[bko]

What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?

Here are a few positives:

Larger movie catalog all under one place, better value bundle due to fewer transaction costs in negotiation. Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.

More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.

More movies. Shared expenses and synergies can produce lower costs and increase supply.

More investment in technology. It makes sense for a larger company to invest more in technology since the business impact and throughput is larger (technology scales).

Less likely to go out of business. Larger and more diversified revenue stream means more long terms security.

Instead of a flippant one sentence snarky response, make the argument or don't comment at all.

[happymellon]

> More risky movies. If a company has more diversified income stream, it can take more risks on new and interesting movies.

Citation. This is not my observation.

[bko]

Do you think a company w less diversified source of income would be willing to take more risk, knowing that room for error is very small?

[Ukv]

Observationally, larger companies already in the lead seem prefer a safe X% return for their shareholders and don't need to take large risks. Smaller companies trying to make it don't have the liberty to rest on their laurels, and often will be risking it all on some idea being a massive hit.

[mint5]

Following that logic, Microsoft and oracle should be putting out a lot of innovative quirky software!

I can’t think of a single example where a super large company gets more willing to take risks when it gets larger. Theres probably a few exceptions but I can’t think of any.

[serf]

the most obvious display of risk aversion is the greenlighting and production of "Spiderman 35 Electric Boogaloo" and "Batman # 740 The Dark Knight Re-Rises Again" -- meanwhile indies are still struggling to find first investors or writing money.

as I said in another comment : These large firms do not take risk.

[happymellon]

All I asked for was a citation, as my observations have been that smaller companies are more willing to take risks as they need to survive.

The larger the corporation, the more risk adverse they are.

[bko]

You don't need a citation for everything. It's common sense.

But sure, look at big tech with a money printing machine, insane margins and revenue. Amazon spends 90b a year on r&d (~14% of revenue). Meta is about 26% of revenue and so on.

That's risk as it's not tied to their core business and most if not all is punted away.

Can you give me a citation of a small company willing to punt 14-24% of their revenue on long term projects that may not bare any results?

[shagmin]

How much of Meta's r&d is spent on keeping people addicted to their apps? I'd argue Amazon and Meta were both more innovative when there was no or very little revenue.

Meta essentially replaced myspace, which basically went down hill after being bought out by a much larger company.

[bko]

Why do you ask questions you can easily ask to an LLM? You probably don't care, your world view is "Meta bad".

Meta created and support React which runs much of the internet. Pytorch, which runs most AI models. GraphQL, Jest, Llama (one of the first open weights models) and more that I can't remember.

What are you talking about?

[mint5]

That world model is not in touch with reality.

R&D spend does not correlate with innovation or creativity. It’s surprising what gets counted as R&D in a big company.

Small companies have to have an innovative product in order to compete with the big fish who operate economies of scale.

[bko]

Very productive comment. Here is my reply:

R&D spend does correlate with innovation and creativity. It’s surprising what it takes to consider something as R&D in a big company.

[avisser]

start-ups spend over 100% of revenue on risky ventures.

[inigyou]

Yes, because if they don't take the risk they are guaranteed to collapse. History supports this idea.

[mint5]

History well supports that large companies do not innovate well, with nearly all collapsing due to stagnation and bureaucracy. A predicted bad outcome does not mean they can avoid it

[toymin]

It's interesting that you bring up Netflix. While their initial offering of having a good selection of movies in one subscription was very attractive, their expansion and eventual entry to public stock market caused it to be pretty much synonymous with "slop" in TV and movie circles, which I think makes a very good case that "big production studio" != "good quality productions".

Warner Bros specifically, while still a very large studio, has been relatively generous with funding more risky movies, and there is a lot of warranted caution that this consolidation is going to result in streamlining everything into taking as few risks as possible and aiming for broadest appeal and highest possible gross margins, which is a terrible thing for anything that could be considered art.

[bko]

Netflix completely changed the game. They paid huge amounts to produce original content. Direct to TV used to be an insult now you have triple A content direct to steaming. You forget what the market looked like pre Netflix. Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point

Comedians for instance get 10 - 25m per special, they were getting a fraction of that before Netflix. They had to sign on shitty sitcoms to make any money

What are you talking about?

[irto]

>Sure you don't like their content now, but that's not the point

That is very much the point. The initial point of bigger company = worse movies.

[pjc50]

> bigger company = worse movies?

Less competition.

[watwut]

> What's your mental model for bigger company = worse movies?

Monopoly => lack of competition => enshittification and abuse.

> Imagine the extreme where every movie was owned by a different owner. Netflix would not be able to license content effectively.

As much as I like Netflix, permanent ownership of movies and series on my side, after one time payment would be hugely desirable. Overall, I dont like this "you just rent catalogues you have no control over" development is all that great.

[serf]

all one has to do is look at movies from indie groups versus conglomerates in order to pick apart every point you made aside from technology investment and movie volume.

your most laughable point is the one about risk : no one takes less risk than a huge conglomerate beholden to a board and shareholders.

real risk in cinema comes the cast and crew that decide to forego dinner in order to get their vision to the screen, and the arts are filled with such passionate examples.

Not everyone wants the 1500th star wars or marvel movie, even the fan bases for those releases are tired.