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I'm still wondering what got Amazon hooked to a billion dollar disaster. After all initial (imo misplaced) optimism, analysts are finally coming out and saying the quiet part out loud: it is not the ground breaking masterpiece they need it to be. Even HoD is performing better and is better received. Both are prequels to very popular IPs, but Rings of Power should be pulling enormous numbers given how expensive it is, and how extensive its marketing was. Despite worsening performance with every episode, they just renewed it for season 2. This wasn't a small and calculated risk, they literally staked the future of their whole studio on this show. What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that? Given the sheer scale of the project, I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
I have no strong opinions about Tolkien, and I have not seen the show, but I see this come up a lot, and I think the answer is surprisingly obvious to people who aren't deeply invested in the fandom. This applies to everything from the MCU to LotR to Star Wars and Star Trek and every other property you care about.
Creators of new productions will very often hire writers who are not loving and doting fans but just in it for the paycheck, toss the source material, and ignore established lore, and the nerds will cry: "How could you do that? Don't you know that will make it suck?"
The answer is no, they don't know it will make it "suck" because they don't care if someone who's read the Silmarillion doesn't like what they did to Tolkien's lore. Nobody else (sigma the tiny, tiny percentage of the audience who's read the Silmarillion) cares either. MCU movies aren't made for you, the middle-aged dude who has boxes of X-Men and Avengers comics from the 80s in your cave. They are made for the new viewers they want to attract.
All they care about - all they care about - is getting more eyeballs. If reboots, reimaginings, and woke recastings will do that, that is what they will do. The tiny angry fists waved by a hundred thousand screaming fanboys is as nothing to the millions of (mostly young and not familiar with or invested in the source material) viewers they need to attract.
Now, an argument can be made that the work was popular in the first place because it was good, and tossing everything that made it good will make it bad. Sometimes that is true, sometimes it isn't. And of course bad writing is bad writing, so if RoP is bad because the writing is bad, it has little to do with how faithful the writers were to Tolkien and more to do with the fact that the writing is bad. Would it have been good if the writers were totally committed to Tolkien's vision? Who knows; maybe, probably not.
But fans really need to stop expecting that production studios care about whether it's "faithful" or "destroying the IP."
As for your other point: yes, they really do care more about making money than "pushing an agenda." They (the suits) will push an agenda if they think the agenda will make money. Writers and other creators on the team might be pushing agendas, to the degree they can get away with it, but the money men only care about whether it will be profitable. You'd see the whitest of all-white productions of the next Black Panther movie if suddenly black people stopped going to the movies, white people stopped watching anything with black people in it, and corporations no longer had to worry about how "lack of diversity" might affect the box office and critical reception (which affects the box office).
I very much doubt anyone in the head offices of Amazon or Sony or Disney is saying "Fuck next quarter's earnings, we need more diversity in this place, dammit!"
The thing is, I think they really are saying that, they just don't realize they are saying that. I'll skip RoP, because, while not great, I'd say it's also not awful (although it's trending downwards). Instead, look at Wheel of Time, which was a major shitshow, and one where the woke aspects really ruined the story. Isolated village where exceptional character stands out now looks like a NY subway stop. Central tenet of the entire magic system and primary plot point depends on differences between the magic of men and women, and they undermine that, claiming the dragon can be a woman. Some of the most noble characters are undermined so the women can look better.
It really really hurt that show, and I think it must have been somewhat clear it would.
Diversity within the different groups really screws with the story. It seems especially silly since there are so many different groups which were already represented in the source material.
An actual faithful telling of the story would be very diverse and show a substantial amount of gender equality without undermining the story.
In the source material there are several intercultural and interracial relationships that just vanish if there aren’t any different cultures or races to begin with.
In this particular case it really feels like they used dei as a weapon to rub it into the fans’ noses instead of either telling the story or making any valuable points about gender/race/culture.
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There is something about the original material that makes it good, some special sauce.
The die-hard fans are not necessarily right about what that is. But it is something. With a book series, there is solid world-building that took place completely out-of-sight and you can just feel as you watch, never being taken out of the experience. That is probably sufficient for the secret sauce but it is usually a necessary for it.
But there is still work for the person doing the adapting! The first Harry Potter movie sucked because it was mostly just reading out the book. By the third the people making the movies learned how to adapt the very strong source material, leaving things out and changing things as needed. By the sixth Rowling had taken back control because who is going to tell her no, and it started to wear again.
