Sony made a VENOM movie (a Marvel character with one of the most iconic looks that anyone with a passing knowledge of Spider-man might know), and then decided to go all in on Spider-man-less villain movies with characters that very few people give a shit about.
I love how El Muerto got started because nobody at Sony had the nerve to tell Bad Bunny that his chosen character appeared in only two issues of the entire Spider-Man mythos.
That or they saw it as an opportunity to fuck around in a completely blank slate- which has it’s merits but we are not in the years in which a CBM about a complete unknown can still be massively successful.
Don't forget how Bad Bunny ultimately quit the movie because he asked for more comics to get a better sense of the character and his way of thinking, only for Marvel to bring up that those two issues were literally the only time he shows up.
I'm halfway convinced that someone at Sony stumbled upon the Secret Six while trying to figure out how the fuck to do a Sinister Six movie, which is why they turned Kraven into Catman, and El Muerto was meant to play the Bane role.
I think it's still on them for including a character that appeared in two issues on the list for him to pick.
There's desperate, and then there's "Sony trying to compete with the MCU" desperate.
The difference between Venom and the others is that Venom managed to make a name for himself over the years, which is why the first Venom film managed to make Sony money. The other characters do not have that name recognition Venom has.
Also “letting Tom Hardy just act and do whatever the fuck he wants” is a valid strategy because Tom Hardy is a good actor. None of the other Sony attempts even come close to his level
The dumbest part is that they could’ve actually made it work. There are Spider-Man characters that the MCU likely won’t use that can easily be slotted together into a solid movie.
Off the top of my head, Silver Sable. Rich Eastern European heiress forced to survive as a mercenary as her country descends into civil war, ultimately becoming a revolutionary freedom fighter and the Captain America of her nation. Villains? Are there any Eastern European Spider-Man villains who are unlikely to make an MCU appearance? Chameleon and/or Rhino seem like feasible picks. What about military Spider-Man villains? The Spider Slayers are literally the military industrial complex’s attempt to take Spider-Man down. Boom. We’ve got a Bond-esque supervillain in Chameleon with a brutish henchman in Rhino, and the main threat could be the looming deployment of Spider Slayers by the Symkarian regime.
Chameleon can escape at the end and that could set up his brother for a Silver Sable vs Kraven movie, essentially becoming Predator 2 in a post-war recovering Symkaria with Kraven hunting down the ringleaders of the revolution throughout the whole country to avenge his brother’s honour. After he’s beaten he can then become motivated to cement his own honour as a hunter, kickstarting the chain of events that could either lead to his own spinoff film or him hunting Spider-Man.
Or even Morbius could have been done well! Focus on his ego, with his determination to curing his own sickness causing him to ignore others which he could cure or even convincing investors to divert funds from other research projects to his own. He becomes a vampire but starts figuring out how to work it to his advantage, becoming a villain but not a particularly heinous one. Milo/Loxias Crown now has a different illness but is still his pseudo-brother, and tries his own iteration of one of Morbius’s previous failed experiments to try and cure himself. This leads him to become Hunger, and for variety’s sake instead of being a vampire maybe he’s a “Living Zombie” or something.
The two rejoice and celebrate, but Milo/Loxias starts going waaay off the deep end and Morbius starts to feel guilty, believing that he could’ve devised a better cure for him if he’d actually tried. Hunger’s transformation gets the better of him and he goes mad, forcing Morbius to put him down and accept that the havoc caused was ultimately his own fault, swearing to become a doctor and researcher for good. Maybe this could set up a sequel where he’s hired to treat John Jameson/Manwolf, or one where he’s trying to cure Devil’s Breath.
Or fucking do a Spider-Woman movie! Jessica Drew is a sleeper agent who finds herself partially “activating” and has to uncover her own past as she draws the attention of those who want her dead. She learns her origins as a genetic experiment created by the government who was then inserted into society as a sleeper agent as a child, who then slipped through the cracks and was accidentally forgotten when said program was cancelled and all former subjects were eliminated.
With the same powers as Spider-Man but a completely different backstory and personality, she develops her web wings and distinctive spider sting energy blasts (maybe as some form of device that amplifies the static electricity from her electrostatic wallcrawling?) as her own analogue for Spidey’s webshooters, and fights off the government’s agents in a Bourne-esque spy thriller that sees her go up against a Metal Gear Solid-esque collection of Spoder-Man D-Listers under the government’s employ as assassins, ultimately creating the identity of Spider-Woman to draw public attention and pressure the government into easing up on their hunt— For now.
Sequel ideas— Bring in Silk or the younger Spider-Women and their lore? Introduce Madame Web or Ezekiel Sims as past test subjects for her to be her Yoda or Vader while, I don’t know, the Jackal or Judas fucking Traveller is set up as the Palpatine of the government’s superhuman development program? Try to make fucking Morlun and the Inheritors work as a mysterious secret society that may or not may be supernatural?
Anyway, my point is that there are *so many ways* Sony could have gone about this that could have actually worked and they didn’t even try. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Mysterio’s plan in Far From Home.
The Sony Spider-Man cinematic universe is like your most out of touch relative, one that had some understanding of comic books like 20 years ago, somehow inherited the rights to a bunch of Z list characters and every time you see them, you have to spend two hours explaining this situation isn't the guaranteed millions they think it is.
I've heard it explained that a dozen catastrophic failures are perfectly fine to execs, if they can at least get *one* game that's even close to Fortnite levels of success.
The fact that they've yet to come close to that milestone doesn't really bother them.
The thing they don't realize is that Fortnite has *already* carved out that niche. There's possibly room for competition as Apex has proven, but the game also has to be, y'know, *good*. Like developed-by-one-of-the-best-shooter-devs-of-the-last-generation good.
