Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
The modern entertainment economy doesn’t reward personal satisfaction—it rewards scalable consensus. So if you truly enjoy something, but it can’t scale—you may have to evangelize it, or else it dies. That’s a pretty weird and unsettling inversion. I’m gonna call it zero-sum economics of cultural distribution: the idea that for certain mega-projects (like the MCU or AAA games) to be profitable, they must dominate to the exclusion of everything else.
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Bravo Johnson
@bravojohnson
If you want that $200M Marvel movie to exist, it has to monopolize screens, attention, and distribution networks. It’s not enough for it to break even. It needs to crush. And so, for you to enjoy it, 50 other weird, subtle, personal, maybe even beautiful projects need to vanish. There’s no room. The bandwidth’s gone. The theater chain dropped the indie to run Guardians of the Galaxy 9 on six screens. The game store won’t stock the narrative-driven $15 game because Fortnite and EA already ate the oxygen. You can’t just “like both.” The ecosystem doesn’t work that way anymore. And that’s the quiet violence built into these entertainment economies: Your consumption requires the nonexistence of other people’s work.
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:grin:
@grin
Is this true? Maybe the small beautiful personal projects just move on to other venues, funding sources, distribution channels. It’s cheaper than ever to make a feature length film, and easier than ever to deliver it direct to viewers. Niche curation is at ATH. I agree it’s hard for an indie project to break through to the mainstream. But I don’t see them directly competing with Marvel in the way you describe. Am I off the mark?
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Garrett
@garrett
Distribution is king Great perspective and framing on this!
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