Watching the mad scramble for literiture and games to turn into movies and tv series is interesting. I guess the professionals in hollywood etc have always done this, but its now a bit more obvious with the almost live tracking by channels on youtube.
The point is that it always seems to be a search for a "good" story or a "good character" that would sell tickets at the box office. This idea pushed the money to chase all the cunning writers and to troll through obscure novels in a search for some gold.
Then we had the age of the immitators. One studio would do something novel and all the second rate studios would do copies or derivitive works.... and they milked that strategy as dry as they could.
Then the studios tried to gain commercial advantage by pushing the budgets to ridiculous sizes.... and tried to out muscle each other in a last man standing kind of stratgey.
Now with the feeding frenzie of the streaming services trying to kill each other for market dominance, they are desperatly trying all these strategies at the same time. But wait, theres more...
The new add is politics.
Hollywood has been on this pain train for the past few decades but its become more obvious as the politics have become more radical. They have historically injected the politics of the day in all sorts of ways that wester audiences were blind to... because it agreed with how they thougth of themselves. But with the extreeme radicalisation of the minority politics at the moment, the hollywood machine does not know which way to thrash.... so they are trying to follow the trends of the cool kids but the cool kids will not agree... so they end up picking one or the other trend and pissng off everyone else.
This is emergent behaviour at its finest and is only really obvious at the moment because of the concentration of productions. If there was thousands of small studios making all kinds of stuff, then these train wreck movies with political adgendas would be lost in the crowd and not float to the top. Its just with the limited number of massive budget movies and the desperation of the production process trying to jam a bit of everything into every single production, we have this situation where all the strategies are being mangled together and making a camel. (horse designed by a committee joke)
The other strategy that seems to be flaring up is not about bringing anything new to the audience, but rather looking for where the audience attention is now... and trying to climb on board. Sort of like the old politician strategy of finding a mab and then getting in front of it. Now its more about finding a popular IP, no matter what... comic, game, novels, anime, whatever and buying the IP and the community. Then trying to commrcialise the community by adding enough of a mix of other popular tropes to try to generallise it to an even bigger community. This is what the pop culture types call "tourists" in their communities.
This has resulted in politics being injected randomly into smaller and smaller niche IP's that are looking more and more out of place. Its just the emergent behaviour of the whole system trying to throw everything at a new project to try to make it successful + big budget + edgy+ conservative + whatever... and with the concentration effect of the current market we end up with all the eggs in one basket and it turns out to be a shit show.
You see the same evolutionary pressures in other market segments like tools and homewares. As the markets get more saturated and the strategies get more agressive, the products start to try to be a bit of every strategy. cheap + good + colourful + features + expensive + mid + brand loyal + new + old. The marketing folk must go insane trying to tick all the boxes at the same time.
This is the beauty of the free market. Watching the evolution of these strategies is better than watching virus dna recombination. Its the same process but more colourful.
The only really novel bit of this is the "intelligent life" search strategy is starting to come into play.
Just as a background, most of the recombinant strategies are pretty simple. they use random mutation or large volume cross overs etc to create the next generation and then use selection to find the most successful in the environment. These strategies work when the system can afford to cull large numbers in parallel or has long time frames to cull serieally. But eventually, the organism or strategy gets too complex and is too expensive and the cost of these simple strategies is a handicap... which is why I think the birth rate is dropping in advanced ecconomies.... but thats an aside. THe point is that the strategy changes to what I call an "intelligent selection". (whether it is or not is easily debatable but thats what they call themselves....) the point is that the life form or strategy starts to encode more and more tricky senses and decision making and the strategy starts to try to "see" the advantage rather than blindly searching with the dumb search. The characteristic of the intelligent search is that it can observe the topology of the environment and make larger leaps from resource rich areas to new resource ritch areas. This solves some of the problems that the dumb search strategies cannot solve. the island effects usually trap dumb search methods. On the other hand more tricky search can bridge over chasms and leap across large regions of poor resources to get to distant opportunities.
The key idea is that the intelligent search uses signals and stimuli to form a hypothesis about where the resources are and then goes and acts upon the hypothesis. Due to the complexity fo the strategy (or organism that expresses that strategy) it is more costly and complex in energy and structure. So if it get it wrong the whole thing can die quickly. Have a look at the failures of large organisations that make big bets and then either live or die because they cannot re-adjust quickly enough to a bad call.
Hollywood is doing the same thing at the moment. Large and larger structures are being built around productions that are trying to be all things to all people and the bets are getting more extreem. Consolidation has made them big and fragile but harder to steer.
