A Boring Dystopia

Wait, Bob Chipman quoted Sony Pictures in a critique of the Mark Webb Amazing Spider-Man series. They used a phase something like content as product. Chipman noted the Webb movies were greenlit not because we needed another Spider-Man movie. In fact, they rejected Raimi's Spider-Man 4 on the assumption that Spidey was getting stale. (Even though 3 was well received, just not as much as the moguls wanted).

But Disney was wanting Spider-Man in the MCU, and Sony wanted to preserve its rights in order to get a slice of that Disney pie. Marvel owns Spider-Man and was free to sell to Disney if Sony wasn't going to make a movie. So they made movies to cockblock Disney. They didn't have a story or a good idea, they just needed to make a movie, even a bad one, to evergreen their Spider-Man rights.

And this led to some ideas from Marketing / Accountancy: What if we extend this same notion of just making movies without inspiration or concepts the same way, since we know enough about what consumers will buy tickets for. (The movie market is mostly teens who don't know any better, hence the 1980s trend of making sure boobs happened in at least one scene.)

Content as product, manufactured the way one manufactures turkey bacon, or Twinkies.

Curiously, we actually saw a similar trend in the music industry in the late 80s, where the labels decided they figured out the perfect formula to knock out hit after hit. (Patrick Bateman would talk about how totally amazing this music was as he was prepping to butcher his next victim.)

We're also seeing it in strategic maneuvers like Warner shelving Batgirl as a tax write off, a maneuver that demonstrates even Warner doesn't regard cinema as art rather than content to be consumed.

We've already seen this kind of devastation happen to the game industry, where AAA games depend on a publisher-proprietary platform, have an always-online mandate (even with single-player) and is loaded with microtransactions, and intentionally made less fun by making the grind tedious so that bypasses of parts of the game can be sold as time savers.

When art is no longer about expression but consumption, the producers have lost the plot. Much like the dusk of Classical Hollywood and the art-film age of the 1970s this is probably going to create an era of low-budget films that are actually good, while the big studios try to sue the snot out of the small production companies for trumped-up rights violations (think the Pokémon vs. Palworld litigation that is ongoing, and apply the same notion to cinema projects).