Mary Poppins was a book series. Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Grapes of Wrath etc etc etc.

The 'comic book movie' of its time, musicals obviously were largely adapted from already popular Broadway musicals. Westerns ended up being their own franchise either via director or star or both.

Sequelization was common enough for a long time for Back to the Future II (itself a sequel) to make fun of excessive Jaws sequels.

Prior to the late sixties there was a 'studio system' where studio heads contracted talent and churned out top down product. Even Citizen Kane was a duress product by Orson Welles who was pressured into making a movie instead of the prolific theatrical and radio talent deciding he wanted to change filmmaking forever.

In the seventies there was a brief moment of auteur driven films where directors were given a freer reign which gave us Apocalypse Now and Godfather (both adaptations, so IP) but also gave us Heaven's Gate with massive cost overruns.

It was Jaws and Star Wars that provided the tent pole model that existed where one large broadly popular movie would support more riskier prestige efforts and cover studio costs.

The independent streak from the 90s was commoditized before it really got going so while it did give us some interesting artistic achievements were kind of smothered in its bed with a handful of survivors milling about doing interesting movies still.

What Marvel managed to do was introduce the idea that you could just make bangers. It wasn't their intent, necessarily, but rather an off shoot of Stan Lee's vision of licensing the Marvel universe as a whole. I had contended as well as Lee that the only real way of adapting comic books is to allow them to occupy the same world. Otherwise you were using 1/3 of each film to not just introduce your superhero character, but the idea of superheroes in general in an otherwise superheroless world. And since most of Marvels stories were inter-related the only way to tell them was to have other heroes already co-exist.

Hard to remember but for the first couple of years Marvel was an independent studio whose only interest was adapting its own material. But this proved that you could have a franchise that didn't have to wait two to three years between movies but could release 2-4 a year.

This coincides with tech companies entering the sphere. Sony had long ago invested in the content side of the business because content sold DVD players.

Now that we're in the era where Sony has been joined by things like Netflix and Amazon along with studios being taken over by investment dollars instead of the studio heads that still at least on some level thought of themselves as filmmakers, the landscape evolves again with the 'why can't they all be blockbuster movies' mentality with less interest in risking things on a mid-level movie (the 40-50 million movie)-which is the thing we're really missing out on now. There are still plenty of small movies done for little money, an embarrassment of riches for the blockbuster movies, but less interest in rolling the dice in the middle. It's less an audience problem than it is a risk aversion problem by studio heads that are focused on stock prices and company valuations.

A byproduct of that is what the guilds are fighting, of studios trying to make film workers more like tech workers. But tech workers didn't have 100 years of being an industry and guilds protecting those workers like movies do, so they're in a unique position to go, "No. Fuck you pay me."

The total cost of what the WGA is asking for is less than they pay any one of the studio heads, so pleading poverty or 'changing landscape' (the latter of which is their go to excuse which has diminishing returns as an excuse since they somehow managed to make buckets on each new variation) sort of falls flat.

Essentially film workers have the privilege of doing what everyone should be doing, fighting back against the squeezing of the workers and creators by the ownership class. The rally they held on Friday that I completely misread in part was meant to spread the fight from just the WGA to the other unions to come together and all fight in their fields for the same thing. After 30 years of real wages being suppressed its long past time.

isn't only a reply to Nilokeras, it's also "haha I'm ignoring Forsher but I going to stick a dig at what he might be saying, because who cares, fuck him". Which is made more evident by the fact this is at least the third time he's done it and, of course, he then returns to the theme again in a second post in this thread:

He and you, by extension. It's a strange bit of anti-union agitprop that isn't particularly convincing - holding a flashlight under your chin and whispering 'user created content' while eliding the differences between platform and omitting figures.

I mean, again...Quibi.

There is this pattern in media where each thing is supposed to kill the last thing. Radio, television, cable, the internet, 'UGC'...god, is that really going to be an acronym? For fuck's sake. The reality is that each medium has adapted and absorbed itself in because each medium fills or creates its own space rather than consuming the others. Sure, television eventually supplanted the radio drama (which has found its way back into existence by the thing that was supposed to kill radio dead finally, podcasting), things have changed and adapted as the borders have shifted. But the suggestion that the existential threat to scripted television is the guy who counted to 100,000 and now bribes his friends to do stupid stunts is absurd. Youtubers/Tik-tokkers etc. have indeed carved out a niche for themselves that fills a need but it's a supplement not a replacement. What people are getting out of Succession or Yellowjackets isn't going to be met by 'lets see what happens if we drop a hatchback on to a trampoline from atop a tower.'

