drotto

Never claimed otherwise. Failure can happen at many levels; poor casting, poor acting, poor design, poor writing, poor CGI, etc. Sometimes, it is clear where the failure occurred, sometimes not. But ultimately, they have to be judged on the monetary success and viewership. More often then not, the better people will rise to the top with repeatable success. Some people will not survive in the job, and nobody should garentee those people jobs or monetary rewors.

Really, other than viewership numbers, and revenue generated, there is nothing to gauge a shows success with the general public. Also, it is a team effort in the end and attempting to pull any one group out is futile. If stuff is being changed there is no way for the average person to know or even care. Therefor, we need real viewer numbers, or a meaningful metric. We need a relative ranking of a shows popularity on a service. It would follow a show that is getting a high percentage of view time would be more popular, thus driving subs. Finally, for services that offer ad tiers, we need what people are willing to pay for ad spots for specific shows. Again, more popular shows will have higher ad buys. As much a we would like a metric that measures talent, all we have is popularity, and profit. If a writer on a popular, money, making show, we must infer they are part of a good team, and they are doing good work. They will then get reworded with residuals and more work. If their next project tanks, they will get downgraded. It's how the real world works.

Double edge sword for everyone on the numbers. The writers asking for residuals bases on views may find their show is worthless, and deserves no residuals. On thr other hand, studios will then have stock holders asking what the heck are we paying for, that is not making us money.

If I were the person that could solve this issue, I would be very rich. The issue is the number of writing jobs is likely contracting over the next few years. They days of streamers green lighting seemingly everything, and the need for that many writers has ended. So those 11500 members are going to be fighting for fewer jobs. That is a hard reality. The second issue of "bad" content and poor job training is somewhat related. In the rush to poor out content, writers who would never have gotten the opportunity or perhaps were less qualified were hired due to the shear number needed to pump out that content. Thus, the decline in quality, and ultimately the current fall. A possible solution, bring back some of the old writers and show runners. Less so to write, but more to train and control the writers room. Too many people without the needed skills were put into lead positions without the experience necessary. Those experienced people will then re-establish the training aspect. Get people ready to do the higher level jobs. Also, establish a clear path for progression and promotion. Second, establish a clear performance based residual system. Writers that have worked on good shows, that make money, should get performance based residual incentives. This will help to insure good writers stay working, and people are encouraged to do their best work. This will also require far more numbers transparency.

Again this could backfire. If you force people into longer commitments, they are more likely to say no thanks. So if the monthly fee is significantly raised, it will cut down on rotation of subs, but what price for a 5 or 12 month sub becomes attractive? As an example if they push one month to $25, what is a tempting price for 6 months? Perhaps $100, so 2 months "free"? All this will do is cause people to drop or stretch their rotation. The prime issue with streaming will always be this, the old popular content will spend years on these serviced, there is no rush to see it. To pull new people in you therefor need to add old but popular stuff (Friends, Sienfeld, the Office), or popular new content. You need several Stranger Things, Wednesdays, One Pieces, or even second tier stuff like the Boys, every year to get people to say that is worth it. But even say you get 6 shows a year that are must see material, you can sub for 6 months every other year and easily get through all that material. Since the popular stuff will not get pulled.

That's being generous.

I am moving, and will be out of region for my favorite team. I might have to suck it up and get ESPN + for the season. Will likely drop it during the off season.

I doubt it will help. People are already tired of paying for multiple services. If they all go up, they will drop one, or may start rotating subscriptions.

Sorry, I can not agree with mandating employee numbers. For the most part it is the showrunners, most of whom are writers, job to determine how many people they need. Where is the evidence that rooms are shrinking? In fact the article states most rooms already meet these requirements, but they stress they should not be forced too. Yes, I do personally feel that extra people in the room when they are not wanted for whatever reason, could lead to an unhealthy environment. This could then have negative effects on the product.

To add fuel to the fire, from Variety, many show runners do not want and did not ask for these writer room requirements. So there is not unity in the ranks, and internal concerns about the effects of those demands. Nobody asked for this,” said one prominent showrunner. “Every showrunner I know is against this. It doesn’t make sense to anybody.” Another writer added: “All the showrunners that want a staff should be given a staff. I don’t think it’s important to force those few that don’t want a staff to have a staff.” The WGA proposed in the spring that TV shows should hire a minimum of six to 12 writers, depending on the number of episodes in a season. At its meeting on Tuesday, they agreed to reduce that ask by one writer — but would not forgo the basic structure. Several showrunners told Variety they did not want to be forced to hire writers who are not needed. In its worst form, they say, that would amount to “featherbedding,” an illegal labor practice in which employers are required by union rules to hire workers who do no work https://variety.com/2023/biz/news/writers-strike-screenwriters-oppose-staff-mininum-1235694323/

Clip from Deadline in May outlining the WGA writer room requirement demands. Before the WGA launched its strike a week ago, it had proposed minimum staffing for episodic TV writers rooms. For pre-greenlight rooms, it proposed “minimum staff of six writers, including four Writer-Producers.” For post-greenlight rooms, it proposed “one writer per episode up to six episodes, then one additional writer required for each two episodes after six, up to a maximum of 12 writers. Example: eight episodes requires seven writers including four Writer-Producers; 10 episodes requires eight writers including five Writer-Producers.” Yes, implying the proposal would lead to bad writers being hired in oppinion. Regardless, I can not see how a 6 episode show must have 6 writers. These guideline are purely about forcing studio to hire more people then they may want or need, and nothing about the quality of the show. They are trying to force studios to hire more people than they may need in a possibly shrinking job market. I know unions exist to get their workers jobs, but this seems extreme.

