They can't, as far as organizational politics goes. Tech is all in on AI.

I just stopped using YouTube for entertainment years ago. Try it!

(I still jump in for the occasional video tutorial etc but it’s always targeted - go for one thing, swoop in, close it when I’m done.

Ironically I find that YouTube has the absolute best content. It's the only one with authentic people making quality stuff for exactly your niche.

That doesn't mean there isn't trash, and I suppose if tv series are your jam it's likely sub-par, but for me it's unmatched by light years.

This might be (unintentionally?) part of the reason for the original subject: how many jobs does the Avengers IP pipeline support? How about for a single artifact output by it--one TV show, for example?

And how many people work on a well-loved indie artifact of about the same market position?

Gonna guess the latter supports way fewer jobs. (This isn't meant as a judgment in taste or moralizing--my own entertainment tastes run indie towards pretentious, so economically I'm part of the problem.)

The last Avengers movie was 7.5 years ago. The last Star Wars episode was 7 years ago. (The Mandalorian one is the only standalone one since then.) Avengers are included in the MCU btw. There have only been about 1 to 3 MCU movies per year for the last few years. (2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 2). There are tons of other, really good movies to watch. Not just indies either: Did you happen to see Project Hail Mary this year? The Odyssey? I missed Spider-man: Brand New Day (the MCU movie that came out this year so far), but it has 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, so I don't think that drags down the average in terms of quality either.

What does this mean “to monetize creativity”?

Are you suggesting creatives just give their work away for free?

Apparently you need a 10 K+ karma account to say the following (which another account, a new one and not mine btw, posted). Some I'm just reusing the other dude's words:

In contrast, thought-terminating clichés like "facebook boomer" show critical thinking on your part.

I fully agree with that: calling someone a "facebook boomer" is just plain pathetic.

(btw the boomers are my parents' generation: don't go thinking I take it personally. I'm a GenX'er and GenX'er are badass, which is why I don't give a flying fuck saying what I think).

Something something about the pot and calling some kettle black etc.

Go ahead and watch one of those cowboy movies like Once Upon a Time in the West. We've definitely lost some skills as a species over time.

It's not that the prices are up to milk the consumer. Look at Southwest's thin profit margin. Costs are up

Habitual use of shorter and shorter form content trains you to expect gratification faster and faster. There is most certainly a better reward for delaying gratification. A really good movie can leave you on a complete high or completely devastated. I'm pretty certain tiktok cannot. It's cheap quick entertainment but if you get used to that fast shallow enjoyment you can't hold on long enough for the good stuff.

That's part of the point. If anyone can create cheap garbage, flood it on socials, and get people to click see what goes viral the old attention economy is just totally disrupted

Interesting, I have seen people be stretched thin and more stretched but I haven't seen people working 80-120 hour weeks. Different circles maybe?

I do feel for anyone trying to find a new H1B sponsor. I've lived and worker as a foreigner before, its stressful for sure. It is also a tough spot for a country to be in, if your domestic labor is struggling to find or keep jobs itsnhard to justify continuing protections for foreign labor.

While this may be true for some people, overall this is not backed up by the data.

The average amount of time spent doing "Relaxing and leisure" activities (mostly TV) has increased 6% in the last twenty years. There was a small decrease after the post-COVID peak, but working time has also decreased in this time frame.

https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm

Not true. If you look at any “cheap entertainment” dashboard, you’ll see usage has been going up.

My hypothesis is, YT, Reels and TT are eating everyone’s lunch, as people spend more time on those. And for people who don’t watch much, there’s Spotify. Basically attention span degradation across all age groups.

Outside of work I think many people only have energy for TV and Insta/tok. Which is a huge problem.

I feel like this comment contrasted with the incredible movie releases this since ~May is just not holding water.

It feels like all media, from tv shows to movies are all following a certain formula, with a goal to drive a certain social perspective about people and society.

Every thing is safe.