I watch a fuckton of Reels. Far more than I should. But I also watch a fuckton of scripted content either at the movies (where i have a subscription to the theater so it's just as easy for me to watch The Little Mermaid premiere as it was to make a last minute decision last night to watch The Machine (eh)) or the streaming channels I subscribe to. One does not supplant the other nor is my engagement the same with each.

Going back to Quibi, if Reels asked me for a single dime I'd never watch another one again. But if I add up what I'm apparently willing to pay each month for access to long form scripted programing I'd probably cry a little.

And here's the big thing, the studios aren't suffering for lack of audience but for their own over-reaches, which are not the fault of the writers and there's really no argument that it's the writers or creators that have to take the hit for their decisions, especially when the people responsible for those decisions are making more than the what the writers are asking for as individuals.

People can wax on about new media or different outlets but the bottom line is that writers, like many many professions, have been asked to do more for less by people pleading poverty and stuffing their own pockets. The WGA is in a unique position to be able to put their foot down and say "Enough" with the vain hopes that it catches on.

This time it's more obvious because (1) UGC was an acronym quoted by Nilokeras from an article I provided, (2) Quibi didn't involve UGC at all and (3) the only discussion about substitution is with respect to my conversation with Nilokeras. But sure maybe I'm being paranoid from a fortnight ago where there's absolutely no doubt he did this, it was completely blatant... again despite what Farn says.

I'll keep saying it... if you're not talking to someone, don't talk to them or about them. This website's foe's list doesn't completely hide peoples' posts so if he decides to read Nilokeras' replies to me he's going to see my comments and be tempted. But it's up to him to resist that temptation. It's ridiculous that I've got to deal with CTOAN's inability to resist that temptation to strawman my posts (and, in particular, his strong tendency to do so in extremely baity fashions) because I can't actually point out to him what he's doing. But it's even more absurd because that's also the whole reason he blocked me in the first place... I had the audacity to not go away when he got up on his soap box. Unless he decides to unblock me, the only way I can deal with his strawmen is attracting other people's attention to what he's doing because, you know, he doesn't read what I write.

And the thing is, even if I also ignored him, he'd keep doing this. The only thing that would change is that I wouldn't know about it. Which might mean I get fewer warnings but it wouldn't solve the problem.

[Cannot think of a name]

This article does a pretty good job of breaking down some misconceptions about the job of a tv writer.

Behind a paywall...I"ll let you sort out what that means to you and your javascript settings...but here are some highlights:

But in an era of complex plot arcs and high production quality, writers say it takes roughly the same amount of work to shoot shorter TV shows as their longer predecessors, leaving a handful of writers with a more grueling workload.

“I just worked seven days a week, 13 to 14 hour days, for three months to make an eight-episode order,” said Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, a showrunner who’s worked on network shows such as “New Girl,” “My Name is Earl” and “The Carmichael Show,” and is also on the WGA committee negotiating with studios for a new union contract. “Me and one other writer worked those hours. It’s exhausting. It’s unsustainable.”

Writers can try to work on multiple shows in a year to balance out the shorter gigs, but many complain that studios are hesitant to hire someone with overlapping commitments, while some simply forbid moonlighting within Hollywood.

There’s also the matter of shrinking residuals — the percentage of profits some writers get each time their show is re-aired or licensed. The exact formulas for these are complex, but the WGA says that generally, the residuals from streaming platforms are far lower than those from network TV.

Ultimately, many writers are forced to work jobs outside the industry to make ends meet, or let their careers stagnate by repeatedly accepting jobs at the same pay rate.

...

But as studio executives look to save money by downsizing writing budgets, many of these divisions have become blurred. The WGA complains that many writers are now doing the job of several people without any extra pay, and that TV writing is transforming into essentially gig work — with everyone treated like an independent contractor.

Warner Bros. Discovery unintentionally called attention to the phenomenon when it relaunched its streaming service, Max, this week. Many writers protested that the new app’s preview screens no longer identified who wrote a show or movie, lumping writers in with directors and executive producers as “creators.”

...

Or, they used to be. The walls are closing in on writers’ rooms, which have been significantly downsized in the name of cost-cutting since the last WGA strike in 2007, and which the union says will soon be extinct if the studios have their way.

“The companies are trying to eliminate the writers room and turn writing into a freelance profession,” WGA negotiator (and writer) Adam Conover said on “The Town with Matt Belloni” podcast this month.

The term “mini-room” has become a pejorative industry shorthand for the downsizing. In some cases, studios are actually hiring fewer writers per show. But more commonly, writers are becoming more like temporary workers than integral parts of a production. Sanchez-Witzel says that often, only a handful of writers get to stay on for the entire production process, leaving the showrunner and maybe two or three other writers to handle all subsequent script changes.

