How Streaming Turned the Entire Entertainment Industry Into a Glass Cliff

Studios and tech companies spent years pushing past-their-prime or irrelevant IP with inclusive casts under circumstances that doomed many of them to high-profile failure.

Disney canceling The Acolyte makes sense. Quality notwithstanding (that episode five smackdown was an all-timer), it was a $180 million glorified miniseries pitched as a TV show and a proverbial eight-hour movie, which reportedly earned among the lowest numbers for any Disney+ Star Wars show. Meanwhile, the adventures of Mando and Baby Yoda will continue on the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu. Would-be Disney+ shows like Moana and Armored Wars are concurrently being retrofitted into theatrical features. Disney is seemingly reversing course on flooding the zone with Star Wars and MCU shows, which, as I feared, diluted the brands at their most vulnerable moments for mostly artificial “streaming gains. Nor are they continuing to produce a Disney+ show or movie spin-off for almost any in-house brand. It was a bad idea in 2018 and 2024.

Expensive streaming shows filled with feature-film-level production values and spectacle come with an expectation they will deliver sky-high viewership. Barring that, there was a 2018-2022 assumption that, however the apples-to-oranges transaction might work, these mega-budget shows would drive up subscription figures to something approximating “if we released a tentpole hit in theaters”-sized revenue. Wall Street reversed course in early 2022, prioritizing profits and revenue over subscription figures and content spending. Consequently, the mere existence of these mega-budget “extensions of a thing I have heard of” shows as a sign of strength was drained of all “credit just for existing” value. None of the platforms save for perhaps Netflix has a user base big enough to pull the kind of viewership that would justify a $150-$250 million miniseries. That’s why the Moana TV show is now Moana 2.

The investor class essentially bullied Hollywood into a gazillion-dollar IP-focused content spending arms race and then, on a dime, flip-flopped when it would cause maximum damage. Even Netflix is cutting back on the number of streaming movies, as even most of the tentpoles like the surprisingly solid Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (a 41 million five-day viewership debut followed by an unprecedented plunge to 22 million viewers in its next seven days) aren’t making the kind of viewership/pop culture impact they were in 2018 or even 2021. However, it’s worth remembering the extent to which onscreen and offscreen inclusivity was used as a proverbial shield and artistic justification for the unsustainable flood of expensive IP exploitations that — some very good and others very bad — were doomed to fail by macro circumstances far beyond the artists’ control.