it's fucking me up how tv shows, movies, and even video games can't be "niche" content anymore
like nothing can be underrated anymore. it HAS to be a success. cartoons have to either be spongebob level successes with immediate marketing or they're shelved a season or two in.
Movies have such inflated budgets that they NEED to break a billion in the box office just to make back what they cost. Anything less than a blockbuster smash is turned into a tax write-off.
a single triple A video game can destroy an entire studio if it doesn't meet expectations, which are already lofty enough as it is.
and everything has to appeal to the widest demographic possible, which can mean sterilizing anything creative about the work so it becomes as palatable as possible.
idk im just sad about this
a huge problem across artistic industries right now is that we're losing the mid-list. It used to be normal for a publishing house (or a move studio!) to have their small projects, their mid-size projects, and their HUGE projects, with the understanding that the HUGE projects were going to help pay for the mid-size and small projects, which would give those works and creators time to find/build their audiences. But we're seeing this toxic wave towards the disappearance of the mid-list for exactly this reason—the ONLY things that exist are small, because they fail to break out, or HUGE, because they manage to break out. And Very few projects are ever going to become HUGE in any industry!!! That's not how sales or people or artistic movements work!!!
here's an interesting essay about this exact issue in the publishing industry. Silvia Moreno-Garcia on Threads also talks about this a lot, which is where I've learned a bunch of stuff.