If certain ultra conservative countries don’t like LGBT representation they don’t get to be in your major movie.

At this point I don’t know the difference between Chat GPT writing the next marvel movie or Disney hiring someone. Either way the story needs to be crystal clear. You never watch something that makes you think.

Well it's shot on a phone, lit with bad LED lighting and edited on a laptop. It all shows in the final product.

If it sucks the conclusion is to turn it off for me. Stopped most subscriptions.

I think we are still in a hangover from the financial cocaine the governments were handing out during the pandemic (and even long after it was a problem).

<3

The thing is that most people would rather not do that and prefer to keep watching garbage. You can only lead a horse to water...

That is a real reason I can't summon the interest to subscribe to any of them: Whatever I pick, I'll be dissatisfied, so I put it off for another day...

It’s confirmation bias; you notice and remember the misses while mostly overlooking the hits.

Scruples likely has something to do with it, but not in the way you suggest. My feed is full of dancing and singing. Seeing a dance trend go viral and with 48 hours people all over the world are posting their rendition of it is remarkable.

The other night I watched a team of 4 dudes row from America to Europe. In a row boat. No sails. Makes me think of the Tom Hanks quote:

It’s hard to think of a fictional story that beats actually rowing across the world.

All art in the Soviet Union was state-manipulated propaganda. At least all of it that was in public venues such as theatre and television.

That limit is called time, which people struggling to get by rarely have. And the "most bang for buck, most in aggregate eyeball hours" is an extraordinarily mono-dimensional take on media and film.

This reminds me of the comparison between Japanese manga and American comics/graphic novels. Some people say the former offer a much wider variety of content and ideas because it is often started by a single (often quirky) author, whereas the latter is usually designed by a committee, which ends up favoring more bland ideas. Anime usually starts of as manga, and that's why anime is so creative as well.

Perhaps AI will help single authors create more work by themselves, and we'll have a renaissance of comic books and other forms of (mostly digital) entertainment in the west. And we'll spend less time watching those TV shows on streaming platforms that follow the same few recipes.

I would look to the culture industry in Japan as an alternative to the gatekeeping-industrial complex we call Hollywood.

Hollywood's cost structure makes it impossible to try anything new. I'd contrast that to Japan where creators can write a "web novel", get a contract for a light novel, have a manga made, and then an anime, and maybe even some video games. And these all reinforce each other: last year I discovered an atrociously drawn anime that had got me curious about the source material -- that blew me away and I bought all of the printed materials that have come out so far and expect to buy all the rest.

Not least, Japan still gets new 4-panel comics like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door, something almost unthinkable of in the Land of the Nepo Baby where we haven't had a new one since Dilbert.

It isn't exactly a desert? It is more like a full buffet, but nothing but cheap, mass-produced sugar literally everywhere. All the 2-star donuts and chocolate cupcakes you can eat, and nothing but that.

Most new ones do, but they've been making like a dozen great ones each year for for like 80 years.

Honestly TV (including the back catalogs) are where most of the truly good video content is.

This part I really agree with. It's the reason shitty Netflix reality shows are among the most popular 'watercooler discussion' shows today.

I started building a game on a custom engine a few years ago and I used to think about selling it, but nowadays the market is so oversaturated I tend to think of it as nothing more than a coding exercise.

"there's such an endless selection of excellent games"

If you have 0 standards.

Same thing here. I gave up on gaming all together because my library grew too much. As a kid, I didn’t even own a console, I had to borrow gameboy or go to my friend house and even then it was just an handful of cartridges. Even now, I plan to just focus on small sample of programming languages and ecosystems, and learn them inside out. There’s just too much stuff out there.

I feel completely the opposite. Mind, I play games a fair bit, but I generally don't feel that excited about most, and I'd say a lot of them have very repetitive tropes. I'm generally in the market for 30h+ spent on a game, so that filters out a lot of the more trendy stuff.

Online games though you pretty much have to follow the herds to the newest titles. You could stick around but it usually isn't pretty: tough to find full lobbies or full of sweats or both.