IMHO the big reason the Fantastic Beasts movies are so clumsy is that Rowling is writing them directly. She is very good at writing books but not good at writing movies, but again no one can say no. If she wrote source material and then someone else made it into a movie we would get something better, but there would still be too much Dumbledore and too little Fantastic Beasts.
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Average TV executive
From personal experience: Netflix has made adaptations of the Magicians and the Witcher. I quite liked both of these shows, but I haven't read the books they're adapting. I've also spoken to friends who have read the associated books and they were generally displeased. Generalizing from two personal anecdotes may not be the most epistemologically robust thing to do, but it hasn't stopped anyone before and it conveys the point: new audiences members don't care about fidelity to the source material. The real risk of disrespecting the source material is that you may lose the spark that made the original appealing, but that's mostly just a general risk of adaptation.
On the subject of fidelity to the source material, another Amazon show: The Expanse. Especially in later seasons, The Expanse takes quite a few deviations from the novels, reworking plotlines, changing characters, etc... It was nevertheless fairly well received by fans of the books. I don't have a thesis for why this is, I merely note it.
I would also note that creative types don't have to be actively pushing agendas. People tend to unconsciously other people think like them and share their tastes/beliefs. Woke writers will write woke shows because that's how people behave.
I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).
The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.
I think they largely changed things that make sense in The Expanse.
In the TV version there’s a belter creole language. In the books, it seems less fleshed out and more like English with occasional other languages mixed in. Sort of like how in Firefly people would occasionally speak in Mandarin (I think). Since in the books, people are physically different from growing up in low g and it’s visually obvious, the creole provides a cultural separation in place of the physical.
The Ashford character is completely rewritten in the TV show, and his second Carlos “Bull” Baca becomes a female character, Camina Drummer. Both seem largely to be more interesting characters so it wasn’t a huge loss.
Both Amos and Alex are older, fatter and balder then their TV counterparts.
If you liked the books, it’s worth a watch.
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I've read both book series and watched both shows. In my opinion they both actually tell a better story than the source. Mainly because the prose in both book series is sub par.
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Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.
As someone who was quite into Heroes of the storm and was regularly a top 200 player I think you misdiagnose it's failure. The primary reason it flopped wasn't because it was too casual, it was because it was too team oriented. From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time. In DOTA or league a carry, and they're literally called carries which gives the reasoning away, would be able to dominate their lane and then use that advantage to by them selves win the game. In heroes you can win the solo lane as hard as you want, but the coordinated team will have taken every objective and you'll be a lower level anyways. They tried to mitigate this a bit with stacking characters but those are even better with a team that can help you stack.
This makes the game hard to catch on for a few reasons:
Very difficult to stream. People watching a stream want to interact with the top player and watch them play well. In Heroes top players are all practicing comm discipline and following shotcallers which can be fun to watch but is really not the standard streaming experience.
People like to at least aspire to be the ones who carry games, this is reflected in the incredibly high pickrate of stacking abilities even when they are suboptimal. This was mechanically not supported by the game.
Solo queue play is the primary way people engage in mobas and heroes just didn't have a very good solo play experience
HotS had a really rich and deep meta game that was a ton of fun, especially because it mostly skipped the tedious laning phase and the interesting strategy started from minute one and continued the whole relatively short match without much of a foregone conclusion late game. But if you can't find 4 other dedicated players that you enjoy queuing with it was not a great experience.
Why didn't Blizzard simply ensure solo queuers are only matched up with solo queuers, and team queuers are only matched up with other team queuers?
They tried quite a few things over the years including that. Team league VS hero league. Duo queue seems like it's an unusually popular experience though and it made team league queues very long. Part of the problem is they just didn't have the player base required to split between so many queue types.
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HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.
Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.
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Citing a few anecdotal examples does not equate to "objectively wrong." But I suspect we'd end up arguing over every IP to be examined and debating to what degree the "hardcore" fans did or didn't like it. I mean, I'd point out that Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy were C-listers who were almost unknown to anyone but hardcore Marvel fans before the movies. If you think those productions, or any others, stood or fell based on the enthusiasm of aging comic book fans, I think you are deluded.
I have not watched She-Hulk, only read reviews and summaries, which convinced me it was badly written and full of characters getting up on soapboxes and pandering to the presumed sensitivities of the audience, which is, again, bad writing. It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.
