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In general I think our IP laws dramatically stifle competition in the creative realms, which as a consumer absolutely sucks! We could have so many awesome spinoffs of LOTR or Star Wars by now if our laws were sane.
'Fan fiction' could just become the norm a decade after a story gets told. Which would be a great change.
I agree. Up until the modern era this was how stories worked. The characters and plots belonged to the people in the culture. Robin Hood or King Arthur, fairy tales, and so on were stories with lots of different versions and regional variations depending on where the stories were being retold.
And I wish this was how things worked now. I’d absolutely love to see what Mickey would be like if you had stories written by contemporary artists.
But on the other hand Harry Potter fanfiction is godawful: nothing but Master of Death power fantasies and Hot (Gay) Slytherins as far as the eye can see. The crowd is not always better.
But it is copyright that causes this. Good adaptations will be sued to death. So it only makes sense for bad fan fiction to exist, because their awfulness keeps them from succeeding and thus from being targeted.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a good example of how an author that turned out to be good enough for success, rewrote her copyright-violating fan-fiction into an original work.
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I want to point out, this is a flaw and reason why IP actually does encourage creativity: it's already bad that people keep reusing tropes because they're reliable, encouraging experimentation (even by coercion) leads to better works in the long run.
But IP has so many other downsides, sometimes it even discourages and blocks original works (for example, LLMs being broadly censored against anything resembling IP, because otherwise it's too easy to trick them into generating it). And it turns out, fan-fiction writers are often more creative than original fiction writers, by applying creativity to less common aspects (besides the core characters/settings/etc. which they reused).
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I dream of an era where the "canon" for a given series isn't dictated by the primary IP holder, but instead can be forked off by people where-ever they want, and fans can just form organic consensuses as to what particular canon is 'best,' and pick and choose precisely which parts of it they want to incorporate into their particular experience.
I would absolutely prefer the version of Star Wars where the Darth Jar-Jar theory was true and he turned out to be the evil behind Snoke in the new trilogy. Let me have my canon, and you can have... whatever The Rise of Skywalker was.
Force these massive companies to compete on something resembling quality, rather than Neener neener I own the IP, you have to go through me if you want more content.
There's something nice about having one canon, like how it can be more fun to play Minecraft in Survival Mode than Creative Mode.
But not everyone feels this way (like how some people only play Creative Mode), mainstream canons (especially today) are generally mediocre at best (even according to the mainstream audience), and IP has so many other downsides. People who want this can resort to subscribing to some curation group who picks one canon for every popular media.
I agree one canon is better. I’ve got no idea if JarJar should be reworked but I do think it would be nice if Disney realized some of the stuff they created was stupid with Star Wars and just remake some of the episodes. Episodes 7,8,9 need to be completely redone. The IP for Star Wars has lost a lot of value because they were so bad. They should just remake those films maybe borrowing from fanfiction. Perhaps even admit you messed up and run some crazy promotion like the new episode 7 is free in theatres. How much would it really costs to remake them like 1.5-2.5 b which is significantly less than the initially paid for the IP.
GOT probably needs a reboot either just the last seasons or the final 2. Paramount paid $110 B for GOT. A reboot is tops 3% to do it again but correctly and GOT is likely still WBD highest value IP. Probably more like 1% of purchase price. Some of the issues with GOT was just being a rushed finish, but the WhiteWalkers and John as the Prince who was promised was just poor storytelling. It was the dumb hivemind trope that Independence Day used to beat a super powerful enemy. The real WhiteWalker story has never been told. Not even sure of Martin figured out that story.
The thing with great IP and the stories people really love is it’s not about fantastic graphics and special effects. It’s the storytelling where you need very real talent figuring it out.
I think the real cost, the real problem, is the reputational hit from admitting they fucked up, alongside the shame, blame, and perhaps even legal responsability, it puts on the creators (producers, directors and writers, mostly) of the publically disgraced movies and the chilling effect it would have on future works.
Imagine how it would go! It's hardly a new phenomenon, bad movies get made all the time at all budget levels, but admitting it means throwing people under the bus. It means telling, quite directly, to the dozens of fans of episodes 7-9 as they are that they have objectively bad taste, talk about spitting on someone's soul. For any producer, director or writer who is about to work on a Disney movie, they'll have seen how Disney failed to stand behind their works. Are they going to imply the movie I worked years on is shit if it doesn't make them enough money? For the public, they'll have seen how Disney swore, for years, to the tune of billions of dollars that episode 7, 8 and 9 were the sequels we always wanted to the Star Wars saga.