I guess preferences vary, but the idea of spending my retirement consuming "content" seems like a type of hell.

I would be very interested to read the report too.

It might be this one Yellow Economy[1]. But I'm not 100% sure.

[1] https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/yellow_economy_14_...

Economists keep saying over and over that so far AI has had minimal impact on the economy. That may change in time, but we aren’t seeing massive losses as a result of AI, despite some C suites using that as an excuse to lay off after over hiring.

https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-re...

Maybe a lot of people worked at stackoverflow idk; but I have been organising electronic “underground” music nights for 15+ years and basically stopped now because there just wasn’t a big enough audience anymore.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is that I think COVID and its aftermath is a much bigger factor here than AI, especially when it comes to “live / performing” art

I live in Atlanta ("y'allywood"), a formerly big LA film outsourcing location. They shot much of Marvel and Netflix stuff here pre-2023. The unit below me has been rented to Winona Ryder and Dave Bautista.

Beyond that, my hobby is film and I know tons of people in the industry. I've made indie films with them.

All the jobs have gone to Europe. It's simply cheaper to film there now. Amazon and Netflix built infrastructure and taught local crews how during the pandemic content wars.

Looking at my Gen Z wife, all the eyeballs have gone to TikTok.

There's the answer.

Or not. Significant shifts in the nature of emplyoment are undoubtably disruptive, but there's no particular reason to believe this one will result in mass unemployment any more than previous shifts have done so.

Especially if we're talking about jobs in creative industries that require customers with the means to support and consume their output.

Besides, an overabundance of surplus labor, if properly managed, is as likely to lead to a better world than a worse one. There's no ironclad rule that everyone, or even the majority, need to work to live or live to work to be happy. And many creatives, in particular, would be happy and productive working on personal and noncommercial projects if funding were no longer an issue.

If we think about it, AI can be seen as dumping cheap products below cost and disrupting the domestic market.

I mean the real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws in many cases and even if we discount that, it is well known that AI is being pushed far below the actual costs for providers. There are disruptive technologies, yes but this is not the same if the real cost is hidden or deferred and it doesn't compare with horses/cars or whatever analogy that comes up often.

In the physical world, this is called dumping isn't it? Just because tech is involved it doesn't change the fact. Countries already have anti dumping laws.

Stackoverflow killed itself long before AI appeared: they developed so hostile and toxic culture that it basically collapsed its utility to zero.

I just looked it up. Getty Images revenue has increased in four of the last five years (the outlier being 2023 were there was a small decline).

They have had 200 million in judgements against them by investors this year, and are filing Chapter 11 to reorganize debt and go private.

In other words, nothing to do with AI.

Nicely sliced. Weekly wages for full time workers have been rising for decades while fewer workers work full time. I don't think this data backs your assertion.

Meanwhile household basics increased faster than wages. In other words people don’t have more money.

https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index

Upvote for bringing data, since I did not. That said, that quote was in reference to AI, so referred to the past 3-4 years. And of course, our money today is not worth as much as it was 20+ years ago. Also many important goods and services increased in price at a higher rate than inflation or wage increases. It might be interesting to look at such industries for a history of consolidation or PE-involvement.

Hooray for just-in-time scheduling where workers have to be available full time but rarely get scheduled full time. It’s an innovation that has been great for capital and terrible for labor.

25% increase in half a century? We ahd like 3 technological revolutions since then and economy grew massively.

Compare that to how much wealth appreciated, like a price of gold or real estate.

Median real wages increased by the narrowest possible meaning of this word.

Trickle down economy is literally a trickle.

I don't find either of these charts dispositive by themselves. The cost of healthcare, education, housing, transportation, and insurance have easily outpaced any growth in wages. Another facet of this debate is that cheaper goods aren't necessarily of equal or better quality.

That level of certainty is not justified.