A lot of the conversation here seems to be a combination of hardcore fans desperately wanting the studios to believe their opinions are important, and people desperately wanting to find evidence that "go woke, get broke" is true.
Meanwhile, what actually determines success is almost always mass appeal, which correlates only loosely to quality (some very good movies bomb, though usually of the more artsy variety, while the dreadful Michael Bay continues to print money, even if his most recent venture fell a little flat because it didn't feature giant robots), and what motivates studios is making money, with wokeness and social agendas being tolerated because you always have to let the creatives have their little causes while they make money.
That's like the argument that the Soviet Union didn't collapse because of lack of respect for property, it collapsed because the government mishandled people's property (which happened because they didn't respect property).
Being too woke leads to prioritizing wokeness over everything else, which leads to bad dialog and characterization.
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Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.
Everyone enjoys dialog and characterization and complains about its lack when absent. Are you using some definition of "hardcore fan" that means basically "people with any degree of taste"?
Hardcores are among the only people in that set, yes.
That wasn't my question, but believing only trufans care about dialog and characterization and other markers of quality is not an uncommon affectation.
I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.
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Just as a data point,
I've watched a bit of the originals (but not completely), I've watched RoP not because I was particularly interested but because my wife is into that universe and wanted to.
(I'm willing to suffer through a boring hour of TV every week if my wife wants to watch something, fwiw I have very little sense for what wokeness I'm supposed to be upset about in this show.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but this doesn't seem like a gentle introduction into the universe, I constantly have the sense that I'm supposed to be getting references to the Peter Jackson movies that I don't get.
If you're telling me this is designed to bring in new fans who haven't seen the movies or are already familiar with the universe, maybe they just failed miserably, but I think the actual answer is that you're wrong.
Well, obviously the set of people who watched the original movies is very large, making them part of the target audience, but yes, I think they expected to attract more than just existing fans of LotR. It's entirely possible they failed miserably.
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Counterpoint #1--Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Was it a 100% shot-for-shot take on the books? No, certainly not, but most of the liberties that Jackson took were adequately justified by the translation in medium. Arwen didn't rescue Frodo in Fellowship--that was supposed to be Glorfindel--but Arwen is much more central to later plot in ways that Glorfindel is not, so tightening the cast there made sense. It's well established in interviews with Jackson and everyone else involved that they tried hard to center Tolkien's vision and leave every other agenda out. The result is really, really good.
Counterpoint #2--The RoP marketing department pulled the same nerd-baiting shit Hollywood has done since Ghostbusters 2016--"the old, male/pale/stale fans are *ist and hate this take, don't be low status like them, give us money." Interviews with the showrunners and actors generate claims that Middle Earth should be "a reflection of the world we live in" in defense of woke casting, or that adding an original character who is the sister of Elendil "brings a feminine energy" to his line. The changes are strictly modern-agenda based, and add nothing in terms of storytelling efficiency or consistency.
I don't think those are counterpoints. Peter Jackson's movies were actually good. They were appreciated even by people who'd never read Tolkien and didn't care about how faithful they were to the books. They would not have been so popular if the only audience was Tolkien fans. Peter Jackson was a good director who cared about the quality of his work, and that resulted in a good product. He was given the freedom to make that product because he convinced the money men that his attention to the work would pay off.
ROP, on the other hand, seems to be trying to cash in on the presumed profitability of woke casting, and failed because the product, independently of how white the cast isn't, just isn't very good. It was short-sighted, but I never claimed the money-men are actually good at predicting what will be profitable.
Good writers and good directing could have produced a good series even with woke casting and fans bitching about black elves. But bad writing and bad directing would not have made a series that was closer to Tolkien's vision good.
This misses the point. Yes, the existing fanbase will care about faithfulness to canon in ways that potential new audiences won't, but what every audience member cares about is some level of verisimilitude--does the story with all its components hang together in a mutually-reinforcing way that captures the imagination? Tolkien is an excellent example of a storyteller who had a clear vision and a craftsman's attention to detail. As Jackson found, if you stick to his vision, all the little pieces fit together better, making the overall narrative and supporting structures more satisfying to the audience. You can make changes, and Jackson did as noted above, but they need to be in service to the story.
"You had one job!"
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I think you completely gloss over why Peter Jackson's original LotR movies were good. It's not that they were shot for shot adaptations of the books. They weren't, though they were close. It's not that they had stunning production values, though they did.
