If companies want to write off losses for unreleased IP, they should lose the copyright to it and be forced to release it to the public domain

Corpo Translation Bot

We really didn’t think about how a 74 year old character might not resonate with anyone living until after we made the movie. So now we’re pretending it is a real diamond in the rough IP to get someone else to save our ass or chalk it up for a loss. Either way, we don’t fucking care.

Lemmy will appreciate the final thoughts. I especially liked the part about Comic-Con.

What has changed is our awareness of how such things work. There was a time when only the subscribers of Hollywood trade magazines knew much about which movies were in development, to say nothing of which were canned. But audiences today are as intimately acquainted with upcoming projects as they are with the financial maneuvering behind them.

This isn’t just a matter of more of us reading entertainment news. Normal people have been forced to attend to this stuff — baroque tangles of licensing and distribution rights — just to be consumers. Feel like streaming a favorite sitcom? You’ll need to know which subscription matches that media and then keep up with whatever agreements, disputes or mergers will dictate its availability or shift it into another company’s library. Even ownership of media has become an intricate concept. You might “purchase” a movie from a platform like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+, but you’re still subject to the vagaries of the deal; things may simply disappear from your digital library because of expiring agreements.

The mechanics have been laid bare, and it is consumers who have been burdened with navigating them. It is particularly maddening that this visibility doesn’t translate to malleability: No matter how well you know the ecosystem, you remain under the thumb of corporate arrangements. […]

Consider too the barrage of marketing campaigns intended to monopolize our attention through every stage of a film’s development, from conception to release. Marvel Studios has its “phases” announcements, in which it outlines years of planned movies and shows in splashy events designed to keep fans in a frenzy about the long-term strategy of a major media company, as though a shareholder meeting has broken out at Comic-Con.

[…] This is one impact of media consolidation: Studios can work very hard to hold your attention before deciding, at the last possible moment, that they’re better off throwing out artists’ work than letting you pay money to see it. “Coyote vs. Acme,” the Warner spokesperson says, “remains available for acquisition.” Just not by you.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Over the last few years, Warner — which also owns channels like TNT and TBS and streaming platforms like Max — has whittled down its content-and-development holdings in an effort to reduce costs and chip away at its $45 billion gross debt.

The video was taken down after a copyright claim, but it had already revealed some of the ingenious mayhem that audiences would miss out on: squished cars, real clouds of dust kicked up by an animated roadrunner, charming prop renderings of the cartoons’ rocket skates and hand-painted signs.

The movie was based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by the humorist Ian Frazier, which had Coyote filing a lawsuit over the indignities he had endured at the hands of Acme’s unreliable explosives and physics-defying spring shoes.

We might complain today about pop culture governed by algorithms and data, but it’s not as though 20th-century decisions about which movies hit Blockbuster or which songs dominated the radio were based on some high-minded meritocracy; we have always been at the mercy of boardrooms.

Marvel Studios has its “phases” announcements, in which it outlines years of planned movies and shows in splashy events designed to keep fans in a frenzy about the long-term strategy of a major media company, as though a shareholder meeting has broken out at Comic-Con.

As much as a satirical legal filing written from the perspective of a cartoon coyote’s lawyer can speak to the moment, there’s a section toward the end of Frazier’s story that maps out a bit of the daffy labyrinth consumers now face.

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