[graphe]

> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay.

Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.

[bluepizza]

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.

Corporations don't have feelings. It is okay to be mean to multi billion dollar corporations.

[ta_1138]

You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value.

As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable.

That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.

[skydhash]

> That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive

The streaming model requires a conveyor belt of content to work. And movies are expensive to produce, consume a lot of bandwidth, and not really replayable. The constraints tend to give bad content. It’s the whole cheap, fast, and good triangle.

[edgyquant]

Corporations are made up of people and groups of people do very much have feelings.

[tedivm]

Corporations are people when it benefits them, and are mindless machines when it benefits them.

Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine.

It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.

[graphe]

Corporations don't have hands to wring either. I don't love Disney, either IP or their agenda but they didn't wring it. Factually.

They bought an IP to add onto it. If any company wringed anything it was Google buying Motorola for patents and then spitting out the bones to resell.

[erellsworth]

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money.

Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

[pnutjam]

Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any. They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.

[geodel]

> you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.

Still in luck, you are not yet in Hadoop domain :-)

[graphe]

Religions don't wring up other religions by making more media of other religions.

[erellsworth]

WTF does religion have to do with this? I have no idea what you're trying to say.

[graphe]

You don't wring anything by making more media. It is a ridiculous idea to think.

[erellsworth]

You absolutely can wring something out by making too much of it. There's a reason "superhero fatigue" is a thing.

[babyshake]

> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it.

I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.

[axpy906]

This comment reminded me of South Park’s Panderverse for some reason.

[JoBrad]

For my family, Disney’s value is more balanced between old and new content, vs Netflix, which I expect to lose content after some time.

[beardedwizard]

Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.

[cpuguy83]

Andor is phenomenal at least.

[kranke155]

Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.

[edgyquant]

Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.

[kranke155]

Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated.

I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters.

Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2).

BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault).

So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance.

Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result.

Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".

[jghn]

Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.

[kyriakos]

Exactly this. SW productions are side characters who had some kind of relationship with a skywalker at some point getting their own shows. The recent movie franchise didn't manage to open new directions for bigger plots that can be presented as tv shows therefore all Disney+ SW productions are stuck in the past trying to unsuccessfully expand on existing characters.