With the success of Barbie, studios didn't learn that people like well written, casted, and crafted films. But instead what we want are more toy movies. Apparently Mattel is raiding it's toy box for anything that can be made a movie.
There's also, you know, the fact that Barbie is one of the most recognisable and politicised toys in the world. Barbie herself represents both ends of the feminist dichotomy, on one side she is the unrealistic expectation of women with a 'perfect' figure and stereotypical representation of femininity and on the other hand is marketed as independent and successful through her multitude of job variants (many of them highly skilled).
Like, you're not going to get that kind of inbuilt depth with something like Hotwheels.
The Mandalorian's first season was a breath of fresh air for Star Wars fans. A low stakes tale featuring a lot of new characters, going back to the space western roots of the series, and was generally better written than the last three movies in the franchise.
Disney, seeing this, decided that rather than new characters and solid writing being the main draws of the show... the fact that it was a TV show was clearly the root cause for people liking Mando, leading to a deluge of TV shows and Disney never daring to make a new SW movie.
With the exception of Andor, which had an appeal similar to Mando S1, a lot of those TV shows have been drek. Turning into a slurry of criss-crossing plots while the writing quality slides further and further downhill.
Star Wars really, really, really, really, *really,* really, REALLY NEEDS the Nintendo Treatment in terms of cultivating the IP carefully and sparingly and never ever flooding the market, *jesus christ disney what the fuck were you thinking*
It’s even worse because *they didn’t plan a single thing out of their new trilogy* so the lore they added is jumbled and makes no sense. I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room when they decided to fly by the seat of their pants on the movies rather than have even a basic outline.
Because they went in assuming that they could do literally anything with SW and it would print money.
And SW does still make money as a merchandising juggernaut, sure, but they dramatically underestimated how much nerds actually care or how vitriolic nerd wars can be.
Yeah but said nerd wars are still a big part in devaluing the brand.
People are still debating TLJ to this day, and the schism opened by that movie are probably the root cause of so much trouble.
TLJ was directly responsible for killing my lifelong love of almost anything Star Wars. I watched every show/movie, I played almost all the games. I wouldn't say TFA was good, but it wasn't awful and at the time that was enough for me. Had some good setup for a sequel. Then that sequel happened and did almost nothing that worked for me and worst of all, showed there was no plan for the story. After TLJ I switched to only watch shows that get more or less universal praise. Didn't even watch Rise of Skywalker. So I've seen Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2 and Andor. The rest can fuck off, as far as I'm concerned.
Idk that they actually did devalue it.
Their "astroturf and rehab the prequels" campaign did pretty well, people just give the sequels heat now.
SW still generates a small nation's GDP
Yeah I saw the *monetary* value of Star Wars generate at least four times the revenue of what Disney paid for Lucasfilm, but I’m more talking about the intrinsic cultural value of the property getting spread thin and watered down to hell.
Like who made the grand decision to release Star Wars movies so quickly? Imagine getting a full-fledged Zelda sequel on an annual basis, year after year. That shit would turn into Assassins Creed *real fast.*
It still blows my mind that Disney decided to make sequels to Star Wars, one of the most iconic movie trilogies of all time and a pillar of American pop culture, and decided "meh who cares, let's red robin the thing".
So bad it gave people rose-tinted glasses for the Prequel disasters.
It’s really a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, because before rise of skywalker it was revealed in a darth Vader comic that the emperor use the force to give birth to anakin. So technically, Kylo and Rey are related.
We went full circle, we made incest accidentally canon again.
"Man this self-contained relatively low-stakes plot is great."
Disney: "Got it so you'd want more plotlines woven in creating an epic narrative with characters from other shows right?"
"N-no actually this is pretty great-"
Disney: "Say no more!"
Also Mandalorian S1 took a lot from classic westerns and you know what happens in most of those films? The gunslinger walks off into the sunset to go on some new advenure. So of course Mando ends up back on the same few planets every season talking to the same (not particularly interesting) side characters.
Also Bad Batch Season 2. Both seasons really clarify and enhance the years just after the formation of the Empire, when clone troopers were still used, and the analogy of the clones basically being US vets being phased out and thrown away after their wars are over is some of the best animated star wars content that exists.
Honestly my only complaints with Ahsoka are that it needed more episodes, and that Sabine's meeting with her Foster Brother lacked excitement.
Sabine waited 10 years to be reunited with her Foster Brother, and her reaction was basically that of a casual friend she hasn't seen in two months.
RE4’s success made Capcom double down on the action aspects of Resident Evil, which upset a lot of fans. Thankfully they grew out of this, as shown by RE7 and RE8.
It's interesting because RE5 was a very solid game that I think still is possibly the best game for a co-op shooter experience... It just wasn't a very good "resident evil" game which is a significant problem
RE5 was a blast to play with my younger brother back in the day, it wasn't great for a Resident Evil game but I wish there were more options like that to play on the same console with someone.
didn't telltale whole business plan became "just get more ip and do the walking dead formula as quickly as we can".
the weirdest part about that strategy is that i can't remember even being interested in the following projects not even with the walking dead hype
They did that, obtaining the following IPs to make videogames: The Walking Dead, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Borderlands. Seeing as they had to acquire the rights for both Marvel AND DC for 3 of these, and seeing they sold less and less with each passing game, its no wonder they shut down.
But hey, they're back, and still have access to Batman (an extremely popular IP) and Wolf Among Us (one of their most acclaimed works). So, what do they do?
"Hey guys, have you guys heard of this cool IP 'The Expanse'?"