It's because Peter Jackson worked hard to give life to the themes of Lord of the Rings. He probably could have gotten away with the acting being worse, the production not as good, or the casting being bonkers, if he nailed the theme. Luckily for him it was the total package.
This Amazon series is attempting to build on that success, without understanding the themes of Tolkien one iota. It's a dead and hollow thing. And lay people might not be able to articulate that they want their culture to have themes. But they know when someone is putting a corpse in front of them and trying to pass it off as prime rib.
It's definitely not that. Peter Jackson wiped his ass with the themes of LOTR. Things like Faramir trying to take the Ring, or Frodo sending Sam away, are completely anathema to the center theme of the story. Tolkien wrote a story where the Ring was a strong temptation to evil, but there were stronger things still (friendship, or duty), which one could use to resist the temptation. Jackson got the first part, but whiffed hard on the second.
Regardless, though, the LOTR movies are great. They aren't particularly good adaptations of Tolkien, but they are great movies in their own right. That's what the clowns behind RoP (and WoT, and GoT, etc) don't get. You can get away with not being faithful to the original, but your product has to be good on its own merits. You can't just write a half assed TV show and figure it'll be well received because of the IP.
Tolkien wrote a story where literally everyone succumbed to the ring or knew they would except Sam, regardless of their thoughts on friendship, or duty, or... anything. The only form of resistance anyone truly offered was refusing to be exposed in the first place and take the ring. And in the end, what saved the world was not the rising of good, but the self-destruction of evil.
No, that's not the same thing. You're talking about using the Ring, which is definitely something which corrupts. But in Tolkien's world, it's possible to resist the temptation to pick it up at all. Faramir, even when he found out Frodo was carrying the Ring, said "not even if I found it laying by the highway would I take it". He is able to hold strong to his conviction that he must not take up the Ring.
Jackson, on the other hand, felt that it wouldn't be dramatic to have characters who weren't struggling with the temptation. So he destroyed the main theme of the story, all because he thought it would be more dramatic. This is not speculation either, this is directly from interviews on the extended edition DVDs. They felt it wouldn't be dramatic to have Faramir stay strong in the face of temptation, so they changed his character to give in for a time.
So yeah - the movies were good, but it's not at all true that they were good because they respected the themes of the story. They in fact deliberately disregarded the themes of the story because they thought it would be more dramatic.
Yes, the only people who can resist the Ring are people who never use it, and they make sure they can never use it by never allowing situations where they can use it; Gandalf and Galadriel both resist the Ring when offered it, because if they did take it, it would corrupt them.
It's the difference between not cheating on your wife after getting drunk at a company party and not getting drunk at a company party so you don't cheat on your wife.
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I'm not sure we are disagreeing here. Good things are good, and bad things are bad, and why something is good or bad is an aesthetic judgment and the subject of many debates, but my argument is that ROP isn't bad because it "failed to respect the lore," it's bad because it's, as you say, a cash grab by people more interested in capitalizing on a hot IP than actually trying to understand what would make a good product.
I am saying that Amazon only cares about making money, like every other studio. Woke-casting is a means to an end, hiring a good director who makes a quality product is a means to an end. If they were 100% accurate at predicting what will be the best means to their ends, then everything they produce would be profitable. Obviously this is not the case.
Would a suitable middle ground be that “respecting the lore” makes a product much more likely to be also incidentally good due to various reasons?
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Sure, but I think that's bad reasoning, and even a corporate executive could see why.
The original version managed to sell. Yes, to a limited audience, but it still managed to sell when other works of that same type wouldn't sell to that same audience. If you randomly change things, you're going to end up changing the qualities that distinguish it from similar works that don't sell. Those qualities are also likely to make it sell in another medium that inherently has a larger audience.
I think the actual explanation is a combination of ideology and wanting to take credit. Executives like to change things because if they succeed, the executive can take personal responsibility for the success. If the executive doesn't do anything creative to the work and it succeeds, they can't take credit; Tolkien or whoever gets all the credit.
Right, but you can see why they'd make changes that they explicitly claim will appeal to a larger audience, as opposed to random ones?
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No, it isn't.
This is why.
The point is that if the work sells to a limited audience, it has traits that, in a work directed at a larger audience, would make it more likely to sell to that larger audience.
(Especially if it has a larger audience because the medium inherently has a larger audience independently of content.)