No, I don't think we're gonna get a redo. If that bad all women Ghostbusters movie was never officially disgraced by Sony, Disney's not going to do it with Star Wars. At least that Ghostbusters movie could be pushed into a corner never to be talked about again, while SW killed off or bastardized beloved characters. It's best for them to maintain the fiction that they were perfectly good movies that simply for whatever reason, didn't resonate enough with audiences. The best they could do to correct it is a split timeline, JJ Abrams' Star Trek-style, that they then splice over the bad one, and I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off in a way that doesn't feel like a massive ass pull; at least Star Trek had a history of time travel and diverging timelines.
That’s not how movie financing works. If you’ve ever read about the politics and mechanics of the industry, it goes something like this (I’m oversimplifying a bit and some details may be a little inaccurate from what I remember):
A lot of rich people (and even ordinary people without their knowledge) finance movies.
In IB, there exists a specialty financing department called something like “TMT-DCM” which stands for “Telecom, Media & Technology,” Debt Capital Markets (DCM). A common goal of IB is to raise money for companies projects (this is a fairly standard function called “capital sourcing”).
Some movies are absolutely financed by rich people. The story of the dude that defrauded Malaysia and then used the money to party and fund 'The Wolf of Wall St' is pretty well known. But the reality is that this isn't that common. Rich people don’t have cash just sitting around. They’re rich because they own companies that are worth a lot of money.
Anyway, IB’s are commonly tasked with raising money for movies. I don't know who’s active today (and TBF it’s been about 15 years since I read about this), but Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan were very active back in the middle of the 2000’s. The thing is IB’s don't really have money themselves, so they reach out to rich people and institutions (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, also sometimes hedge funds, etc.) to invest. More normal people unknowingly have exposure to this than you might think.
This is where people go wrong in their thinking. Individual movies are very risky. So then why would people invest in a single movie? Well they actually don't, and this is where the magic happens. What happens is you go in and create a portfolio (which is substantially less risky than an individual film). The way these deals are setup is that, say, 10 future movies were coming out for a studio in the next 18 months, and their total budget was estimated to be $600 million, with a mix consisting of few $100 million movies and several $30 million movies. The producers and the studio will then reach out to an IB. The bank will then say, "If the studio sources $100 million, we can get the other $500 million.” Alright. Deal.
The IB then creates an ABS (which is essentially a financial package that will contain all the money that these movies make over the course of their entire lives. That includes everything, box office, DVD’s, cable broadcasts, TV broadcasts, foreign broadcasts, airplane broadcast, you name it, they do it, or 'other' licensing like when a clip of a movie is featured in a commercial for a toothpaste advertisement. The ABS will have a lifespan of, say 10 years for instance, and will have a minimum return of 8% a year and a maximum of, 15% a year, which is all based on several inside and outside estimates of how the movies should perform. The IB then turns around and markets this security to rich people and institution's to invest. They give $X (up to $500 million) and get a percentage of the total return pool.
So then your movies start coming out. The ABS starts getting a chunk of the profits, and the terms for 'revenue' and 'profit' are very strictly defined. The debt agreements for these ABS’s can run like 300 pages long, with everything laid out in excruciating detail. The split will be something like 20% of the profit which goes to the studio / producer and 80% going back to the ABS. When the ABS hits its maximum return for a given year, the excess profit then goes back to the studio which is to incentivize them to keep distributing the films.
So the idea is that out of 10 movies, maybe 3 bomb, 5 do ‘alright’' (e.g. are profitable but not exactly raking in dough), and 2 are huge blockbusters. But the point here is that the 7 that do 'alright' or great more than pay for the ones that bombed with money left over.
Then after a while, say 5 years or so, all the movies come out and now we have a better picture of how all 10 did, and we can figure out how the investment did. But, there’s still 5 years left on the ABS. Usually there are call or put clauses in the contracts that allow either the investors to be made whole by forcing the studio to buy back the ABS at a predetermined return (that’s the “put” and it’s used if the movies failed to perform) or the studio may have a “call” (which allows the studio to buy back the ABS at a predetermined price if the movies way overperform). But it’s also common that people just ride the ABS and collect the checks up to maturity and at the point of maturity, normally the residuals are auctioned and everyone gets a cut of the final distribution.