In the long term, some worry what will happen to the craft without rooms where fledgling writers can learn from experienced colleagues.

“If we’re creating a system where nobody is learning how to actually make television at the higher levels, no one’s going to be making television in 10 years,” said film critic and writer Drew McWeeny.

...

More than twice as many original English-language shows were released in 2022 compared with a decade earlier, according to research from FX Networks — 599 to 288.

But whereas a typical network show might have had 10 to 12 writers or more, streaming services tend to hire between six and eight.

Kyra Jones, a writer on “Queens,” “Woke” and “The Right Swipe,” said the competitive job market poses “one of the biggest threats to increasing diversity and inclusion in television writing.”

Showrunners “end up being scared to take a chance on a writer with less experience,” she said. “They want to make sure that they have someone who they think can get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible, making the rooms very top-heavy and only hiring executive producers or co-executive producers, high-level writers, which leaves us out in the cold.”

Jones moved from Chicago to Los Angeles to pursue her career after successfully landing two writing jobs. Instead, she had to go on unemployment last year and now works remotely part-time at her old job — Northwestern University’s sexual health and violence resource center — while she waits for another opportunity in TV.
...
Many writers say the past five to 10 years have broken the machinery of career advancement that made those star turns possible. What’s more, it’s getting harder and harder for them to even know how many people watch their shows.

Streamers have much more data about their viewers than box offices or networks that rely on Nielsen ratings ever could, but the companies closely guard this information — even from their writers.

Writers whose project is streaming-only are paid a flat residual rate based on how many subscribers are on the service. For example, a writer whose work streams on Netflix will make more money than one who writes for a smaller streamer such as Paramount Plus. But within a particular streaming service, the pay is the same. Writers on Netflix megahits like “Stranger Things” or “Bridgerton” earn the same pay as those who write the lowest-viewed shows on the platform, Kaufman said.

EDIT: Forgot to add a spoiler tag for long stretches of text.

also, hahaha...The Onion

[Stellar Colonies]

If people are worried about their TV and movies being disrupted, maybe they should agitate for the writer's demands to be met swiftly to minimize said disruption.

[Nilokeras]

Except, no, it doesn't. Not for movie studios.

Suppose you are Disney and you are selling your midbudget movie... ChatGPT give me a midbudget movie title and description in the format of "X is about ..." which is a sentence long... "Lost in the City" is about a group of friends who get separated on a wild night out in a big city. Is Netflix really going to offer you ad space? What about Paramount? WB/HBO/Max? Peacock? Or are you stuck with only your ad supported tiers on Disney and Hulu?

We're not talking about whether Apple or Tesla or Huawei or whatever are getting a better deal than they used to. We're talking about whether a fractured media landscape is a good place to advertise movies. And it isn't. You have to find someone who's going to host your ads and the people who are hosting your ads would be... advertising a rival streaming platform by doing that. Youtube will host your ads, but there's a bit of a contradiction here isn't there? It used to be said that 50% of an advertising spend is wasted but we don't know which. The value proposition of Google, Facebook etc. is as you've just described: we will use data to target ads to your actual prospective consumers, which will result in more efficient advertising. Targeted ads have been around since the DVD era, but mid budget movies started dying off then. Reality has spoken... targeted ads don't work for movies. Is this because targeting ads doesn't work for a product where people want to be surprised? Is it because having to target ads on new platforms has actually increased advertising spends rather than decreasing them? A combination? Something else? Who knows. But it's evidently not working.

But the bigger problem with this theory that ad supported tiers are better for the movie studios is that the ad supported tiers haven't existed for very long! They don't contradict the narrative that chasing eyeballs has got more expensive because they're new. We're not describing a market change that has developed alongside a static condition, we're describing a market change that predated a new condition. More to the point, I actually suggested that ad supported tiers have been created because the movie studios need to be able to advertise to a captive audience. That's kind of insane because obviously they just want the revenue from selling ad space... but probably not to their competitors.

Rival streaming sites are not the only place to advertise movies or TV shows. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, old fashioned TV, radio, the sides of buses are all places advertising can happen. Some of them are not targeted at all and efficacy could be low, of course, but the flipside to this is that there's no actual evidence that the model for the 'mid tier' movie is actually broken.

Take A24, for example. They've made quite a name for themselves scooping up indie talent and have created a slate of 'mid tier' movies that are quite profitable: Aronofsky's 'The Whale' made $54 million on a budget of $3 million. 'Moonlight' made $65 million on a budget of $2 million. 'X' made $15 million on a $1 million budget. And so on. If advertising and attention-getting for these smaller movies that don't have Marvel's infinite advertising hose didn't work they wouldn't be a success. But they are.