The CPI has gone up far faster than real wages.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

People are earning about 12% more and working about 5% less since 1980, but everything costs roughly 3x what it did in 1980 relative to wages, and that's where most people are pinched.

Boomers gonna boom

Yes, it definitely can. That's sort of why I kept putting it in scarequotes. I am not skeptic of AI, fwiw. Mostly just our current crop of corpo/gov leadership and their views on what healthy economy looks like.

Hollywood got devalued because people prefer spending time on Youtube/TikTok/Instagram/Reddit/Discord/Video Games/Hacker News/etc.

There was nothing the business leaders could have done to prevent the effect of basically an unlimited supply of video entertainment being added to the market.

That's not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison. The inputs for an unscripted podcast are vastly different from a scripted TV show. They're different mediums for expression, and each carries different costs.

While I suspect you're not wrong about either inefficiency in large, well-funded media organziations or the efficiency of Rogan's operation, comparing his podcast to anything but a substantially similar TV show is hardly a fair comparison. Even a relatively low-budget scripted TV series is going to require a cast, writers, props, sets, costumes, hair and makeup, lighting, camera work, craft services, transportation, significantly more editing and postproduction, the list goes on, plus directors and producers and administrative personnel to manage all of this.

Consider "The Red Queen" by Ridley book. It's premise is that evolution constantly improves a species, but since other species also are improving, the species runs and runs but stays in the same place.

It's the same thing in business. One has to relentlessly decrease the cost of doing business, because your competitors are doing it as well. You run and run and stay in the same place.

I haven't read the cited article, but the professor would need to show that industry profit margins are increasing to make his point. I haven't seen any evidence that margins increased in general.

You raise a good point, but I would like to add more nuance. Traditional TV is largely displaced by YouTube (small content creators) and streaming (Netflix, etc.) Traditional film has moved nearly entirely to streaming, but there is more of it now than ever before. TikTok is something truly generational to me. Just like Instagram largely killed the blog because it allowed normies to watch the amazing lives of the top 5%. TikTok allows young people (mostly women) to gossip faster than ever before.

There are also tax considerations, even movies get shot away from Hollywood.

Another huge nail was the strikes - business will continue with or without those on the picket line, but it just moved to where there weren't strikes.

Yep. My father was in the biz, and I heard the stories at the dinner table. This has been a long evolution, and the old ecology no longer exists. AI has just given the pre-existing trend another (vary large) extra kick.

Not only is Valheim remarkable for the fact that’s it’s largely a one man show, it’s also a labour of love that couldn’t come out of the AAA gaming world, which is creatively bankrupt. They’re busy trashing beloved gaming series left and right and shuttering once beloved studios.

We’re now entering a new era where projects like Halo Reclaimer[1] are more creative and more popular than some of the slop put out by the AAA world with massive marketing budgets. There’s no slop, no micro transactions, just Halo Forge turbocharged by virtually anyone who loves Halo and has a Claude subscription.

[1] https://fangamesdb.com/games/project-reclaimer-halo-3.html

The problem is, in a world running on next-quarter financials and bonuses, long-run disadvantages don't matter as long as the persons in charge of decisions can fuck off with golden parachutes before the house of cards crashes down.

Or everyone tacitly agrees on a new low standard of product, maybe adds in regulatory capture to prevent competition from rising, and even if you want, you won't be able to find an alternative. Enshittification galore.

Are you proposing to sacrifice others from a position of wealth, privilege and safety, for long term benefits?

Or are you an actual graphics designer or the like, who lost their job to AI?

I'm amazed nobody has challenged OP on his narrative for why the film industry left LA since it's completely wrong.

It has nothing to do with 'evil corporations chasing efficiency.' And you rightly point out, efficiency/productivity is literally what raises living standards for everyone.

The truth is, rising living standards have increased leisure time globally, and increased leisure time leads to increased demand for entertainment fit to your culture.