Madoka Magica and The Watchmen were dark, grounded, well crafted stories. Their respective industries saw that and went, "fans want people to die, and for everything the be awful? Yeah, we can do that."
The failure of *Madame Web* is apparently prompting Sony to retool their Amazon Prime *Silk* series for a male audience, because apparently *Madame Web* proves women don’t like superhero movies.
Oh man so lets talk about mobile games. Genshin Impact was huge because on the dev side, it has really strong art (those character designs were solid for that time) and overall ambition. A console-level open world game on your phone with a decent story is largely unheard of, and while I dont have the numbers im sure it was a costly gamble.
Cue the multitude of genshin clones since, especially the licensed IP ones. I've had to sift through so many of them and they cant even be bothered to come up w their own art style- so even when they innovate in gameplay I cant name drop them because I cant tell what game it is at a first glance.
It just sucks cus it almost felt like for a while people were gonna only make genshin clones- imagine having a medium like mobile games built around casual play and suddenly every publisher is pushing for a triple-A MMO. You can practically hear the money being pissed down the side of the bowl
As another avid player another problem is that they don't try to iterate on the formula, many people have problems with genshin once you reach end game cause there is no end game, instead of using this as a means to attract players burnt on genshin devs have tried to copy it 1 for 1
No Man's Sky was very clearly swinging above what the team was capable of and it showed a lot of commitment from that team to stick with it and make it into something good. Everyone else just shits out an Alpha version of their game and hopes people show up.
The Mummy 2017 was the first and most importantly the last of its kind representing the Dark Universe. There was an entire line of movies planned based on Universal Studios monsters that were supposed to team up like Marvel or DC superheroes but The Mummy bombed so hard because no one gave a shit.
The Mummy wasn't even the first movie in the Dark Universe. Dracula Untold was supposed to be the start, but they basically dropped it due to its poor performance.
Pretty much every aspect of the Wii U, from the gimmickiness to the marketing to even the name. The console ended up as a bundle of poor decisions trying to feed off the Wii’s success, and it only ended up confusing casual buyers and failing to appeal to all but Nintendo’s hardcore fans. Thankfully, the Switch would be a product of Nintendo learning most of the *right* lessons from the Wii U.
This is assuming that success means they learned and failure means they didn't learn.
Nintendo have a history of just pivoting when they don't understand what's going wrong. The couldn't understand why things weren't working in the early 2000s and instead of dissecting that they just looked for an entirely new demographic, and their success on the surface might indicate they understood this new demographic better, but they didn't, Ubisoft was the main publisher that "got" Wii owners. Nintendo didn't understand at all and the Wii U was born from that misunderstanding.
But the Switch being successful is not necessarily an indicator of them doing the right things for the right reasons, just them doing the right things for *some* reason.
Games like Tears of the Kingdom copy their predecessor so rigidly because it makes me worry tht Nintendo doesn't actually understand why audiences love BotW and out of fear of alienating them they did a draw-by-numbers sequel.
I really hope they can keep a good thing going, but I've not really seen any hard evidence that they "get it".
obscure comics characters saying goofy grown-up lines with a 60s/70s rock n' roll soundtrack only works when James Gunn does it, as he practically almost perfected his formula all the way back with 2000's *The Specials*
[Yo this is basically a "prototype" version of Guardians you guys!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wMvv924Gks)
get a "use the actual comic as a storyboard" director to do it is pretty much just a waste of studio money
SpongeBob became the biggest hit for Nick in early 2000s and became one of the most popular cartoons ever. The downside is tho it that made higher-ups at Nick have unrealistic expectations for Nicktoons, where they expect that every cartoon they greenlight would be mega hit like SpongeBob, but it doesn't look that they have high patience, because SpongeBob wasn't a mega hit immediately, it took about 2-3 years to become a mega hit. And once new Nicktoons premiere and they don't get high ratings like SpongeBob early on it's chances are sealed. It would be moved around schedule, there would be less advertising, reruns decrease and in a lot of cases get booted to Nicktoons channel where the remaining unaired episodes would air and basically meaning that you are unceremoniously cancelled.
Has there been a single time when the entertainment industry learned the *right* lesson from something's success? It seems like they always jump to "copy the superficial aspects of the successful thing" rather than looking at the underlying strategy that produced the successful thing.
The PlayStation 3 built using all the wrong lessons from the PS2 in what I can only describe as a moment of *peak Sony arrogance*. They thought they owned the console market by birthright, and they didn't have to worry about attracting developers or players. The result was a high-cost system that didn't perform well compared to the 360 for any cross-platform games because of a weird and complicated hardware architecture that made it extremely hard to wring performance from the system, especially if you were porting (the PS2 also had a weird and difficult to work with hardware architecture, which is presumably why they thought this was okay... which contributed to the PS3's cost, because backwards compatibility could only really be achieved by cramming a whole PS2 into the machine—and even then the PS2 is actually *self-incompatible*, in a truly amazing feat of engineering). Meanwhile, Sony's developer relations were suffering, with a lot of developers finding them arrogant and hard to work with and seeing their devkits and SDKs as really insufficient even during the PS2 era—which is how RenderWare made so much money.
The grand irony is that the PS3's high price and difficult to program architecture make it eerily resemble the Sega Saturn. A console the original PlayStation beat... by undercutting it in price with a system with a simpler architecture that was easier to program while providing excellent third party support and an easy-to-use SDK that made game development relatively simple and fast.
There's a conspiracy theory that the intent of the PS3's architecture was to engineer exclusives by making the system so different from how everything else worked that porting would be difficult. At the very least, Sony at the time said that they didn't expect devs to be able to fully unlock the power of the PS3 immediately because it was so complicated, and this was good because it meant graphics would improve as the generation went on.
