Semantic Nonsense: HBO Min

So you might have heard at many points in the process that the Discovery takeover of Warner Bros. has been a giant mess, with no greater showcase for the shitstorm than the former best streaming service: HBO Max.

To Warner Bros., this represents the fourth consecutive time the company — which would be absolutely fine as an independent business — has been bought and subsequently immediately mismanaged by its new corporate overlord in this century alone.

Warner Bros in the 21st Century pic.twitter.com/6tk95YQgdF

— Don_East (𝕊𝕡𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕣-𝕊𝕖𝕟𝕤𝕖: 𝔻𝕒𝕟𝕘𝕖𝕣) (@TheRealDonEast) August 18, 2022

While the initial news is long past (at least in Internet and news cycle timing), the foreboding doom it created shall reach far into the future.

You STILL can neither own, nor rent anything

This Discovery v. HBO Max content disaster lays bare how complacent we’ve been about streaming libraries.

Most recently (specifically, since all the big boys but Sony got their own, individual services), each content creator has been seizing back their shows and movies from wherever they had roamed to bring them home to their and only their service.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that each studio’s streaming service was intended to be a full library of their content. The notion that a studio would pull its own content from its own service seemed unthinkable in this context. Doubly so for content created for and exclusive to that streaming service. But we were dead wrong.

You see, it’s not worth it to have a library. It’s not worth it to have mass amounts of children’s programming when your strategy is to differentiate yourself from Disney. It’s not worth it to pay residuals to the casts and crews of old, seldom-watched content when you can create new content under contracts that eliminate residual payments. And it’s not worth it to offer content of differing profitability side-by-side when low-profit content merely distracts the consumer from high-profit content.

This culling is our wake-up call on streaming. In the fullness of time, there will be no availability for any but the most profitable legacy content. This culling will be remembered as the inflection point when streaming platforms lost their innocence.

Now, nobody can trust any piece of content whatsoever to remain on streaming services. I’ve long been a champion of physical media, much like anybody who ever tried to buy a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on a digital storefront a year after it came out. But there’s a problem with physical media… and you might be surprised to hear it’s the same problem with legacy content.

So what, specifically, is that problem? Twenty years from now (if that many), only the first two seasons of Stranger Things will exist because Netflix never bothered to keep up the home releases. The original Ducktales will live on, but the reboot shall vanish as though it never was.

These shows and more, plus most of today’s new content, will never see a physical media release. While there is still profit to be had in DVDs and Blu Rays, there’s not ENOUGH profit to justify producing them when those resources could instead be used for higher-profit activities. Which brings us to the deeper dread of the poster child of the culling, Batgirl.

Opportunity knocks off

Is there truly no room in theaters anymore for a $90 million dollar movie?

In the DC Cinematic Universe’s bold, new future, there are no direct-to-streaming movies. It’s wasteful. Superhero feature films must go big or go home not exist. Or be ritualistically destroyed for a tax break.

The truth is that, like George Bailey, Batgirl was worth more dead than alive. If Batgirl was sent to the theaters, that means fewer screenings of movies like Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Black Adam or the multitude of tiny-budget horror movies that make a small but cost-efficient splash. Batgirl was made to be a middle-tier movie; an unenviable category that is on its way to extinction. The last thing a movie wants to be right now is costing too much for what it profits.

Batgirl was destined for the same fate as the season 3 DVDs of Stranger Things for the same reason: the minimum-acceptable profit margin is now too high for it. Discovery is betting that it will earn more money from the tax write-off AND by not changing its existing theatrical release schedule than it would make selling tickets to Batgirl on the big screen.

(Oh, to be in a world where the U.S. live-action Sailor Moon pilot can be watched but Batgirl and the other tax write-off victims can’t.)

But as I said, the culling reveals a darker, deeper truth and a loss of innocence. For this is not merely Batgirl ‘s problem. Opportunity Cost has come for our movies and it is not taking prisoners.

Cost-efficiency is whittling down the kinds of movies that are allowed to be made. A greenlit movie must be either a blockbuster tentpole expected to threaten for a billion-dollar bank, a low-budget flick that can post a good opening weekend, the vanity project of a well-heeled studio, or just straight-up Oscar bait.

There will be fewer opportunities in general for actors who don’t get cast in summer blockbuster action movies. Comedies (romantic or otherwise) and any drama that isn’t Oscar bait starring well-known actors will die quickly in favor of casting the kinds of nobodies that appear in original horror films lest a non-tentpole film have to pay tentpole salaries.

Tom Hanks is no blockbuster action star, and the only way any production would be allowed to afford the salary he commands would be for him to appear in Disney vanity projects and Oscar bait exclusively. It’s entirely possible this is already happening.

The movie industry is in the midst of a transition reminiscent of one of the major changes that occurred in the video game industry: the death of the single-A-tier and B-tier games in favor of polarizing toward AAA studio titles and indies.

99 Jahre Krieg Ließen keinen Platz für Sieger

I must say, though, that Discovery buying WB just sounds weird. It gives me some real “Wait, K-Mart bought Sears, not the other way around?” vibes. But there’s more ways these deals are similar.

As you may recall, Eddie “I can make a buck I don’t need and all I have to do is destroy an American institution?” Lampert famously drove Sears into bankruptcy after becoming CEO post-merger, all the while stripping Sears apart piece by iconic piece and selling them for his personal enrichment.

Should we be counting the days until David Zaslav starts the Warner Brothers fire sale?

And perhaps that’s the BETTER outcome. Warner Brothers could get the same treatment that outlets like Electronic Arts and Activision gave so many of their acquisitions; micromanaged until their spirit was gone, followed shortly by the complete destruction of what they bought. Their IPs left to languish in obscurity, their assets and personnel dispersed amongst the conglomerate; the consumed company thoroughly digested. Its atoms still exist, but can never be reconstituted.

Imagine, if you will, DC Comics going the way of Maxis. Don’t think it isn’t possible. Countless companies that would have done just fine on their own have been bought by a conglomerate who then either mismanages them to death, or kills them via suicide pact as the purchasing company fails. GameStop, for example, is clearly doomed (it’s just a matter of when) but ThinkGeek was doing solid, sustainable numbers and would almost certainly have outlived GameStop had GameStop not consumed it.

In truth, I wonder if the only way the “attract moar investors” growth scheme can stop is when there are no more smaller companies left to cannibalize. When there is nobody left to buy the disembodied parts of your acquisition. When you can tear apart in one year what took 100 to build, you will inevitably run out of things to tear apart. And then Alexander shall weep, for there would be no more worlds left to conquer. Jobs destroyed, art destroyed, all goods and services higher than shit-quality destroyed, potential for lasting profit destroyed, everything destroyed. The process even destroyed itself in the end, as all insatiable hungers must.

And all for what?