I feel pretty good about the progress I’ve been making lately with my zine. I’ve finished up most of the first chapter. I’m happy with how it’s turning out and with the unique quality it’s going to have among my other works. I’m getting more used to the new tools at my disposal and thinking about different ways I can use them. Quite frankly, I’m mostly annoyed that I’m not able to do more in a day because of errands and work.
First, some housekeeping. I am wondering about the future of this website and blog now. Every time I come on here to write, it occurs to me that there’s a little “write with AI” button in the corner. Maybe it’s not actually a safe place to have stuff anymore. Like, I already resigned my fate to AI scraping what’s already on here; I had this site up before AI tools were being shoved everywhere, so it’s only logical to assume my stuff was messed with during the development phase of those tools without my knowledge. Everything on the internet is potentially fair game. But I also don’t have to use a platform that explicitly has AI features, you know? I’m just not sure what else to do. There might be places to put up my practice comics, and I’m fine with taking down DB’R’ for the time being. This blog, though, is harder to replace. Besides the joys of writing, I’ve come to enjoy what it does for my weekly routine. Moving to a blogging platform would involve building an audience specifically for this blog, which is different than how I’ve been treating it as an ancillary feature of a website. And besides, I don’t know enough about blogging platforms to know if any are anti-AI and would provide me with protections. I’ll be thinking about it in the future. For now, I’m going to continue here since it’s already in place. My license for this domain is up in January, so that’s the concrete deadline if I don’t decide to drop it before then.
This week, I’ve been focused on production, so my thoughts have been pretty literal. I want to continue to focus on short stories for a while, rather than try to do a big long series. I have a lot of ideas from over the years, and I never got far enough to see the full scope of the stories. I figure it would be good to do single chapter stories of those concepts, just to see. I can always go back to any of them later if I want to do more, and they’ll force me to stretch my abilities and skills in new ways. It’s pretty exciting to think about seeing these stories come to life in some way. I have enough different variations of some of them that I can probably do multiple unrelated single stories under the same title, if I wanted to. I also have some more thought put into the next project I want to do, the remake of You’re a Snack. I have a basic plot outline and character arc down. It’s going to be a fully different story with somewhat different character beats and backstory that better gets at what I wanted to do with that book in the first place. I have some more prep work to do, but I’m trying not to do too much on it right now so I can keep my focus on the current project. I have four more issues to work on, after all; I don’t want to put all my enthusiasm into the next thing right away.
I have also been thinking about the Warner Bros merger, since it’s been confirmed that Netflix is the winning bid. Still years of negotiation and whatnot to be final, and who knows what’ll happen by then. Deals fall apart, and this administration isn’t exactly hiding their own political interests in this deal. That’s actually a quick thing to say first: It’s good that Paramount didn’t get it. That would have put CNN under the ownership of major Trump donor and ally David Ellison, basically ensuring that CNN becomes another far-right mouthpiece. This is literally what Viktor Orban has been doing in Hungary over the past few years, it’s what other autocrats have done in the past. That said, to comply with merger rules or whatever, Netflix is only buying Warner Bros, spinning out Discovery (where CNN lives) as its own thing, which leaves it potentially vulnerable to acquisition by Paramount. If Paramount tries to buy Discovery, it’s not hard to guess how that deal will be handled.
So really, it’s more about what Netflix owning Warner Bros means for the future of movies. Before anything else, it’s important to note that these mergers are always bad. Consolidation and monopolization is terrible, and there’s going to be hundreds or thousands of layoffs and other downsizing efforts as a result. Past mergers have resulted in fewer and lower quality products. Mergers bad, we need a new age of trust-busting. Specifically here, Netflix has basically been unprofitable until the past year or so, staying afloat on VC money while they undercut the entire television industry so they could replace it. That was always their plan, and the recent switch to higher subscription rates and ads, resembling cable companies, speaks to how their old rates were always too good to be true. Their leadership also explicitly hates movie theaters and wants to kill them (despite also trying to buy a theater chain a year or two ago?), so it’s not great to think about them owning a legacy media company that releases their movies in theaters.
