[notanormalnerd]

Because from a economical business point:

* You're getting old and your not spending as much money. * Getting 5$ from 100.000.000 people is better than getting 50$ 1.000.000 people. Especially if you can do it at lower costs. * Getting in new audiences to keep the franchise alive and healthy * And last but not least the average consumer is not interested in it being "true" to some kind of book or whatever. It has to make sense, but not in a true to the original author kind of way.

[ajuc]

The problem is the low effort part not the "not being true" part. If you take a result of decades of loving work of some author and give it to a committee to remake it in 6 months (and people in the committee were chosen by some random criteria like genitals or pigmentation) - you get low quality product with big budget.

Then you blame people who understand what was lost for complaining and call them racist.

Few people have problems with changes for the better. But the changes are usually for worse. In the Witcher season 1 most changes were well received (introducing Yennefer backstory for example). But removing the Ciri & Geralt scene which was the pinnacle of the 2 short stories collecting just so that they can put 30 minutes of Ciri walking with that black elf that has no influence on anything else in the story was just dumb. Pacing was awful, and they had to cut the good stuff.

The story got objectively worse, but people who didn't read the books won't complain cause they don't know what they missed.

[towaway15463]

1. Older audiences have more money and spend more of it.

2. There’s only 68 million Gen Z compared to 72 million Millenials.

3. You keep a franchise alive and healthy by protecting the core IP and making the fans happy not by alienating them and making terrible renditions of the story. If you do that then all you have left is a name that is increasingly associated with bad writing and acting and eventually it becomes a joke that no one will turn out for.

[webmobdev]

> Older audiences have more money and spend more of it.

And one way to make them spend that money is to target their kids, which is much more easier to do so ...

[dtx1]

see everything star trek after star trek enterprise

[thrown_22]

From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.

Today I saw physical adverts for House of the Dragon on the train ride home. The only thing I thought about was how shit the last season of Game of Thrones was and how I will never read any media about that world again. Even though I would have watched a new show set in a completely different world with the production quality I saw in the posters.

Currently Big Corp is spending billions on acquiring IPs which rather quickly end up having negative value. This is, to put it mildly, not good business sense.

[pseudo0]

It truly is bizarre to watch. It reminds me of the ethically questionable business strategy of buying a premium brand, slashing prediction quality and costs, and then raking in profits before people catch on. That strategy is viable because of cost-cutting though, while many of these franchises are setting records for production costs despite their mediocre quality.

[MarkPNeyer]

All of these strategies make sense given the financial environment we live in, with a money supply that constantly increases via debt creation. There’s something like an arms race for attention. The combination of this arms race and unlimited financing means we have production costs for for one hour of entertainment in the tens of even hundreds of millions.

I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.

[thfuran]

>From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.

There are probably more than 10x as many people who remember liking the lotr movies as a kid than who are close enough friends with a member of that fanatical core of Tolkien fans to have the show personally recommended to them and probably many times again as many people who are just generally aware of the popularity of LotR. That's the real benefit of the IP. Having some really dedicated fans help hype it up for a few weeks/months before it comes out doesn't hurt, but their job is pretty much done by the time it actually releases.

[thrown_22]

How well is the Star Wars franchise doing these days?

[notanormalnerd]

You wouldn't believe it, but fantastical.

[SantalBlush]

I think they also buy these IPs for the cultural impact. With these massive brands like Star Wars/Marvel/Game of Thrones, people get a strong sense of FOMO because they know everyone else will be talking about the new show or movie and they don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen it. These names are so big that they influence pop culture, and that's why media companies are paying huge sums for them.

[lordlimecat]

That only works for so long. It's burning money for warmth instead of spending a bit of time to buy firewood.

[zmgsabst]

Pareto tells us that 0.1% of people account for 38% of the money.

Intentionally aggravating your most passionate fans is a moronic business plan — like a mobile game that intentionally pisses off the “whales” to pursue casuals.

[bmn__]

Likening a passionate fan to a whale does not work for me. A whale spends thousands to ten thousands times as much as a casual, but a passionate fan does not spend orders of magnitude more than a casual. A business analyst can only see this first-order effect as money is easy to measure; the second order effect of the passionate fanbase having a larger-than-usual reach and being to organise mass gruntle/review bombing/boycotts and other forms of IP burning/resistance is invisible to him, or he does not care because the cost is already sunk, whereas whaling is always an ongoing business.

[Victerius]

The exact shape of a Pareto distribution depends on two or three algebraic parameters. And the Pareto principle isn't some universal law that applies everywhere.

[zmgsabst]

Sure — do you think it’s likely or unlikely to apply to things like profit per customer in media? …do you think the distribution will be significantly different than mobile games?

Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?

If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.