There are lots of reasons why 'mid tier' movies don't get made as often by studios. Conservatism, a desire to hedge bets, a VC-driven desire to clarify and make legible to VC brain an industry that up until recently relied on executives who were still 'movie people' making bets based on their own knowledge and tastes. But advertising isn't really one of those reasons, if for no other reason than absolutely everyone in the decisionmaking income bracket - movie people, VC's, corporate execs buying ad space, ad execs - all still think that advertising works. It may not actually, and it may just be a way to spray money around very effectively, but that's not really relevant. Everyone thinks the emperor has clothes on.

Likewise the need for advertising isn't really at the heart of ad-supported tiers - they're really just a way to deal with the very real possibility that price hikes in subscriptions may not be sustainable forever. With ads you can 'hide' the extra value you're extracting for your viewers.

Which really has nothing to do with either what I'm saying or what the article was saying. The article's point was simply "people are choosing to watch things that the WGA has no relevance to, which reduces the bargaining power of the WGA". My point is "people are choosing to watch things in so many places that film studios have had to rely on IP to keep marketing budgets under control".

Again, as above, if advertising and attention-gathering didn't work A24 wouldn't exist as a business model. You can turn an indie movie with a tiny budget into a cash cow that makes 15 times its budget back in profit. The modern studio fixation on IP has far more to do with VC investors demanding that movie production be 'rationalized' in such a way that it's legible to them and produces consistent, short term increases in profitability.

In days of yore (aka the 1990s) the model generally went like this: movie studios produced lots and lots of mid-tier movies to fill a release schedule. Romantic comedies, courtroom dramas, horror movies, character dramas, etc. They were relatively cheap to make and each of them could be relied upon to make a small amount of profit. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, some flopped, some overperformed, some did okay, and that created a financial base on which larger tentpole or more risky projects could be launched. Sometimes those big tentpole projects made you ten movies' worth of profit (Ridley Scott's Gladiator), sometimes they bombed incredibly hard and you had to eat $100 million dollar losses (The 13th Warrior, which created a 100 million dollar hole). Others did just okay, and made a smaller amount of profit. But because you had a flow of other movies going in the background any losses could usually be absorbed.

This of course is not very predictable - profitability year-on-year varied and movie execs had to have their hand on the tiller at all times, following trends and scoping out talent. Enter the VCs, for whom an investment in a movie studio is just that - an investment. They are interested in the studios' share values, and ensuring that they remain stable at the minimum and increasingly profitable if at all possible as one part of a broader portfolio of investments. The idea of cocaine hound studio heads following their guts makes them itchy, so as superhero movies start to take off in the 2010s you see a very hard push towards 'rationalizing' the production of movies and making it something finance bros could understand. Big movies with big stars, planned in advance, with huge advertising budgets to make sure that every movie is profitable. Superhero movies and classic IP were just the thing of the moment that provided the justification needed to make this transformation.

Those mid-tier budget movies didn't die off because of unprofitability or the difficulty of advertising for them - again, see A24 - they were killed, purposefully, to make the business more palatable to the people with controlling financial stakes. It's a very common phenomena in many sectors that get sudden influxes of VC cash and, by extent, control exerted over them, and can lead to some very strange company behaviour. Quibi, the intense pressure a year ago to make the 'metaverse' a Thing, all those articles last year talking about how working from office is really so great and can we please keep all of my commercial property investments afloat etc.

[Cannot think of a name]

Except, no, it doesn't. Not for movie studios.

Suppose you are Disney and you are selling your midbudget movie... ChatGPT give me a midbudget movie title and description in the format of "X is about ..." which is a sentence long... "Lost in the City" is about a group of friends who get separated on a wild night out in a big city. Is Netflix really going to offer you ad space? What about Paramount? WB/HBO/Max? Peacock? Or are you stuck with only your ad supported tiers on Disney and Hulu?

We're not talking about whether Apple or Tesla or Huawei or whatever are getting a better deal than they used to. We're talking about whether a fractured media landscape is a good place to advertise movies. And it isn't. You have to find someone who's going to host your ads and the people who are hosting your ads would be... advertising a rival streaming platform by doing that. Youtube will host your ads, but there's a bit of a contradiction here isn't there? It used to be said that 50% of an advertising spend is wasted but we don't know which. The value proposition of Google, Facebook etc. is as you've just described: we will use data to target ads to your actual prospective consumers, which will result in more efficient advertising. Targeted ads have been around since the DVD era, but mid budget movies started dying off then. Reality has spoken... targeted ads don't work for movies. Is this because targeting ads doesn't work for a product where people want to be surprised? Is it because having to target ads on new platforms has actually increased advertising spends rather than decreasing them? A combination? Something else? Who knows. But it's evidently not working.

