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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!"
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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