On top of that, Netflix is historically bad at managing their shows and movies. They barely advertise them, they’re known to axe popular shows for no apparent reason (because all their metrics are secret), and their shows often go years between seasons. When they do release movies in theaters, it’s limited release with barely a word to the public, and it goes away so fast. They also specialize in making “second screen movies and shows,” which means making things you can pay half-attention to while scrolling social media on your phone. Some of these are problems all streaming services have; they operate under a fundamentally different model than traditional TV shows and try to make them as good of quality as movies, making them monumentally expensive to produce. HBO Max was also a big offender during the pandemic in doing simultaneous release to theaters and streaming, essentially telling viewers that there’s no point in going to the movies. Generally, because streaming is so accessible and doesn’t involve physically producing a home format, studios have been pulling movies from theaters a lot faster than in the past.
So, yes, a lot of people are afraid that Netflix buying Warner Bros is really bad for the future of the movies, and I can see why. Netflix could decide that all movies should be streaming from now on, which would make all those movies less enjoyable and could easily result in major creatives leaving the company and their projects behind in protest. I’ve seen a lot of that sentiment online, and it’s easy to see that viewpoint. I’ve also seen the argument that this deal could have the opposite effect. Netflix buying a studio that relies on theaters for much of their profits could encourage them to continue releasing WB movies there, and even to use the same infrastructure to release their own that way now that they won’t have to do it from scratch. At the very least, it’s hard to imagine Netflix wanting to lose things like James Gunn’s DC movies by killing theaters or being too involved in production. Not that that’s a convincing argument to me — these business ghouls don’t understand or like art — but you know, they would want the potential profits. It’s not unreasonable to say that while Netflix might want to kill Hollywood right now, their incentives would change if they actually owned part of it.
Outside of that, it’s also true that Netflix has made some great stuff. Just this year they had K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wake Up Dead Man, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. Despite the stretched out production and truly bizarre release schedule, Stranger Things has been getting rave reviews since its inception, and this final season is very well-received. I’m personally a huge fan of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and the Fear Street movies, which speaks to how long it’s been since I had Netflix. So yes, Netflix makes a ton of sloppy reality shows and things like Red Notice, but they also make these really good movies and shows, with a lot more control for the creatives than you’d expect. They’re a fundamentally weird company because they both want to kill and emulate traditional TV and Hollywood, with the main change being to pay creatives even less than ever while skirting union regulations. The tactics Netflix employs to be bad for creatives have been adopted by most of the streaming landscape, which is evil and bad, but also means that part isn’t a thing we’re concerned about changing in this merger deal.
All of which is to say, I don’t know a lot about what this means. It’s bad that Warner Bros is up for sale at all, and I think Comcast Universal would have been the most preferable buyer since they’re the most business-as-usual. I have no ability to predict what this means for the future of anything concrete at the moment, and neither does anyone else no matter what they prognosticate. No one was expecting the string of stupid and disastrous things Zaslav did when he bought WB a few years ago. Netflix could be more of that kind of confusingly bad mismanagement, or they could let WB do its things, or even take up a more traditional Hollywood role.
So, at the moment, all I can really say is that I hope movie theaters survive. I have a Regal Unlimited pass and go to the movies once a week on average. It’s a real joy. I don’t watch that many movies at home because it’s harder to concentrate on them. I have my phone, as well as everything else I want and need to do besides sit on a couch for two hours. The movie theater is different. I have to schedule it into my day, giving me something to look forward to. I drive down there, I select my seat, I get my snacks, and I settle into a unique, specialized environment. After committing so many decisions and being fully separated from the rest of the world, it would be insane to do anything besides watch the movie. Plus, the darkness, giant screen, and loud speakers make it immersive and all-encompassing. All those people who make arguments about convenience are so incredibly misguided. The inconvenience is the feature. Really, any argument that theaters are inconvenient or too low quality for what you spend are just arguments that capitalism is bad. Everyone is overworked and underpaid, and if we addressed those things, they would enjoy leisure activities like going to the movies more. That’s the sinister part of business ghouls like Netflix owning Hollywood: They want to create the crushing economic and social conditions that force people to their low-rent business model, basically making everyone into the people in Wall-E, except with multiple jobs instead of getting fat in a hover chair. So I hope we turn things around as a society and can keep having nice things like movie theaters.
Life in the Gutters 