I have no idea why streaming companies will spend like 10 million dollars per episode, and then spend the absolute minimum on writing staff.
Like, they have the data on what everyone watches. They have to know that some mid 2000s content with worse visuals but better writing is beating a ton of their flashy new IPs. Yet they’ll still insist on spending insane cash on something that will completely fade into the background in like a year max.
These decisions are made by people who view the world through spreadsheets. They wouldn’t recognise a good story if you hit them on the head with it.
Okay but they should recognize the concept of ROI and diminishing returns. An accountant should be perfectly capable of realizing that that after a certain point it makes sense to spend money hiring more writers versus bigger name actors or CGI.
Corporations are simply groups of people, and people are terrified of being blamed for failure. The dumb things we see corporations doing are often cases of many people making small, super-safe decisions. Big names and big visuals attract eyeballs so that’s a safe decision. Writers may be a swing and a miss, risky.
This is why a good CEO is paramount. They can take the risks that drive success. Of course some are cowards and only look to drive the needle one tick over, quarter after quarter, so the board doesn’t fire them. But leaders like that will never hit it out the park.
You haven’t worked in many large corporations, have you?
I’ve worked in a few.
I could understand if each department had massive budgets that were spent in an idiotic manner due to inexperienced and incompetent leads.
I could understand it each department got less than the bare minimum, resulting in a final product that was mediocre despite strong individual contributors.
What I don’t understand is this mentality “hey let’s spend $200 million on this new TV Show, but only 2 million on the writing staff.”
Stargate SG-1 just gets better and better compared to modern stuff, and I have to watch it in vaseline-o-vision 90’s low-def.
So many great scifi books but they’d rather rehash or prequel things.
Same shit with generative AI. You want to replace… the writers? The guys that contribute a hundred pages, triple-spaced, right at the start? This technology’s gonna let any rando with a nice PC singlehandedly produce Pixar-quality CGI with mildly gloopy backgrounds, and you think the real savings are in the people who write words pretty good.
That’s interesting. I’m not going to lament the death of the old studios system. Sure it worked some of the time, but it was mostly bloat. Side benefit of this being, as Stewart points out, people who loved their craft got a chance to get better at it over time.
Instead of cutting the inefficiencies, silicon valley “disrupted” the system, aka undercut existing systems at a loss for the all valuable market share. Now that they’re competing with themselves, they’re squeezing everyone involved: creatives, technicians & the audience to make their unsustainable business model magically sustainable. The illusion “tech will save us all” is failing, AI & everything-as-a-service is their last hope.
I don’t know what the alternative is? Pandoras box is open, we can’t go back to the older system anymore.
Support crowd funded groups and cooperatives. This will continue until workers are the ones receiving the profit.
Nebula is a creator owned streaming service!
It’s disappointing that Apple put constraints on John Stewart when it’s pretty clear he is on the right side of history with his takes on the big issues of our time. So he talks about AI and China…would it really hurt Apple?
Yes. Apple personally doesn’t care but they need to maintain their reputation and relationship with China to keep manufacturing their products.
Ok but why the fuck would he join Apple and be surprised that they aren’t all about free speech? He sure was ok with taking their dirty slave money (which he very well knows is blood money) Lost a lot of respect for him when he joined Apple and lost more when it went to shit and he acted surprised
Apple manages their public image very carefully.