Anyway, the point I started with was about the intelligent search being the new evolutionary trick.of note is that now they are trying to spot the resources at greater and greater distances and leap to the next island of resources because they are so hungry and take so much resources to survive that they cannot exist in the areas between the islands. They need larger and larger markets to keep the line going up, but all the easy markets have been exploited by small outfits with dumb strategies. So now the intelligent strategy is jumping around hunting any community that looks like it has an exploitable IP. They are no longer specialising in similar material (super hero movies, or historical fiction or comedy movies) now they are just jumping to anything that looks popular... this is why the light is being shone on more and more niche communities that nerds used to have all to themselves.
The issue is that all the easy general population stuff like sport and romance has been fragmented and diluted to the point where the general population is sick of the sight of it and the "yoof' has shattered the topic into a million variations that the big producers cannot taget.
Perhaps this is an interesting counter-strategy to the mega-corp model? Shatter and fragment the resources so the mega-organism cannot find enough resoures and canot adapt to the new environment.
This is what happened with the bud light situation. The organsm tried to adapt to what they thought the environment represented and found that the market was not like their hypothesis and that the market had fragmented. One brand could not be generalised to many different segments at the same time. I understand why they would want to do that, the efficiency of being able to produce the one generic product and deliver it into many markets is what makes the mega-corps work. However, when that doesn't work, usually they just by a whole pile of small niche brands and try to find efficiency by amalgamating their back end processes while keeping the illusion of diversity at the market facing side.
I think the big lesson from the bud ligth event was that its hard to take a very amalgamated brand and try to shatter it into diversity, so it represents very different things in different parts of many markets. I think the biggest mistkae was not realising that the market place has become homogenised. Its gettting harder and harder to segment the market. Used to be geography was the major limitig factors and allowed regional variation to thrive, but with the online space and laguages starting to be homogenised, its getting harder and harder to be able to vary messages or find "new regions".
I think this is the same issue that has changed the landscape in politics. Watching the major parties trying to evolve and deal with the lack of agility while the microparties bloom like weeds is eternally entertaining. But the problem has become that even the microparties are no longer regionally diverse. they immediatly go on line and start to generalise away all their unique identities and become the same mush of whatever attention seeking topics.
I have noticed the same fatige in youtube channels. they are all seekign attention and once they run out of their unique ideas, they start to borrow from their successful neighbours and rapidly evolve to look the same and cover the same content.
The cross fertilisation of ideas is happening so much faster. But there are still cultural divisions and regions that seem to be robustly immune. Different nations and ethnic identities are still doing their thing. As much as the digital nomads think they are changing the world, the reality of the local environmental pressures are still the dominant forces on the way people live out side of urban areas. More and more of the urban areas are blurring together, but the regional areas are still strongly pressured by their physical environments.
Bringing these ideas back to IP squatting by mega-corps trying to make Tv programs.... is challenging because geography does not quite map... pun intended. But if we argue that different genre and tropes are like the geography in physical environments then the idea kind of translates.
So, the urbanised stories are like the mashups of all sorts of crap into the post-modern urban stories that are being mapped onto older genre projects. For instance where a super hero move gets a bunch of post-modern politics and "updates" shoved in to make it palitable for the generic online consumers. While there are still genres that are "hard" to inject modernity simply because the tropes in that genre have such speific "regional" nuances that are still hard to bend and the audicne archs up a lot more. Trying to think of an example. Things like the rings of power, i would argue is a shockingly bad from a traditional fantasy audience point of view, but a success to a more generalised audience who just wanted to watch something that they could understand. It may not have had critical success (and should be burned from a "tolkein fan" point of view) but as an exercise in generalising a nich IP it shows some success simply by existing.
The quetion is can IP's be generalised in a market the is fragmenting and was never really generaliseable? Trying to pretend that the international market is somehow homogenous is a delusion that only really ivory tower idiots could cling to. But its the sort of thing that a mega-corp has to beleive and lie about to its shareholders to convince them that it can continue to grow when there are less and less opportunities of scale.
This reminds me of something warren buffet said, and i am paraphrasing, that as the size of the capital grows there are less and less opportunities at that scale.
I think this is the problem facing hollywood and the big production houses. There is simply less and less large IP's to canabalise. The Marvel universe had been developed for decades and had a huge corpus of material to mine... but its done. Tolkein has been ravaged. Harry potter has been mined out. The witcher got trashed so quickly. Starwars has been milked pretty dry. Animated films and kids movies have been plowed over so many times they are almost unrecognisable.
The phrase, "the next big thing' has been over ued but for these large production houses.. there is a size problem that they need behemoth size IPs to feed their beast and there are not that many left.
So now they are hunting anything that is left that a community forms around....
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