The whole system needs a good flush, creatives and executives alike.

Paying good writers is always worth it. What the problem is, and still one of the main sticking points of the strike, is the WGA wants to dictate the size of the writers room for every show. That means unneeded or even bad writers would be mandated into writers rooms where they may not be wanted. That effects not only the bottom line, but potentially the creative process and even quality of a show.

On the other hand studios like Sony are backing off on plans for their own services, and taking a more traditional approach to license their movies to existing services. WB is also co sidering licensing and doing VOD for several months before making a film "Free" for subscribers on MAX. So an adaptation of the older model. Again, no streaming has proven a reliable ROI for forgoing direct payments for a specific property, and putting it on a subscription service were the fee is distributed between 1000's of properties. While Stranger Things seems to drive subs, but what value to second and third tier properties have? What is the value of a 30 year old film? This is why you see streamers pulling content, the storag fee are greater than they pull in. Yes, many jumped on streaming, except for arguably Netflix, nobody has made a profit yet. I think the ad tiers are a path towards profit, but it is far from printing money like they all thought. It also goes against then original idea that people could watch anything they want, anytime, no ads. Instead it is starting to look a lot more like cable, and there are only so many people willing to spend money on multiple services. I think the consumer pool may be smaller then expected.

Plus the very good revenue streams they sacrificed for streaming, like physical media, and TV airing rights. Those were big money makers, now insignificant.

Two thing are always lost in talking about compensation. 1. CEO's oversee multiple divisions of a larger company. Iger in your example is responsible for Parks, ESPN, Cruise ships, streaming, and content creation. An actor or writer is contracted to do a job, gets payed and moves on. It is not a long term job it is essentially gig work. Very different work in that respect. 2. CEO's are constantly under scrutiny and responsible for all the decisions being made. The buck stops with them. Company does bad or loses money, they are gone. Actors and writers get paid up front (yes there are residual deals also). If a project goes bad they still got paid in full, and have few fiscal risks if it performs poorly. Sure co sistent bad performance may hinder their future prospects, but they are generally not held fully responsible.

I think the streaming issue is actually relatively simple, but I have no clue how to fix it. Maintaining massive server farms, and all that bandwidth is expensive. Now add to that original content is more expensive than the streamers imagined. They thought they could get away with spending a traditional network's 2 or 3 million per episode, but that quickly ballooned to $100 M plus for 8 or 10 episodes. Then it became very hard to quantify how much those expensive shows really bring in. So expensive content that was likely losing money. They created a catch 22, if they slow down content creation or make cheaper shows, they may lose viewers, if they spend the money, they need to raise subscription rates to justify the spending. When they charge top much either drop or short sub and bing, then drop. When the streamers actually figure out a way to make money they may have something.

Honestly, the parks may be in their most difficult position ever. Universal is coming at them hard, with multiple new attractions, an entire new park, and hot IP's that are brining in big audiences. They are building an entire new park in 2 or 3 years, while Tron and the Guardians rides took like 5 years each to build, and Epcot has been under construction for 4 plus years now. This is money they almost needed to stay competitive. The Moana water thing and a Figment meet and greet are going to mean nothing against Nintendo land, more Harry Potter, How to Train your Dragon, Universal Monsters, etc. Really, Disney is going to need a significant expansion of an existing park, or even a 5th gate, to stay on top.

And now he is rumored to be directing James Bond.

Disney + has lost close to $13 billion since it luanched. That is all about writers and content creation.

Granted the theme parks are by far the largest and most profitable division of Disney. In fact they often subsidize other departments. They can survive without the content creation department (not saying they would thrive without them). No parks would be an instant collapse.

https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/kite-man-hell-yeah-trailer-harley-quinn-max-1235723802/ I like the Harely show, this could be funny, but I am not sure where they will take this.

My biggest complaints for this show are very consistent for Disney series in general. 1. Feels like this would have been better as a 2 or 3 hour movie as opposed to a 9 episode show. Not dismissing the good moments, but still too much filler. 2. Teasing Thrawn and this was Disney's take on Heir to the Empire was a major portion of this show's promotion and it is frustrating. At this rate will see Thrawn as a cliffhanger in the second to last episode, and then in the final episode, with no resolution of the story. You will have to wait for the movie for any real use of him. Things need to become a bit more stand alone. 3. Too many contrived events to get to the next point in the plot. There be whales here, being this week's example. After building up the map that much, then basically discarding that to hitch a ride, seems to be another step in a long line of things that have just randomly happened to so we can get to the next plot point. I was hoping for a bit more nuanced and mature writing. I like when characters feel like they are moving the plot along and figuring things out, not being led along by things that are just happening to them. Overall it is good, but some of the things listed above are stopping me from rating it higher.

Meaning any provisions that would llow the studios to scan images or record voices for future use should be strictly banned from the base level contracts. The only time those things should be included are when those are the items specifically being considered.

That is disappointing. I wanted Deadpool to connect into the MCU, but still kinda be it's own thing. I am convinced one of the reasons the MCU is faltering is it has become too interconnected. To the extent that many films fail to stand on their own or seem like they require hours of homework to fully understand.