Incidentally, this scenario is how Netflix funds all of its content. The debt that Netflix issues is “backed” by the streaming rights and liquidation value of all its IP (movies / TV/ etc.). The only real difference is that instead of having a bunch of little boxes containing let’s just say 10 movies each, Netflix itself is just one giant box that holds everything. But the structure is more or less the same.
I don’t know how much any of this has changed in the years up to today, but this is how it used to work in the early 2000’s.
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I think the Star Wars brand might actually be toast. I do get your point but 7-9 did very real damage that a full cancellation of those might work.
GOT would be harder because the end wasn’t terrible it was just bad relative to the earlier work.
This is the second most offensive opinion I've read on this website.
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Mandalorian and Grogu is currently doing worse than Solo, and is being beaten by a horror film. I agree with you. The sequels divided people, which was enough to cause people to lose interest in it, but now most of the voices who were defending them are quiet. Nobody cares enough to press the issue any more.
I recently saw an article in one of the geek publications where the author was like, “yeah, the sequels were inconsistent and undermined each other, but the people who say this was because of feminism are still misogynists.” I’ve never met someone who defends the movies. They suck. But cancelling them wouldn’t do much. The energy’s already gone.
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Agreed, but then we end up having to watch said canon crash and burn when someone without any love for the IP grabs hold of it and inserts their own vision, and then mocks the people who are suddenly alienated because har har I peed all over your stuff now I own it. A fandom should, in such cases, be able to organize and just pay some other person to continue from where things left off and go on their merry way. This could happen in the current era, but in practice, coordination problems mean you can't outbid Corporations for the rights.
I think books in particular are amenable to a 'flexible' canon. Most long-running series have entries that fans would rather forget/ignore. Oh, and many where the endings rather suck. So if another author wants to come in and rewrite, say book 6 of a series, or just change a single character arc or 'fix' an ending, well, let them publish it, stick it on the shelf next to the originals, and let people choose.
I ALSO support the idea of authors going back over their own works and adjusting things based on their increased experience and feedback... so long as they're very transparent about doing so and keep the previous versions available.
This doesn't always play out well (Kirkman is making some changes from the Invincible comic to the TV show that I find baffling) but I think it is healthy.
This also opens them up to being bullied into making changes that are genuinely horrible, but hey.
Yes there's absolutely an 'artistic integrity' argument to be made.
I think the apotheosis of this would be a wikipedia-like site that tracks all versions of a given canon and charts the different paths readers/viewers can take and lets people provide feedback on individual tracks so future readers/viewers can pick the one they expect to like.
Hey, at least fans can fight over whether Sony's version of the canon is better than Microsoft's. We lost something when the console wars died down.
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That does sound good, except as the other user noted, the IP laws also protect the small quality authors from the massive slop companies to an extent. Right now, if you have Legends of Gemlands and a generic mass-marketed Slop Wars, you can google the former and it will come up. Gonna be a lot tougher if the massive company can fork Legends of Gemlands and have their version come up in the first 10 pages of search.
That's trademark (identity), not copyright (content). Nobody is suggesting that trademark be abolished.
Wouldn't forked content necessarily have identity similar enough that it is easily confused?
The trademark is the name of the work, not the plot and the characters. Just call your fork Legends of Crystalia, and mention on the same page that it's a fork of Legends of Gemlands not endorsed by the original creator, in order to avoid any confusion. (Though if the characters are trademarked separately—e. g., using a specific gemstone character that figures prominently in the plot as the logo for Legends of Gemlands—then you will have problems.)
For a real-world example, see the recent controversy between Notepad++ (trademarked) and a fork that dared to call itself Notepad++ for Mac without authorization.
I think the overall result, though, is not a proliferation of independent creators protected from corporate overreach, its just an inevitable centralization of all the media to the eternal corporate entities, who then shut down anyone else who might want to spin off the works in question... including the original creator.
The ONLY reason Calvin and Hobbes hasn't burned up its Dragon's hoard of goodwill is because the creator has simply refused to be bought and has become a recluse, the sole holdout of his generation of artists.
But it is certain that once he dies, it too will be sucked up into the corporate vaults and exploited to the max.
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I never understood how people bought into this willingly.
I assume natural crowd-following instincts (you want to be part of what everyone else is doing, not go off on some random tangent where nobody else cares), backed by the aforementioned IP regime that makes it very sketchy to put too much effort into a product you can't distribute.
But yeah, its like the one Tyler the Creator tweet about cyberbullying. "How the hell is corporate canon real? Just read the fanfiction, don't watch the theatrical releases, and believe whatever you want."
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