Creators v. corporations v. machines
The battle for the soul of entertainment is just beginning
After a crazy few weeks, we are back with your dose of Friday fiction just in time for the holiday weekend, along with a deep dive into the current issues plaguing the entertainment industry.
And, in case you missed it, Guild of Magic is out now from major retailers here. You can also grab it from my shop now, or read the latest chapter below.
Three enter, only one leaves
I swear I am going to finish my long-planned “give me $300 million to start a streaming service and here’s what I would do” thought experiment piece within the next few months. But until that happens, I wanted to take note of several stories from the entertainment industry that address some big picture things we are seeing:
Who should get the benefit of the creative work necessary to create the comics and books we read and the shows and movies we watch?
Should a creator’s work be allowed to be used to train AI models designed to replace those creators?
The big news of the moment is the Writers Guild strike against the major studios and streaming companies. Over the past 5-7 years, we’ve seen overindulgent spending on content that reminds me of Jeff Goldblum’s famous line from Jurassic Park:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
In the media conglomerates’ rush to reorient the distribution of shows and movies to streaming platforms, no one bothered to ask whether this was an economic idea that made sense for anyone other than Netflix. And surprise, it doesn’t. As a recent Vulture piece put it, the streamers are “burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch.”
And even when people are watching streaming shows that are generating ratings that would make a network exec blush, the shows’ creators are getting none of the upside. In that same piece, The Shield creator Shawn Ryan relates that his new show The Night Agent got viewership equivalent to the shows that sit in the plum post-Super Bowl slot across his entire season and yet will see nothing more for his efforts.
Now, that’s the contract he signed with Netflix and I question why the big-time showrunners who chased tens of millions of dollars in development money didn’t stop to ponder what upside they were giving up when they signed their deals, but it represents a larger problem across the industry and one that caused the Writers Guild to draw a line in the sand now, lest they be swept away in the next era of entertainment.
But the problem is also on the other side as well. As Steven Soderbergh correctly noted in the piece (the entirety of which is worth reading), “you can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue.” That is because the studios and streamers have not perhaps modeled correctly the cost to acquire a new subscriber and the cost to then retain that new subscriber.
So although The Night Agent might have broken viewership records, how much money did it actually contribute to Netflix’s bottom line? I suspect not even Reed Hastings knows.
Another third rail of the moment, overworking creatives to the detriment of their health and to the benefit of their employer, is highlighted in another piece from Vulture, where we find out that the production of Across the Spider-verse was plagued with haphazard and allegedly poor production practices that led the movie getting delayed several times over.
One of the artists who worked on the film asserts that contrary to the assumptions underlying the third film’s March 2024 release date (i.e. that the movie is basically done and being polished right now), the animation work for the third movie has in fact not even started. That is … surprising and disappointing.
Also disappointing is fired Sony Studios head Amy Pascal’s response to the complaints raised by the artists in the piece, which she seems to ignore how animation actually works:
“One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” adds Pascal. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” To the workers who felt demoralized by having to revise final renders five times in a row, the Spider-Verse producer says, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.”
That would be a trite but expected sentiment if we were talking about a non-animated movie. But in animation, all of the story work is supposed to be figured out ahead of time to prevent expensive and time-consuming last-minute changes.
I’m waiting with baited breath for Pascal to share her experience in being forced to do months of unnecessary and avoidable work because of the unreasonableness of the person she was working for. And to those of you who may respond to my last sentence with a similar “welcome to having a job,” I submit that just because people have been horrible and exploitive bosses to their employees since time immemorial does not mean that we should accept that with a stupid quip as an immutable law.
Finally, I wanted to touch on one of the ancillary issues of the writers’ strike: the use of “AI” or machine learning to replace writers and artists. This came to the forefront recently when it was immediately discovered that the opening credits of Marvel’s new Secret Invasion show were generated using machine learning. Instead of perhaps taking inspiration from some of the amazing art produced during the original comic run or the recent Meet the Skrulls mini-series, like this:
Or using the visual development artwork that had already been created, we got this monstrosity:
I’m not a technological luddite, but at a minimum, if you are going to use machine learning so that you can make a cheaper opening credit sequence, maybe make sure it doesn’t look like it was spit out from a Midjourney prompt?
This issue also arose in the indie fantasy world, in which the yearly Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off cover contest winner was a cover that i) artists immediately suspected was generated using machine learning and ii) sadly too many people didn’t recognize as ML-generated and lauded it as amazing and recommended the book solely based on it.
The “artist” defended himself and presented “proof” that he had in fact illustrated the cover, but his work was quickly picked apart by actual artists, who pointed out that it had been created after-the-fact once the accusations had been leveled. And then an inquisitive person on Twitter located the Midjourney prompts this “artist” used to create all of the cover elements, followed by another author realizing that he had hired this same “artist” with explicit instructions not to incorporate AI art, and unfortunately now the cover contest has been cancelled indefinitely, and perhaps valuable lessons of knowing the telltale signs of ML-generated art and not hiring artists without any actual art portfolios were learned.
In closing, to refresh your palate after reading the above, I present the Dune, Part 2 trailer:
Guild of Magic, Chapter 43
A new chapter of Guild of Magic is now unlocked and we’re officially in the endgame of the book now!
And while Guild of Magic crescendos toward its conclusion for free subscribers, if you are a paid subscriber, it’s time for the fourth chapter of the next book in the NYC Questing Guild series.
Guild of Relics, Chapter 5
As a reminder, if you are a paid subscriber and are wondering where your weekly chapters in your email is, going forward, the link to the new chapter will be in this weekly post.
Comics!
If you’re a comics reader, head to my weekly comics release post below from the past two weeks, where the week’s new releases, comics marketing, and creating memorable characters. Also leave a comment to any of the June comics posts to enter this month’s giveaway!
Question of the week!
In honor of the newest Indiana Jones movie opening today, what’s your favorite entry in the series?