But the bigger problem with this theory that ad supported tiers are better for the movie studios is that the ad supported tiers haven't existed for very long! They don't contradict the narrative that chasing eyeballs has got more expensive because they're new. We're not describing a market change that has developed alongside a static condition, we're describing a market change that predated a new condition. More to the point, I actually suggested that ad supported tiers have been created because the movie studios need to be able to advertise to a captive audience. That's kind of insane because obviously they just want the revenue from selling ad space... but probably not to their competitors.

Rival streaming sites are not the only place to advertise movies or TV shows. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, old fashioned TV, radio, the sides of buses are all places advertising can happen. Some of them are not targeted at all and efficacy could be low, of course, but the flipside to this is that there's no actual evidence that the model for the 'mid tier' movie is actually broken.

Take A24, for example. They've made quite a name for themselves scooping up indie talent and have created a slate of 'mid tier' movies that are quite profitable: Aronofsky's 'The Whale' made $54 million on a budget of $3 million. 'Moonlight' made $65 million on a budget of $2 million. 'X' made $15 million on a $1 million budget. And so on. If advertising and attention-getting for these smaller movies that don't have Marvel's infinite advertising hose didn't work they wouldn't be a success. But they are.

There are lots of reasons why 'mid tier' movies don't get made as often by studios. Conservatism, a desire to hedge bets, a VC-driven desire to clarify and make legible to VC brain an industry that up until recently relied on executives who were still 'movie people' making bets based on their own knowledge and tastes. But advertising isn't really one of those reasons, if for no other reason than absolutely everyone in the decisionmaking income bracket - movie people, VC's, corporate execs buying ad space, ad execs - all still think that advertising works. It may not actually, and it may just be a way to spray money around very effectively, but that's not really relevant. Everyone thinks the emperor has clothes on.

Likewise the need for advertising isn't really at the heart of ad-supported tiers - they're really just a way to deal with the very real possibility that price hikes in subscriptions may not be sustainable forever. With ads you can 'hide' the extra value you're extracting for your viewers.

Which really has nothing to do with either what I'm saying or what the article was saying. The article's point was simply "people are choosing to watch things that the WGA has no relevance to, which reduces the bargaining power of the WGA". My point is "people are choosing to watch things in so many places that film studios have had to rely on IP to keep marketing budgets under control".

Again, as above, if advertising and attention-gathering didn't work A24 wouldn't exist as a business model. You can turn an indie movie with a tiny budget into a cash cow that makes 15 times its budget back in profit. The modern studio fixation on IP has far more to do with VC investors demanding that movie production be 'rationalized' in such a way that it's legible to them and produces consistent, short term increases in profitability.

In days of yore (aka the 1990s) the model generally went like this: movie studios produced lots and lots of mid-tier movies to fill a release schedule. Romantic comedies, courtroom dramas, horror movies, character dramas, etc. They were relatively cheap to make and each of them could be relied upon to make a small amount of profit. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, some flopped, some overperformed, some did okay, and that created a financial base on which larger tentpole or more risky projects could be launched. Sometimes those big tentpole projects made you ten movies' worth of profit (Ridley Scott's Gladiator), sometimes they bombed incredibly hard and you had to eat $100 million dollar losses (The 13th Warrior, which created a 100 million dollar hole). Others did just okay, and made a smaller amount of profit. But because you had a flow of other movies going in the background any losses could usually be absorbed.

This of course is not very predictable - profitability year-on-year varied and movie execs had to have their hand on the tiller at all times, following trends and scoping out talent. Enter the VCs, for whom an investment in a movie studio is just that - an investment. They are interested in the studios' share values, and ensuring that they remain stable at the minimum and increasingly profitable if at all possible as one part of a broader portfolio of investments. The idea of cocaine hound studio heads following their guts makes them itchy, so as superhero movies start to take off in the 2010s you see a very hard push towards 'rationalizing' the production of movies and making it something finance bros could understand. Big movies with big stars, planned in advance, with huge advertising budgets to make sure that every movie is profitable. Superhero movies and classic IP were just the thing of the moment that provided the justification needed to make this transformation.

Those mid-tier budget movies didn't die off because of unprofitability or the difficulty of advertising for them - again, see A24 - they were killed, purposefully, to make the business more palatable to the people with controlling financial stakes. It's a very common phenomena in many sectors that get sudden influxes of VC cash and, by extent, control exerted over them, and can lead to some very strange company behaviour. Quibi, the intense pressure a year ago to make the 'metaverse' a Thing, all those articles last year talking about how working from office is really so great and can we please keep all of my commercial property investments afloat etc.