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Strong disagree on the "just in it to make money" thing. Right from the very top, Bezos started the entire Amazon prime media ecosystem to try and buy his way into celebrity culture, which isn't just a matter of throwing expensive parties like Notch, but rather a complex patronage network as exemplified by Harvey Weinstein. And at lower levels most of the current crop of writers are from wealthy families who got into media as a status thing.
Media is similar to colleges and cults. In some ways you can model their behavior as "just trying to make money", but in reality it's emergent behavior developed from layer upon layer of status games, almost totally isolated from economic reality by massive cash injections. And those are the environments where woke purity spirals thrive like mold in a dank crawlspace.
Economists realized a long time ago that models used for competition between firms don't work to model behavior within firms, and almost nobody in a firm is actually working with the goal of "make the most money for the firm", especially when there's no obvious link between mission-focus and personal success within the company.
I think if you're looking at the very top, sure, Bezos himself does not need more money. The ultra-rich are doing things more for ego and personal gratification than because they need a few billion more in their bank accounts. Which can affect what sort of projects they take on, and their corporate culture.
But the bottom-line decision-making is still going to be money-driven.
How much first hand experience do you actually have working for the large corporations?
In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one. That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing agents who are making these decisions, but actual, real people. Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in. You get paid in Amazon stock, not in your project’s stock, which creates a sort of tragedy-of-commons situation.
Next, if product is less profitable that it could conceivably be, how would anyone even know that? If you’re a mid level exec, you can present your case to higher level execs in a light positive to you, you can cherry pick metrics, shift blame some unrelated causes or some poor schmucks etc. You can pull it off, because you are good at corporate politics, why, that’s how you became a mid level exec in the first place.
As you can see, the incentives to focus on the bottom line are less strong than you suggest. This is why economists keep talking about principal-agent problems. Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it. Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.
This ... doesn't really touch on 'whether or not they could do it'.
"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?
Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit. Vaguely recall bezos mentioning how important understanding the details of the financials of your company, and having a good account of everything that happens, is to a successful startup.
Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though? A common poorly-understood-complaint is "executives have bonuses based on stock price, leading them to optimize for stock price at the expense of social well being / long term growth", which seems to contrast with that.
Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?
But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity? It's very plausible that an exec who deeply believes in 'wokeness' would still not do that, in particular.
We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much. There's no way to tell from the above that "obviously" the "SJW-aligned execs" (and SJW really isn't the right term here) would push diversity because they believe in it.
(Also, wouldn't the people 'pushing diversity' here be, like, casting directors or writers, who you'd expect to be more 'woke' and be directly involved in this, and have less exposure to stock price or w/e?)
Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much. The only way to really find out what the causes are of woke casting or woke storytelling is gonna be reading accounts from people involved, whether they're the woke(?) writers/actors/execs themselves - who will often just proudly state that they're hiring more black people because representation is critical for underprivileged black youth or something - or someone who was there and thought it was ridiculous blogging after the fact.
That obviously depends on the circumstances, people involved, etc. What do you expect me to do here, give a rigorous, quantified analysis of a rather qualitative statement?
Some are, but so what? My argument is not that nobody ever tries to maximize profit for the company, but that it is not the sole, or often even main goal of people who make decisions.
Let me quote the next statement that comes after the one you quoted:
Did you miss it, or do you need me to elucidate what I meant here?
Well, let's be specific then. Consider Melonie Parker, Google's Chief Diversity Officer. In what way, do you think, she focuses on the company's bottom line? How exactly do you think her initiatives and decisions can quantifiably lead to differences in profitability? How can the CEO or the board track her performance year over year? Or compare it to her predecessor, Danielle Brown? Clearly, not by tracking the revenues and profit margin of her department. What tools does the board have available to measure her impact on quarterly earnings with any reasonable degree of confidence? The answer is, really, none. It's all gut feeling.
Do you have any real first hand experience working in a large corporation? Do your meetings and decisions always focus on bottom line first and foremost? This has very much not been my experience.
I actually find this suggestion pretty funny -- it really tells more about you than you think. This is a real failure to understand the other side, it's like Christians who think that the atheists oppose prayer in school because they secretly worship Satan.
To the point, no, if I had my way, ensuring specific skin color standards among the cast would not be my priority. I find the race-based casting practices grating not because I have some kind of aesthetic preference for white-skinned actors, but rather because it is often done deliberately to not cast white-skinned actors. This is similar to why progressive would complain about an all-white cast (including all extras) of a Hollywood movie set in modern day America, but do not mind an all-white movie produced by Czechs, set in Czechia: the former can only be done to make a particular point, whereas the latter is just normal.