China now has 2X as many movie theaters as the US does. India produces 2,500 films per year today vs. 500 in Hollywood. Ditto for Europe (2500 films produced last year). South Korea went from nothing to a global entertainment player in 10 years. Their industries are still smaller than Hollywood but growing at faster rates.

Just like what happened to Detroit in the 1970s when Auto manufacturers started having to compete with other countries who built domestic car industries, the same exact thing happened to Los Angeles.

In both 1970s Detroit and 2010s LA, companies had focused on monetizing old cash cows (the superhero film was the chevy land yacht) while the market evolved under their feet, and unions had inflated wages/costs to the point of being wildly uncompetitive, so the industry supply chain went global. LA also refused to allow building new homes, so talent couldn't afford to stay even at $1,000/day union rates just for holding a light (that's an actual union rate for a gaffer in LA).

We're still just at the beginning of this in entertainment.

Technology has enabled the production and distribution of high end video content to drop dramatically, while at the same time demand for entertainment shifted from being heavily western to being much more diverse.

Sadly, I believe this is a case of survivorship bias.

Rollercoaster Tycoon was also developed by one person. Developers could also be absurdly efficient in the past, see valve and half-life 1 as an example.

It means little to give examples of cases where developers punched above their weight and arguing it was because of reason X they could achieve it in the first place.

How many people failed, was it because of missing tools?

Like before, people will attribute some of their performance to tools, that in reality didn't matter at all.

This is not "software," this is video games. Video game nonsense is such a drop in the bucket, and it matters orders of magnitude less than video game addicts think it does. I could maybe understand it being mentioned in comparison to the film industry - they're both artistic creations that require a bunch of work by large teams. But that's also what's exceptional about them - 1) they mostly fail, and 2) they require expensive marketing and distribution.

When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.

Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.

"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.

Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.

I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.

Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.

"that those super farms became a practically inconsequential part of the overall economy. " - not really.

The super farms are as important as ever.

Because farms are hyper competitive, it means that the surplus and efficiency gains are not kept by the farmers.

And it's not just 'super farms' - its' transportation that enabled 'regular labour farms' in low cost areas.

So the benefits go to distributors, packaged food makers, grocers and consumers.

In this case, mostly to consumers.

You can see the charts for the kinds of work people used to do vs, now aka we used to all live on farms, now we do all sorts of things.

This is why we're seeing an pushback on globalization, economic optimization doesn't always balance out with strategic considerations aka food supply security etc. and those are hard to put on the books because they feel like a 'non-market force'.

A 'subsidy' feels like welfare, it's really and adjust of the balance of power.

Except cinema tickets prices got raised, if we were still talking about Hollywood and its entertainment industry.

Quoting outliers and exceptions is not supporting your argument. Concurrently, a lot of people figured they are super shrewd and will make AI-generated games and guess what, barely anyone buys them. There are social and taste factors in art. It's not a chart with a line climbing up. A lot of normal folk, myself included, see AI-generated entertainment as low-effort and a plot to get their money while the other guy is snoring and is having 2x RTX 5090's make him money in his sleep.

People don't like that. They don't have to be proficient in IT to see what's going on and to dislike it.

Yes. That is what your parent comments are saying -- that they are not seeing the common folk get too many benefits (if any) when the dust settles, which it still has not. They/we are saying: it's going to get objectively and measurably better only for the richest class.

The only thing at this point that is likely being revolutionized is our cooking skills because we should learn to cook rats and roaches -- because those on top care not about you and me. No, scratch that. They care. But they want us gone.

Almost nobody wants human workers per se, they just don't have a choice. The LLM era shows this acutely and clearly; many businesses rushed to fire people BEFORE they had proof LLMs will get their work done at all. The social and economic aspects of "nobody wants human workers" have been there forever but it was accepted as a necessary evil.

Now, many capital holders have an excuse _and_ a tool to want less -- or zero -- human workers. We are currently living in this boiling pot and your vaguely optimistic comment does not line with the reality I am observing.