Your conclusion is fairly accurate, but there are some quibbles of details.

A24s movies are considered low budget movies. "Mid-tier" movies are considered to be in the $20-50 million range. Think movies like The Lost City which had a budget of $68 million on the high end of the scale and a movie like Good Boys that had a budget of $20 million.

Also A24 and Blumhouse have leaned on one of the more consistently reliable outlets, horror. Low budget horror won't always make you rich, but they have a better than even chance of making their money back. Also as you note, A24 tends to buy films over producing them themselves which means they're not spending their money until they've seen the final product. That's part of what drove the 'indie boom' of the 90s. Distributors could cruise Sundance and other festivals and buy up the best ones. Unfortunately the gold rush behavior of that bubble burned it out, and then as you note venture capital started taking over and the 'all tentpole' model became 'the thing' for the reasons you noted.

The result is that the $20-50 million movies cratered. Not that they're not made, but now everyone that does apparently has to represent the category, as people are writing more obituaries for the mid budget movie as the $20 million The Machine or the $29 million About My Father under performs against a live action Disney movie on Memorial Day weekend (I think they tend to get hyperbolic about these things. I'll * this and come back to it.)

And finally a semantic point, Tentpole movies got their name because they were supposed to hold up the tent to cover riskier mid-and-low budget takes but, as you note, they could be pretty big swings that in some cases could end a production company if it went all kinds of wrong.

*There was a lot of obituraries written about adult dramas when Ridley Scott's The Last Duel failed to perform at the box office, but I don't think in these cases they're taking into account either zeitgeist or nature of the content.

While The Last Duel under performed, its box office wasn't that far off The Green Knight, arguably a less accessible movie with no star power behind it other than a minor following for the director (but no Ridley Scott).

At the same time they were lamenting the under-performance of Last Night in Soho.

What those obituaries didn't take into account is that both movies derived their drama around violence against women. Not violence with women, but against them. Sexual assault. Not many took into account that the zeitgeist had moved on from that.

Again, the $15 million A24 Green Knight which played on fewer theaters and had a fraction of the advertising budget did almost as well as the $100 million star driven and directed The Last Duel. But most frustratingly, they had just written think pieces celebrating the return of the adult drama after the success of Ford vs Ferrari, with the same star in a history film. Both movies had similar budgets (@$100 million) but Ford vs Ferrari pulled $225 million while The Last Duel pulled $30 million.

Also worth noting, The Last Duel was post pandemic.

Not that this relates directly, it's just a little frustrating when I read these panicky pieces about movies dying.

But, I mean...they're still making them, they're just not the bread and butter anymore. There were three this last weekend, Jennifer Lawrence has No Hard Feelings coming up. I think some of the concern is that those movies aren't 'get out of the house' movies. I wouldn't have watched The Machine if I didn't have a theater subscription.

I think I may have meandered off the plot...

[Ifreann]

I think I may have meandered off the plot...

This is what happens when you don't have a writer. Even NSG is suffering.

[Cannot think of a name]

I think I may have meandered off the plot...

This is what happens when you don't have a writer. Even NSG is suffering.

No wages, no pages means no pages, dammit.

[Forsher]

Rival streaming sites are not the only place to advertise movies or TV shows. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, old fashioned TV, radio, the sides of buses are all places advertising can happen. Some of them are not targeted at all and efficacy could be low, of course, but the flipside to this is that there's no actual evidence that the model for the 'mid tier' movie is actually broken.

Yes, the existence of multiple places to advertise is rather the whole point. You cannot go to one place and think you've got everyone. You can't even go to three places and think you've got everyone. But you used to be able to.

Take A24, for example. They've made quite a name for themselves scooping up indie talent and have created a slate of 'mid tier' movies that are quite profitable: Aronofsky's 'The Whale' made $54 million on a budget of $3 million. 'Moonlight' made $65 million on a budget of $2 million. 'X' made $15 million on a $1 million budget. And so on. If advertising and attention-getting for these smaller movies that don't have Marvel's infinite advertising hose didn't work they wouldn't be a success. But they are.

As CTOAN has observed, these aren't mid budget movies. And while we're on the subject of what he said, he may also be right that the reason The Last Duel and Last Night in Soho underperformed was the subject matter. I think there were two other movies which had the same subject... Women Talking and one other that I can't remember. Women Talking grossed $9m, but it would have been a genuinely low budget film, I think. (There's no reported budget. Apparently there's a $135m figure out there but this is absurd, so if that figure has any basis in reality it probably was a slip of a decimal.) But the main thing is:

But, I mean...they're still making them, they're just not the bread and butter anymore. There were three this last weekend, Jennifer Lawrence has No Hard Feelings coming up. I think some of the concern is that those movies aren't 'get out of the house' movies. I wouldn't have watched The Machine if I didn't have a theater subscription.