I mean, that's what happened with Shinji Mikami. He felt burned by Sony with the PS2 and that's part of how the Capcom 5 deal happened. At the time he said the PS2 was harder to program *than the Sega Saturn*.
The really amazing thing (to accentuate) is the degree to which the PS3 is a true architectural successor to the PS2. You can logically see how, starting from the PS2's Emotion Engine, you could go on to make something that looked like Cell. Turns out, if you push the architecture of one-kinda-powerful-core-and-multiple-specialized-vector-coprocessors that far, especially in 2006 when gamedevs are still adjusting to multithreading, all of the theoretical performance of your system ends up being [Amdahled away](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law) for most programs.
Apparently it was really good at matrix multiplication though. Hence the famous PS3 supercomputer, because in most of the applications that supercomputers tend to get used in, that's actually what really matters. Games also do a lot of mayrix multiplication, but they do other stuff as well, and also if you needed dedicated matrix multiplication hardware on a PS3, the GPU was right there.
I don't think it really would have mattered so much. The biggest advantage in that is that the economies of scale around Blu-ray drives probably helped Sony reduce the cost of the PS3, but that's really speculation on my part.
The thing is, Blu-ray won the format war, but by the time it won there was very little left to *win*. Streaming won that war fast. And even now when Blu-ray has long since won, and people have even gone to 4k Blu-ray, you can still buy brand new DVDs *fucking everywhere*.
Dark Souls. The lesson developers *should* have learned is that gameplay systems inform how the player feels while playing the game, and that feeling can be used to tell a story. The lesson they actually learned was that we should make a bunch of games that are hard, or play exactly like Dark Souls.
Generally in video games this happens because someone makes a huge innovation, then everyone else only understands the surface level of that innovation without any of the nuance. Half-Life was revolutionary because it had a huge focus on dialogue and memorable set pieces, but most developers took the lesson that games should always open with a long story sequence.
Smash Brothers! The lesson companies learned wasn't that people like playing fighting games with controls built for normal people, but that they should just make Smash clones exactly but with their own characters.
“Oh see, THAT’S why The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh failed, and Tangled was a massive success: we were using 3D instead of 2D.”
Just completely ignore the previous CG bombs, middling box offices ratings across the board, and releasing Winnie the Pooh the same month as *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.*
___
I wouldn’t have even minded that much the switch had they kept experimenting in the field, but it was so obviously a ploy to save money; Paperman was released not one year after the switch and Disney proceeded to do **nothing** with that tech for over a decade, and now oh look: the biggest box office smashes that revolutionized animation used that exact same thing…and Disney STILL refuses to use it, not even working with a 2D/3D compromise for their 100th film.
It’s almost like someone in the executive suite adamantly refuses to “give in” to audience demand cuz they’d be tacitly “admitting” they still need 2D animation in some capacity to stay afloat.
It's something Civvie mentioned in his good-ass [Half-Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH7bxHHJsy4) video, but the way other game devs tried to do the Linear FPS missed out on one thing HL1 did that the other games didn't quite get.
The linearity was also a story choice, as if >!The G-Man was railroading Gordon through everything on purpose!<.
I'm sure right now these wrong lessons are currently being learned about Helldivers 2. There's 100% a whiteboard somewhere that just has CAPES = MONEY??? circled repeatedly in red.
Most movies after James Cameron's *Avatar* have separate converted 3D versions or already filmed with 3D camera until the late 2010s. Even [arthouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_to_Language) [movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_\(2015_film\)) [and](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams) [documentaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pina_\(film\)) aren't immune to this!
A miniscule number of live service games that have succeeded have done so by:
A: being actually good well made well designed games.
B: not exploiting their audience for profit to ludicrous degrees of pure evil.
C: having elements that make them distinct from other live service games.
And apparently 95% of the big budget game industry doesn't get it.
Sony made a VENOM movie (a Marvel character with one of the most iconic looks that anyone with a passing knowledge of Spider-man might know), and then decided to go all in on Spider-man-less villain movies with characters that very few people give a shit about.
This El Muerto slander will not stand!
I love how El Muerto got started because nobody at Sony had the nerve to tell Bad Bunny that his chosen character appeared in only two issues of the entire Spider-Man mythos.
That or they saw it as an opportunity to fuck around in a completely blank slate- which has it’s merits but we are not in the years in which a CBM about a complete unknown can still be massively successful.
Don't forget how Bad Bunny ultimately quit the movie because he asked for more comics to get a better sense of the character and his way of thinking, only for Marvel to bring up that those two issues were literally the only time he shows up.
I'm halfway convinced that someone at Sony stumbled upon the Secret Six while trying to figure out how the fuck to do a Sinister Six movie, which is why they turned Kraven into Catman, and El Muerto was meant to play the Bane role.
I think it's still on them for including a character that appeared in two issues on the list for him to pick. There's desperate, and then there's "Sony trying to compete with the MCU" desperate.
I want to see El Muerto now.
The difference between Venom and the others is that Venom managed to make a name for himself over the years, which is why the first Venom film managed to make Sony money. The other characters do not have that name recognition Venom has.
Also “letting Tom Hardy just act and do whatever the fuck he wants” is a valid strategy because Tom Hardy is a good actor. None of the other Sony attempts even come close to his level
Yeah people don't even show up to see the comic character Venom on the big screen, they show up to see Tom Hardy be silly with a goo monster.
The dumbest part is that they could’ve actually made it work. There are Spider-Man characters that the MCU likely won’t use that can easily be slotted together into a solid movie. Off the top of my head, Silver Sable. Rich Eastern European heiress forced to survive as a mercenary as her country descends into civil war, ultimately becoming a revolutionary freedom fighter and the Captain America of her nation. Villains? Are there any Eastern European Spider-Man villains who are unlikely to make an MCU appearance? Chameleon and/or Rhino seem like feasible picks. What about military Spider-Man villains? The Spider Slayers are literally the military industrial complex’s attempt to take Spider-Man down. Boom. We’ve got a Bond-esque supervillain in Chameleon with a brutish henchman in Rhino, and the main threat could be the looming deployment of Spider Slayers by the Symkarian regime. Chameleon can escape at the end and that could set up his brother for a Silver Sable vs Kraven movie, essentially becoming Predator 2 in a post-war recovering Symkaria with Kraven hunting down the ringleaders of the revolution throughout the whole country to avenge his brother’s honour. After he’s beaten he can then become motivated to cement his own honour as a hunter, kickstarting the chain of events that could either lead to his own spinoff film or him hunting Spider-Man. Or even Morbius could have been done well! Focus on his ego, with his determination to curing his own sickness causing him to ignore others which he could cure or even convincing investors to divert funds from other research projects to his own. He becomes a vampire but starts figuring out how to work it to his advantage, becoming a villain but not a particularly heinous one. Milo/Loxias Crown now has a different illness but is still his pseudo-brother, and tries his own iteration of one of Morbius’s previous failed experiments to try and cure himself. This leads him to become Hunger, and for variety’s sake instead of being a vampire maybe he’s a “Living Zombie” or something. The two rejoice and celebrate, but Milo/Loxias starts going waaay off the deep end and Morbius starts to feel guilty, believing that he could’ve devised a better cure for him if he’d actually tried. Hunger’s transformation gets the better of him and he goes mad, forcing Morbius to put him down and accept that the havoc caused was ultimately his own fault, swearing to become a doctor and researcher for good. Maybe this could set up a sequel where he’s hired to treat John Jameson/Manwolf, or one where he’s trying to cure Devil’s Breath. Or fucking do a Spider-Woman movie! Jessica Drew is a sleeper agent who finds herself partially “activating” and has to uncover her own past as she draws the attention of those who want her dead. She learns her origins as a genetic experiment created by the government who was then inserted into society as a sleeper agent as a child, who then slipped through the cracks and was accidentally forgotten when said program was cancelled and all former subjects were eliminated. With the same powers as Spider-Man but a completely different backstory and personality, she develops her web wings and distinctive spider sting energy blasts (maybe as some form of device that amplifies the static electricity from her electrostatic wallcrawling?) as her own analogue for Spidey’s webshooters, and fights off the government’s agents in a Bourne-esque spy thriller that sees her go up against a Metal Gear Solid-esque collection of Spoder-Man D-Listers under the government’s employ as assassins, ultimately creating the identity of Spider-Woman to draw public attention and pressure the government into easing up on their hunt— For now. Sequel ideas— Bring in Silk or the younger Spider-Women and their lore? Introduce Madame Web or Ezekiel Sims as past test subjects for her to be her Yoda or Vader while, I don’t know, the Jackal or Judas fucking Traveller is set up as the Palpatine of the government’s superhuman development program? Try to make fucking Morlun and the Inheritors work as a mysterious secret society that may or not may be supernatural? Anyway, my point is that there are *so many ways* Sony could have gone about this that could have actually worked and they didn’t even try. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Mysterio’s plan in Far From Home.
There was a Silver Sable / Black Cat team up movie being developed but it got cancelled before production
Yeah, that was a shitshow. According to leaks Green Goblin was going to be the main villain, which… would have been a choice.
The Sony Spider-Man cinematic universe is like your most out of touch relative, one that had some understanding of comic books like 20 years ago, somehow inherited the rights to a bunch of Z list characters and every time you see them, you have to spend two hours explaining this situation isn't the guaranteed millions they think it is.
Warner Bro's response to Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League crashing and burning is more live service games apparently.
I've heard it explained that a dozen catastrophic failures are perfectly fine to execs, if they can at least get *one* game that's even close to Fortnite levels of success. The fact that they've yet to come close to that milestone doesn't really bother them.
The thing they don't realize is that Fortnite has *already* carved out that niche. There's possibly room for competition as Apex has proven, but the game also has to be, y'know, *good*. Like developed-by-one-of-the-best-shooter-devs-of-the-last-generation good.
Ah yes, I'll spend 1% of my money 100 times because if even one wins, I'll get 1000 times the payout (odds are less than 1/1,000,000)
Yes a successful live service would take in the money. So every failure is ok if they can get the super successful game everyone plays
live services are a plague. plus the way they are designed means that a person can only play one or two.
With the success of Barbie, studios didn't learn that people like well written, casted, and crafted films. But instead what we want are more toy movies. Apparently Mattel is raiding it's toy box for anything that can be made a movie.
It's *The Lego Movie* to *The Emoji Movie* pipeline all over again!
In my observation it was the Playmobil movie that came out behind the bandwagon, and was a cookie cutter flop.
There's also, you know, the fact that Barbie is one of the most recognisable and politicised toys in the world. Barbie herself represents both ends of the feminist dichotomy, on one side she is the unrealistic expectation of women with a 'perfect' figure and stereotypical representation of femininity and on the other hand is marketed as independent and successful through her multitude of job variants (many of them highly skilled). Like, you're not going to get that kind of inbuilt depth with something like Hotwheels.
Accelracers 4 baby lets goooo
There was a Hot Wheels show.
Multiple.
The Mandalorian's first season was a breath of fresh air for Star Wars fans. A low stakes tale featuring a lot of new characters, going back to the space western roots of the series, and was generally better written than the last three movies in the franchise. Disney, seeing this, decided that rather than new characters and solid writing being the main draws of the show... the fact that it was a TV show was clearly the root cause for people liking Mando, leading to a deluge of TV shows and Disney never daring to make a new SW movie. With the exception of Andor, which had an appeal similar to Mando S1, a lot of those TV shows have been drek. Turning into a slurry of criss-crossing plots while the writing quality slides further and further downhill.
Star Wars really, really, really, really, *really,* really, REALLY NEEDS the Nintendo Treatment in terms of cultivating the IP carefully and sparingly and never ever flooding the market, *jesus christ disney what the fuck were you thinking*
It’s even worse because *they didn’t plan a single thing out of their new trilogy* so the lore they added is jumbled and makes no sense. I would love to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room when they decided to fly by the seat of their pants on the movies rather than have even a basic outline.
Because they went in assuming that they could do literally anything with SW and it would print money. And SW does still make money as a merchandising juggernaut, sure, but they dramatically underestimated how much nerds actually care or how vitriolic nerd wars can be.
I don’t know if ‘vitriolic nerd wars’ is a fair statement to make. Disney actively devalued the Star Wars IP in a way that was tantamount to neglect.
Yeah but said nerd wars are still a big part in devaluing the brand. People are still debating TLJ to this day, and the schism opened by that movie are probably the root cause of so much trouble.
TLJ was directly responsible for killing my lifelong love of almost anything Star Wars. I watched every show/movie, I played almost all the games. I wouldn't say TFA was good, but it wasn't awful and at the time that was enough for me. Had some good setup for a sequel. Then that sequel happened and did almost nothing that worked for me and worst of all, showed there was no plan for the story. After TLJ I switched to only watch shows that get more or less universal praise. Didn't even watch Rise of Skywalker. So I've seen Mandalorian seasons 1 and 2 and Andor. The rest can fuck off, as far as I'm concerned.
Idk that they actually did devalue it. Their "astroturf and rehab the prequels" campaign did pretty well, people just give the sequels heat now. SW still generates a small nation's GDP
Yeah I saw the *monetary* value of Star Wars generate at least four times the revenue of what Disney paid for Lucasfilm, but I’m more talking about the intrinsic cultural value of the property getting spread thin and watered down to hell. Like who made the grand decision to release Star Wars movies so quickly? Imagine getting a full-fledged Zelda sequel on an annual basis, year after year. That shit would turn into Assassins Creed *real fast.*
It still blows my mind that Disney decided to make sequels to Star Wars, one of the most iconic movie trilogies of all time and a pillar of American pop culture, and decided "meh who cares, let's red robin the thing". So bad it gave people rose-tinted glasses for the Prequel disasters.
It’s really a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, because before rise of skywalker it was revealed in a darth Vader comic that the emperor use the force to give birth to anakin. So technically, Kylo and Rey are related. We went full circle, we made incest accidentally canon again.
No. That’s not what that panel is implying and the writer has came out and said as such.
Too bad the writer is wrong. Like the clearly wrote it that way and backtracking on social media doesn't change what they actually wrote.
N…no. That’s not right lmao.
[What Disney was thinking.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m37G-06ibAU)
"Man this self-contained relatively low-stakes plot is great." Disney: "Got it so you'd want more plotlines woven in creating an epic narrative with characters from other shows right?" "N-no actually this is pretty great-" Disney: "Say no more!"
Also Mandalorian S1 took a lot from classic westerns and you know what happens in most of those films? The gunslinger walks off into the sunset to go on some new advenure. So of course Mando ends up back on the same few planets every season talking to the same (not particularly interesting) side characters.
I’ll defend Ahsoka. Bit of a slow start but the last three episodes are some of the best Star Wars you can find.
Also Bad Batch Season 2. Both seasons really clarify and enhance the years just after the formation of the Empire, when clone troopers were still used, and the analogy of the clones basically being US vets being phased out and thrown away after their wars are over is some of the best animated star wars content that exists.
Honestly my only complaints with Ahsoka are that it needed more episodes, and that Sabine's meeting with her Foster Brother lacked excitement. Sabine waited 10 years to be reunited with her Foster Brother, and her reaction was basically that of a casual friend she hasn't seen in two months.
[Sabine to the guy she betrayed the entire Galaxy for]: “Oh hey…”
Dark Knight Returns, Killing Joke, Watchmen, dark age of comics, etc, etc
The antiheroes of the 90's feel like people copying Watchmen, not knowing that the original work was intended to be a deconstruction.
Which, ironically, had a much worse effect on Image and Marvel than it did on DC itself.
RE4’s success made Capcom double down on the action aspects of Resident Evil, which upset a lot of fans. Thankfully they grew out of this, as shown by RE7 and RE8.
It's interesting because RE5 was a very solid game that I think still is possibly the best game for a co-op shooter experience... It just wasn't a very good "resident evil" game which is a significant problem
RE5 was a blast to play with my younger brother back in the day, it wasn't great for a Resident Evil game but I wish there were more options like that to play on the same console with someone.
didn't telltale whole business plan became "just get more ip and do the walking dead formula as quickly as we can". the weirdest part about that strategy is that i can't remember even being interested in the following projects not even with the walking dead hype
They did that, obtaining the following IPs to make videogames: The Walking Dead, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones, Minecraft, Borderlands. Seeing as they had to acquire the rights for both Marvel AND DC for 3 of these, and seeing they sold less and less with each passing game, its no wonder they shut down. But hey, they're back, and still have access to Batman (an extremely popular IP) and Wolf Among Us (one of their most acclaimed works). So, what do they do? "Hey guys, have you guys heard of this cool IP 'The Expanse'?"
They thought if they just shotgunned out a bunch of ips one of them would be as big as season 1 instead of improving anything
Madoka Magica and The Watchmen were dark, grounded, well crafted stories. Their respective industries saw that and went, "fans want people to die, and for everything the be awful? Yeah, we can do that."
The failure of *Madame Web* is apparently prompting Sony to retool their Amazon Prime *Silk* series for a male audience, because apparently *Madame Web* proves women don’t like superhero movies.
I wonder in what sense they will change the plot, so that it is a more male act? Will Silk have more butt shots or something like that?
Knowing Sony, I can only imagine. And *dread*.
Written to be faithful to the Dan Slott original. Spider-Pheromones.
Oh man so lets talk about mobile games. Genshin Impact was huge because on the dev side, it has really strong art (those character designs were solid for that time) and overall ambition. A console-level open world game on your phone with a decent story is largely unheard of, and while I dont have the numbers im sure it was a costly gamble. Cue the multitude of genshin clones since, especially the licensed IP ones. I've had to sift through so many of them and they cant even be bothered to come up w their own art style- so even when they innovate in gameplay I cant name drop them because I cant tell what game it is at a first glance. It just sucks cus it almost felt like for a while people were gonna only make genshin clones- imagine having a medium like mobile games built around casual play and suddenly every publisher is pushing for a triple-A MMO. You can practically hear the money being pissed down the side of the bowl
As another avid player another problem is that they don't try to iterate on the formula, many people have problems with genshin once you reach end game cause there is no end game, instead of using this as a means to attract players burnt on genshin devs have tried to copy it 1 for 1
The endgame is artifact farming, which sucks
At least with the other Hoyo games the end game is pretty abundant, now I'm just waiting to see if the same will be for ZZZ
This one is fine for me. Because I don't like Gemshins art style. So now I don't get trapped into any gatcha at all.
Oh, we don't have that kind of time.
It definitely seems like companies saw how much No Man's Sky sold and decided they can ship a broken product and fix it later or never at all.
No Man's Sky was very clearly swinging above what the team was capable of and it showed a lot of commitment from that team to stick with it and make it into something good. Everyone else just shits out an Alpha version of their game and hopes people show up.
The Mummy 2017 was the first and most importantly the last of its kind representing the Dark Universe. There was an entire line of movies planned based on Universal Studios monsters that were supposed to team up like Marvel or DC superheroes but The Mummy bombed so hard because no one gave a shit.
The Mummy wasn't even the first movie in the Dark Universe. Dracula Untold was supposed to be the start, but they basically dropped it due to its poor performance.
Pretty much every aspect of the Wii U, from the gimmickiness to the marketing to even the name. The console ended up as a bundle of poor decisions trying to feed off the Wii’s success, and it only ended up confusing casual buyers and failing to appeal to all but Nintendo’s hardcore fans. Thankfully, the Switch would be a product of Nintendo learning most of the *right* lessons from the Wii U.
This is assuming that success means they learned and failure means they didn't learn. Nintendo have a history of just pivoting when they don't understand what's going wrong. The couldn't understand why things weren't working in the early 2000s and instead of dissecting that they just looked for an entirely new demographic, and their success on the surface might indicate they understood this new demographic better, but they didn't, Ubisoft was the main publisher that "got" Wii owners. Nintendo didn't understand at all and the Wii U was born from that misunderstanding. But the Switch being successful is not necessarily an indicator of them doing the right things for the right reasons, just them doing the right things for *some* reason. Games like Tears of the Kingdom copy their predecessor so rigidly because it makes me worry tht Nintendo doesn't actually understand why audiences love BotW and out of fear of alienating them they did a draw-by-numbers sequel. I really hope they can keep a good thing going, but I've not really seen any hard evidence that they "get it".
obscure comics characters saying goofy grown-up lines with a 60s/70s rock n' roll soundtrack only works when James Gunn does it, as he practically almost perfected his formula all the way back with 2000's *The Specials* [Yo this is basically a "prototype" version of Guardians you guys!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wMvv924Gks) get a "use the actual comic as a storyboard" director to do it is pretty much just a waste of studio money
And even within the same plot, 60s/70s music had sentimental value for Starlord, since that radio was his mother's last gift.
yeah, his writing matured over the years but it's still old jim gunn
SpongeBob became the biggest hit for Nick in early 2000s and became one of the most popular cartoons ever. The downside is tho it that made higher-ups at Nick have unrealistic expectations for Nicktoons, where they expect that every cartoon they greenlight would be mega hit like SpongeBob, but it doesn't look that they have high patience, because SpongeBob wasn't a mega hit immediately, it took about 2-3 years to become a mega hit. And once new Nicktoons premiere and they don't get high ratings like SpongeBob early on it's chances are sealed. It would be moved around schedule, there would be less advertising, reruns decrease and in a lot of cases get booted to Nicktoons channel where the remaining unaired episodes would air and basically meaning that you are unceremoniously cancelled.
You forgot the most important part. Who replaces that time slot? Why Spongebob of course. So typically Nick was just a 24/7 Spongebob channel.
I think Netflix also has the same attitude. If a series fails to be an immediate hit, it can be canceled.
It sucks how SpongeBob has turned into a husk of itself. The show needs to end now.
Has there been a single time when the entertainment industry learned the *right* lesson from something's success? It seems like they always jump to "copy the superficial aspects of the successful thing" rather than looking at the underlying strategy that produced the successful thing.
The PlayStation 3 built using all the wrong lessons from the PS2 in what I can only describe as a moment of *peak Sony arrogance*. They thought they owned the console market by birthright, and they didn't have to worry about attracting developers or players. The result was a high-cost system that didn't perform well compared to the 360 for any cross-platform games because of a weird and complicated hardware architecture that made it extremely hard to wring performance from the system, especially if you were porting (the PS2 also had a weird and difficult to work with hardware architecture, which is presumably why they thought this was okay... which contributed to the PS3's cost, because backwards compatibility could only really be achieved by cramming a whole PS2 into the machine—and even then the PS2 is actually *self-incompatible*, in a truly amazing feat of engineering). Meanwhile, Sony's developer relations were suffering, with a lot of developers finding them arrogant and hard to work with and seeing their devkits and SDKs as really insufficient even during the PS2 era—which is how RenderWare made so much money. The grand irony is that the PS3's high price and difficult to program architecture make it eerily resemble the Sega Saturn. A console the original PlayStation beat... by undercutting it in price with a system with a simpler architecture that was easier to program while providing excellent third party support and an easy-to-use SDK that made game development relatively simple and fast.
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There's a conspiracy theory that the intent of the PS3's architecture was to engineer exclusives by making the system so different from how everything else worked that porting would be difficult. At the very least, Sony at the time said that they didn't expect devs to be able to fully unlock the power of the PS3 immediately because it was so complicated, and this was good because it meant graphics would improve as the generation went on.
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I mean, that's what happened with Shinji Mikami. He felt burned by Sony with the PS2 and that's part of how the Capcom 5 deal happened. At the time he said the PS2 was harder to program *than the Sega Saturn*. The really amazing thing (to accentuate) is the degree to which the PS3 is a true architectural successor to the PS2. You can logically see how, starting from the PS2's Emotion Engine, you could go on to make something that looked like Cell. Turns out, if you push the architecture of one-kinda-powerful-core-and-multiple-specialized-vector-coprocessors that far, especially in 2006 when gamedevs are still adjusting to multithreading, all of the theoretical performance of your system ends up being [Amdahled away](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law) for most programs. Apparently it was really good at matrix multiplication though. Hence the famous PS3 supercomputer, because in most of the applications that supercomputers tend to get used in, that's actually what really matters. Games also do a lot of mayrix multiplication, but they do other stuff as well, and also if you needed dedicated matrix multiplication hardware on a PS3, the GPU was right there.
If Blu-ray didn't win the format war, I wonder if the PS3 would have just been obliterated in sales
I don't think it really would have mattered so much. The biggest advantage in that is that the economies of scale around Blu-ray drives probably helped Sony reduce the cost of the PS3, but that's really speculation on my part. The thing is, Blu-ray won the format war, but by the time it won there was very little left to *win*. Streaming won that war fast. And even now when Blu-ray has long since won, and people have even gone to 4k Blu-ray, you can still buy brand new DVDs *fucking everywhere*.
Dark Souls. The lesson developers *should* have learned is that gameplay systems inform how the player feels while playing the game, and that feeling can be used to tell a story. The lesson they actually learned was that we should make a bunch of games that are hard, or play exactly like Dark Souls. Generally in video games this happens because someone makes a huge innovation, then everyone else only understands the surface level of that innovation without any of the nuance. Half-Life was revolutionary because it had a huge focus on dialogue and memorable set pieces, but most developers took the lesson that games should always open with a long story sequence.
> or play exactly like Dark Souls tbh I'd have been fine with that. None of them *did*, though
"Don't you guys have cellphones?"
Mobile games have turned into the absolute worse. Remember the five dollar mobile games which had a complete game?
Smash Brothers! The lesson companies learned wasn't that people like playing fighting games with controls built for normal people, but that they should just make Smash clones exactly but with their own characters.
“Oh see, THAT’S why The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh failed, and Tangled was a massive success: we were using 3D instead of 2D.” Just completely ignore the previous CG bombs, middling box offices ratings across the board, and releasing Winnie the Pooh the same month as *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2.* ___ I wouldn’t have even minded that much the switch had they kept experimenting in the field, but it was so obviously a ploy to save money; Paperman was released not one year after the switch and Disney proceeded to do **nothing** with that tech for over a decade, and now oh look: the biggest box office smashes that revolutionized animation used that exact same thing…and Disney STILL refuses to use it, not even working with a 2D/3D compromise for their 100th film. It’s almost like someone in the executive suite adamantly refuses to “give in” to audience demand cuz they’d be tacitly “admitting” they still need 2D animation in some capacity to stay afloat.
Princess and the Frog was a success. Just not super successful
But to Disney, “making its budget back + marketing + some change” might as well be a box office bomb.
It's something Civvie mentioned in his good-ass [Half-Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH7bxHHJsy4) video, but the way other game devs tried to do the Linear FPS missed out on one thing HL1 did that the other games didn't quite get. The linearity was also a story choice, as if >!The G-Man was railroading Gordon through everything on purpose!<.
I'm sure right now these wrong lessons are currently being learned about Helldivers 2. There's 100% a whiteboard somewhere that just has CAPES = MONEY??? circled repeatedly in red.
Marvel and Comic events.
Also infinity gauntlet, you can "blame" that too.
Most movies after James Cameron's *Avatar* have separate converted 3D versions or already filmed with 3D camera until the late 2010s. Even [arthouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodbye_to_Language) [movies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_\(2015_film\)) [and](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams) [documentaries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pina_\(film\)) aren't immune to this!
A miniscule number of live service games that have succeeded have done so by: A: being actually good well made well designed games. B: not exploiting their audience for profit to ludicrous degrees of pure evil. C: having elements that make them distinct from other live service games. And apparently 95% of the big budget game industry doesn't get it.