You're talking as if "market research" was activity akin to determining tensile strength of a steel alloy, for the purposes of minimizing amount of material used given the desired load bearing capacity. The truth of the matter is that you can make "market research" say anything you want (in fact, this is the main purpose for the existence of consulting firms like Deloitte: to get the "independent experts" to say that the company needs to do what the execs wanted to do anyway), and if the movie flops, you can always blame something else, because there's always more than one cause of a flop anyway. It's not like government regulator of movie industry will start an independent committee to study the cause of the flop, and will unearth the shoddy report made by paid-off consultant. Again, all of this is obvious to people who actually have corporate experience.
This is just an isolated demand of rigor. What do you expect me to do, get quantitative data on what happens in closed meeting rooms?
But see, I'm not actually trying to prove much, only that the focus on the financial bottom line is not the sole driving force of corporate decision making.
But it just seems like a motte and bailey - yeah, that's obviously true. That's the motte. The bailey is "the execs probably did this because of progressivism / sjw and not the bottom line".
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I need to correct you on one point:
Progressives definitely hate the all Czech cast in Czech media, if they notice that;
The progressive influence on these regards is, apart from the UK, very weak, but they sometimes make the point that they really do not like the native cast.
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In other words, institutions are principal-agent problems all the way down.
Yes, although you would expect the most successful firms (like Amazon) to be one ones that have done the best to mitigate principal-agent problems.
It's likely that the kinds of problems that principal-agent incentive mismatches cause can pop up very quickly once the system, whatever it was, holding it back fails. It can even be as simple as a culture change within a rapidly growing department, as it goes from being a dozen people who believe in what they're doing to a few hundred people who are there for a paycheck and career advancement.
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Or, like Google and Valve, luck into a monopoly they can extract rents from while their business is still small, agile, and focused. Then use that firehose of money to paper over their bloat and institutional decay.
What does of institutional decay does Valve have?
Internal reports say they have three major problems, but for some reason the reports only finished describing two of them.
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Tyler McVicker could tell you a whole lot about that, but to keep it short:
-Valve's employees are elegible for end-of-the-year bonuses conditional on peer review and/or performance. This ends up creating a status competition within the company, and old-timers may get a bit of bias in their direction. The work culture in general is not as healthy as it would seem, though it's worth noting that it probably is still way better than some other game companies that gained infamy for crunching.
-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them, let alone supporting older titles (for years, Team Fortress 2 has been on life support, with content continuing to be injected into the game alongside the occasional bugfix, all thanks to the work of a mere 1-3 developers. That said, there's still one guy still updating the GoldSrc engine, it seems). Many potential games were started and canned between the releases of Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx for reasons such as these.
-The flat structure Valve was once lauded for may be contributing to the lack of new titles, as the "rolling desk" system makes it hard to actually pull people together for a project and keep them together.
-Too many ideas and directions could also be another thing. Valve was supposed to be doing more stuff with the SDK for HL: Alyx, but then they jumped full-steam-ahead with the Steam Deck, which has also tempered expectations for new VR hardware (Valve really could do with a new version of the Index to compete with the Quest 2) or a potential new Steam Controller, or the "Citadel" game that Tyler has been reporting on for a couple of years now.
I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.
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Mostly the "games company unable to produce a videogame they didn't buy ready-made from an outside developer" kind.
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This seems basically right, but perhaps underestimates the possibility of ripple effects outwards from a nerdy core. If the hardcore fans LOVE a work and give it rave reviews, then the mediumcore fans will be more motivated to see it, which means pulling along their less invested friends, etc.. I don’t think this is likely to make or break a AAA production the size of RoP or HoD, but I do think it’s very relevant at smaller scales (even the Dune movie benefitted from this, I suspect, being largely liked by fans).
I actually think it does make or break AAA games and movies on a regular basis. What is the last major game that was both popular and lasted long without appealing to the nerdy core? Fortnite was quickly supplanted by PubG on this basis.
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Fan enthusiasm can certainly drive popularity, so it's not like they don't want fans to be happy with the work and talk it up. But the hard-core fans are not their target audience.
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You don't need literal ripple effects. The hardcore fans probably love the work for the same reasons that the medium-core fans are more motivated to see it. Satisfying the hardcore fans is more likely to satisfy the rest, to a lesser but significant degree, without any transfer between fans at all.
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