I think I may have meandered off the plot...

No, what he's doing is providing evidence for my point, which he is ostensibly disagreeing with by endorsing your posts. Either he feels this is becoming a threadjack or it's simply the niggling feeling of "I feel this is more than a quibble about a detail" because it very much is more than a quibble about a detail.

There are lots of reasons why 'mid tier' movies don't get made as often by studios. Conservatism, a desire to hedge bets, a VC-driven desire to clarify and make legible to VC brain an industry that up until recently relied on executives who were still 'movie people' making bets based on their own knowledge and tastes. But advertising isn't really one of those reasons, if for no other reason than absolutely everyone in the decisionmaking income bracket - movie people, VC's, corporate execs buying ad space, ad execs - all still think that advertising works. It may not actually, and it may just be a way to spray money around very effectively, but that's not really relevant. Everyone thinks the emperor has clothes on.

What I am saying is that they don't believe that you can advertise a mid budget movie in a way that will recoup $50m-$100m* for them without spending $100m to advertise it. Consider, again, the numbers. Using the revenue shares that this guy does, suppose we had a movie that opens at $20 million domestically, then with a 40% drop baked in, you can see how the earnings of the investors varies based on a particular relationship between the Chinese gross and the rest of the international gross, for a static domestic legs assumption of 3:



To be clear, this "particular relationship" was pulled out of my arse. The point is that (1) you can see how the earnings of the investors change, depending on how the film makes its box office gross and (2) you can see that a film grossing $100-150m is only going to be able to pay for just the production budget of a mid budget movie. Any marketing spend at all, is going to make this hypothetical film unprofitable in its theatrical window.

The contention I made earlier was to make a $100m gross, you need to advertise like a blockbuster, which means you need to spend as much as blockbusters do. That specific number is probably wrong. For example, your A24 films have got reasonably close to that. But even if those films spent half their production budgets on marketing, our hypothetical $50m movie would fail to return its investment in two of those scenarios. A $50m film that makes twice its budget back is almost certainly losing money before accounting for advertising.

Which really has nothing to do with either what I'm saying or what the article was saying. The article's point was simply "people are choosing to watch things that the WGA has no relevance to, which reduces the bargaining power of the WGA". My point is "people are choosing to watch things in so many places that film studios have had to rely on IP to keep marketing budgets under control".

Again, as above, if advertising and attention-gathering didn't work A24 wouldn't exist as a business model. You can turn an indie movie with a tiny budget into a cash cow that makes 15 times its budget back in profit. The modern studio fixation on IP has far more to do with VC investors demanding that movie production be 'rationalized' in such a way that it's legible to them and produces consistent, short term increases in profitability.

But, as we have seen, you're talking about indie films, not mid budget movies. Let's go to The Numbers and stick Moonlight (32.5 times its budget) into that table. Now, we'll have to make some changes because Moonlight didn't open wide. Therefore I'll use its March re-release for the opening weekend and second week, and stick everything else into the "dom w3+" category:



So, the budget for Moonlight was $2m. With these revenue assumptions for a totally different release model, it made a profit as long as they didn't have to spend $27 million advertising it. What do we think they did spend advertising it? Let's call that amount H. Suppose that we could assume spending 2H would yield twice the gross of Moonlight, earnt by doubling everything in that table:



If H is more than $4 million, this mid budget movie would fail to make a return. And I seriously doubt you believe that doubling the advertising budget would earn twice the views.

There is no margin for error on these individual movies. You'd need the big budget film to cover your likely losses. And you only have to look at the video to see that these tentpoles routinely fail to do that because they routinely barely make back their own budgets. Which you kind of know.

Even if you assume a $20m movie is still midbudget (it may not be, what with changes in how much it costs to make movies), it would barely make a profit if it performed like Moonlight. Such a film would have to have a marketing spend of less than $9 million. It sounds like a lot of money but people say were saying they'd never heard of Strange World, which was a film that made for $135–180 million, the day it came out. Admittedly they were adults and that's a kid's film, but unless Disney actually does just refuse to advertise some movies (which it is accused of all the time), I think we can assume Strange World had a vastly bigger marketing spend than Moonlight. For what these massive movies spend on marketing, $9 million is something like 10%, 20% at best. (Incidentally, Strange World grossed just $10m more than Moonlight.) Even if they were spending in proportion... people think The Little Mermaid and Fast X probably have $150m marketing budgets, minimum. If we give a film that costs a tenth of what they do, a tenth of their marketing spend, then we're spending $15m, which 1.5 times bigger than what such a film can afford if it performs like Moonlight.

