Looking Back on Looking Forward to 2022

Damage Control has a lot of feature posts in the December gauntlet, and this is the one I fear the most. While it’s probably the easiest to write, it also is the blog’s single greatest source of egg on my face.

I’m certainly back to my losing ways this year, but will it be enough to drag my overall record down below .500? Let’s investigate.

The Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X will continue to fly off shelves. Even if they stay in stock a few seconds longer as the installed base grows, it’ll still be very difficult to snatch one.

Not quite. They still sell out quickly, but the pace of restocks has accelerated to the point where an inventory tracker is no longer mandatory for being able to find one.

The bottom will fall out of the NFT grift, but game companies will not get the memo for a while after.

This was so true that it couldn’t possibly be true any harder. The market for NFTs was as dead as a doornail. After trading reached its peak in the beginning of the year, NFT sales and the prices they sold at have plummeted even faster than Tesla’s stock has since Musck offered to buy Twitter.

And right on cue, SquareEnix dropped its tone-deaf NFTs of ecoterrorist action figures when the market had dropped to 10% of its peak value. And to think it sold off a bunch of valuable franchises for a pittance in order to do so… which still doesn’t make sense. Not sure what Tomb Raider’s ownership got in the way of developing a few JPEGs.

Dragonball will regrettably not return to TV. Yet.

Sadly true, but I did enjoy it being in the theater. Perhaps the series will pick up again sometime next year, but I’m still not hopeful.

At least one of the five currently ongoing Star Trek shows will be canceled.

Kind of. Picard will end with Season 3, but that season isn’t airing until 2023, so I don’t think I should count it as a win for this year.

ScarJo will work for Disney again.

Swing and a miss; looks like she’s working for everyone but Disney right now, working with Illumination, Wes Anderson, Apple TV+ and jolly old England since Disney’s aggressive handling of a contract dispute.

We’ll get another (announcement for a) highish-budget fantasy prestige series on a streaming service. And I will doom myself by getting into the details by saying it will be Discworld.

After Henry Cavill got screwed over by quitting The Wicther to focus his time on DC movies, new DC films overlord James Gunn screwed Cavill by taking away that DC gig, leaving the actor with neither job. The ex-Superman did not remain unemployed for long, though, as Amazon had an offer ready for Cavill to act in and produce a series based on Warhammer 40,000 before his butt could land on the street.

However it’s not Discworld, so doom me.

COVID will lose its pandemic-level emergency status (in regular facts, not alternative)

While Joe Biden (in)famously said on TV that the pandemic was over, government agencies are maintaining the state of emergency. Considering hospitals are back full to bursting (though not from COVID alone this time), I can see why they want to keep their guard up.

Corey Perry thinking that if he can’t beat the Tampa Bay Lightning, join them, will backfire spectacularly as the Bolts lose in the Stanley Cup Final.

Perry’s curse continues on, helped along by Pat “Trick” Maroon canceling his own good fortune by damaging the Stanley Cup after the Lightning’s previous win.

Avatar 2 probably can’t flop, but it won’t make MCU bank.

Time will tell on how much money The Way of Water will land worldwide in total, but its domestic box office opening was nearly $10 million less than Thor: Love and Thunder, and around $50 million less than both Wakanda Forever and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

It’s going to take some long tails and a strong international multiplier to get this to a billion-dollar bank… much less 2 or 3. This one has a good shot at being true, but it wouldn’t be fair to just assume the win this early.

The Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan will make the current microchip shortage even worse.

Tempers are still sky high in the neighborhood, and there have been a few moments when goods just couldn’t get shipped out from the island. And while the shortage continues, it’s hard to say it got worse this past year. Order backlogs remain severe, but forward progress has been made. As evidence, you need not look any further than store shelves.

Things may yet get worse. If war breaks out, the consequences for TSMC will be dire and far-reaching. But so long as it doesn’t happen, there’s light at the end of the semiconductor tunnel.

Record

This Year: 3-5-2 (.400)

Overall: 51-49-10 (.509)