Maybe, historically speaking / era-wise, i.e. 50-ish years from now, everything will be alright, a new equilibrium will have been reached and the humanity will be objectively happier generally and per-capita.

That will not comfort a talented VFX artist, a programmer, a sysadmin, a lawyer, and many others, when they have to get their half-paid house confiscated and go live in shanty towns and form a gypsy-like society so they can survive at all.

"Historically..." arguments are boring. What happens _now_? How is society and economy and the rich class handling the turbulent changes in the last 2 years? How will they handle them in the next 5 years?

Only because it's a requirement if you ever want to retire in a society that puts profit above human life.

Do you have an idea as to what your new job will be, and if so, and will you be doing to ensure that you won't be making rich people even richer in this new position?

The last 50 years of books is still more books in the genre you like than you could read in a lifetime.

The point stands, the over supply is a huge factor. There’s so much content available that serves as a competitive/substitute for traditional film and tv that it changes the entire consumer behavior and economy around the industry, which translates to jobs.

I don’t think people will ever really want to only watch old stuff, or lack desire for new stuff. But, in terms of thinking about the volume of media available I think the non-expiring idea is valid. YouTube alone has 500 hours of video uploaded every 1 minute.

It's hard to read old books sometimes. Unless you grew up doing it you just simply don't understand character intentions. Reading a Dostoyevsky book it's hard to relate to characters or even understand the outrage in a lot of scenes.

If you don't know your history well, the whole setting for the Count of Monte Cristo is confusing af. So you now need to read up on the fall and rise of the monarchy and Napoleon, and his exile etc. Also a lot of words are just foreign to most people.

Where as reading a book written recently it's just way easier to get into it since it's written in the context of our collective memory (if that makes sense).

If I remember correctly Stan realized that the old things he liked were shit in that episode. Anti-nostalgia. OP describes the opposite.

There's a lot of nostalgic things that do in fact suck, I have no problem admitting that. Subjectively, I will die on the hill that movies overall are getting worse though. They are all starting to feel over-produced and sanitized. Objectively, the time between seasons of hit TV shows is increasing, we can measure that as a fact. Not rose-tinted glasses.

Many seems unlikely. Influencer income follows a Pareto distribution so you would expect that most influencers who make more than 100k a year earn close to that.

But layoffs only occur if firms can produce output at a lower cost by using AI rather than humans. Those humans go and work elsewhere and total output increases.

Try LLMing this (it efficiently interrogates both your assumptions in a single prompt):

Note: there will always be edge cases, for example if I owned a business, I could theoretically replace someone with AI, and increase my prices, which would contradict the idea that greater efficiency always results in more supply and lower prices, but overall in the long-run that won't happen.

Nonetheless, they either have or do not have a legal right to assert copyright over the content that comes out of the studio. What's described in the section I quoted is only to make it possible to assert more rights than they legally have. Your argument has only changed it from "definitely assert more" to "possibly assert more".

Maybe if we lower the quality a bit more it will finally work.

I highly recommend people watch Wick is Pain [0] because it raises several interesting point:

- The film almost didn't get made until Eva Longoria joined as a producer to help get it financed.

- a lot of the Gun Fu fight scenes were actually developed for Jason Statham but he thought it was too different

- both of the directors were fight choreographers and not seasoned directors

- the guns used in the movies are blank firing but have barrels that are welded closed. This is so that they can be used at close range to other actors (which is a newer technique)

- Chad S. has a great line about the later movies: "We thought 'can we do this next?' but then we remembered we own the IP for this franchise so we can do WHATEVER we want"

I say all of this to point out that I agree with your original point and wish that there were more money available to fund "outside the norm" movies that could lead to great new franchises.

0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36751759/

Target demographic has shifted from male to female. Your point of view is no longer being catered to because your purchasing power as a demographic is in decline.

I’m the opposite. I’m a tan non-caucasian gal and I love this woke stuff in my entertainment. It’s awesome to see and I much prefer modern movies.