In days of yore (aka the 1990s) the model generally went like this: movie studios produced lots and lots of mid-tier movies to fill a release schedule. Romantic comedies, courtroom dramas, horror movies, character dramas, etc. They were relatively cheap to make and each of them could be relied upon to make a small amount of profit. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, some flopped, some overperformed, some did okay, and that created a financial base on which larger tentpole or more risky projects could be launched. Sometimes those big tentpole projects made you ten movies' worth of profit (Ridley Scott's Gladiator), sometimes they bombed incredibly hard and you had to eat $100 million dollar losses (The 13th Warrior, which created a 100 million dollar hole). Others did just okay, and made a smaller amount of profit. But because you had a flow of other movies going in the background any losses could usually be absorbed.

Again, we'll quote from CTOAN:

And finally a semantic point, Tentpole movies got their name because they were supposed to hold up the tent to cover riskier mid-and-low budget takes but, as you note, they could be pretty big swings that in some cases could end a production company if it went all kinds of wrong.

He thinks it's a semantic point but it's not. You are literally ascribing the opposite relationship to risky small/mid budget movies and tentpoles as actually existed. As, in fact, continues to exist. As CTOAN observes, the tentpoles cover the costs for the studios, which allows them to make smaller films, not smaller films creating a financial base for tentpoles.

This of course is not very predictable - profitability year-on-year varied and movie execs had to have their hand on the tiller at all times, following trends and scoping out talent. Enter the VCs, for whom an investment in a movie studio is just that - an investment. They are interested in the studios' share values, and ensuring that they remain stable at the minimum and increasingly profitable if at all possible as one part of a broader portfolio of investments. The idea of cocaine hound studio heads following their guts makes them itchy, so as superhero movies start to take off in the 2010s you see a very hard push towards 'rationalizing' the production of movies and making it something finance bros could understand. Big movies with big stars, planned in advance, with huge advertising budgets to make sure that every movie is profitable. Superhero movies and classic IP were just the thing of the moment that provided the justification needed to make this transformation.

Yes, which sounds all very convincing until you realise that these superhero films are some of the least planned in advance movies ever made. Certainly as a deliberate process for the budgets they have. They are all essentially being made in the same way that Quantum of Solace was. QoS, of course, is the James Bond film where the actors and directors were writing scenes because of the last strike. Why? Because Iron Man was made a bit like that and they've been trying to use the same process to capture the same secret sauce. Everything about them is derided as irrational, inflating budgets and leading to routinely enormous reshoot costs. As everyone observes, reshoots are ordinary... but some of these movies are essentially filmed twice even when they don't have unplanned directorial changes. That isn't ordinary, except for these films.

Now, maybe you can look at Solo and say that the reason for these changes is that cocaine hounds think that's the way to go, but you keep talking about VCs. Everyone in charge of any of these production studios has been making movies since the 1990s or even earlier. You can kind of argue that the shot callers at WB have been non-film executives for some time, but Marvel used to be an indie studio until it was bought by... Disney. Even Sony's been making movies since the 1990s. And guess who owned what we now call Sony before the 1990s? Coca Cola. I guess you were right about those coke hounds! But, for real, where are the Venture Capitalists? They're not in the big studios. They might, ironically, be A24... nope, they're legacy executive led as well. Where are they? At every turn in this post you've used wrong facts. Is this one also wrong?

Also, and this is actually a quibble, big stars are notoriously not part of the IP led tentpole landscape. I'd actually argue this is good for your argument because it's not at all obvious to me that "star power" or, rather, "bankable stars" ever actually existed. I would say that people use the stars to decide which movie they're not explicitly paying for "oh, such and such is in this? how bad could it possibly be?", which is probably why Netflix loves paying for stars. The only other vehicles that are made these days are for The Rock, who works for everyone on pretty much anything... Netflix, WB, Disney, Universal and he's probably even done stuff for Sony. Derp, of course he has, fucking Jumanji.


*Remember that the traditional heuristic is to double the budget to determine whether a film profited. You could argue that the change has actually been in how revenues return to studios and this is the real reason mid budget movies have diminished. If we could assume a $20m film would profit from just $40m, then we see either that much more of that gross had to come from the domestic market or film studios got much more of the revenue:

As you can see, in all three scenarios, the film has failed to return a profit with a worldwide gross of $40m. And, no, setting the Chinese gross to 0 does not help, even with a 70% domestic take: