Also relevant to Fallout 76 and Outer Worlds

[yvannairie]

The lack of risk-taking and long-term brand value is back in the news b/c TROS was apparently a bit shit (I haven't seen it, and one of my friends whose taste I respect liked it a lot) and I wonder if the capitalists of Hollywood realise that a flaccid, mediocre sequel is worse for your brand on the long term than even a bad or kind of forgettable first installment.

B/c like the thing about good sequels is that they retroactively raise the prestige of the whole series. A good sequel uses just enough of the previous movie to build interest in it, which will make the previous movies more profitable in the long term. A boring retread of even a fantastic film will cut off and cauterise any attempt at branching the story out, and kill long-term interest.

Like I doubt that it's actually economically any "safer" to greenlight batches of new ideas and then drive the successful ones to the ground with the sequel factory approach. It's more stable, maybe, but the companies producing art with minimal risk are never gonna see the kind of money and prestige companies with healthier approaches to risk-management do.

(Never mind that there will always be rich people who just wanna have their name on someone else's work. It's not gonna solve capitalism, but we really should bring back the stereotype that rich folks are patrons of the arts so they start competing with each other over who makes the most pretty things happen with their wallets.)