There's a personal positive side for me. I used to watch a lot of movies from more genres, but I haven't enjoyed a lot in the last years besides Marvel and Star Wars, so that's all I watched at the cinema as well. Would prefer they didn't dominate the market and act like assholes, but at least I have some movies I like...
- Time Warner owns Warner Bros Pictures, DC Films, New Line Cinema, CNN, etc, etc.
- Comcast owns Universal Pictures, DreamWorks, Working Title Films, NBC, etc, etc.
Disney is actually behind Comcast in revenue. And of course Disney also got in on the whole 'buy a news company' agenda - they own ABC. This practice of these mega corporations merging and acquiring ever larger shares of the entire media (and news) industry is a large part of the reason that they are in the state that they are.
- List of Time Warner Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Warner...
- List of Comcast Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Comcas...
- List of Disney Assets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
Those lists should not be viewed as all encompassing.
Is it another battle for the attention of the consumer?
Why, exactly I'm not sure ... because they're worried they'll themselves be taken over, if not?
Media and news is just media; news has always been part of the media industry.
By contrast, the fact that the news is in large part quite literally just a branch of these huge corporate conglomerates is certainly something that I think does matter. In many cases the interests of these corporate conglomerates and the average person can come into conflict, yet the average person then goes and consumes their information from the conglomerate. That's not really a great system.
I was not trying to say Time Warner etc are less focused on hypercapitalism, market share and so on. It feels less winner-takes-it-all.
Disney kills the possibility of companies and individuals creating stories of the cultural content of their own youth.
Do you like "Monkey Island"? Copyright doesn't allow you to create your own content. (And I know that it is also owned by Disney)
Children grow with 100-year-old stories not because they are better or more relevant, but because it is the only legacy that they receive.
The people that got Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizzard of Oz, and other stories for free are the ones that allowed the next generation to be stolen of that privilege.
Copyright is designed so anyone that cares and will pay for content, is long dead before making anything public domain.
While the stories from the EU were of varying quality, at least they were interesting. These Disney sequels are so predictable and uninteresting it's not even funny.
Fortunately, each of us gets to pick their own canon. For me, it will always be books by Timothy Zahn, and Disney can't do anything at all to the physical copies that I have on my shelf.
Which by itself is fine, I guess, but there wasn't any depth in it beyond the effects' wow factor.
Until a little green man call a lightning bolt on it ;).
I deeply hate all this shitty culture: cinema theatres in shopping malls, popcorn, DVDs, bluerays, MPAAs, bearded actors' snouts all looking the same, posters all looking the same, obsession with rotten 50s scifi setting ad nauseam, sequels, prequels, triquels.
"Not only do we have to play it for four weeks straight, we have to play it four times a day," said Roper, adding that with only one screen available, it would be "very difficult" to play a single movie for a month without losing money due to lack of audience.
Sounds to me like the kind of business practices that is getting Google sued by the EU, and despite their necessarily being different rules for monopoly, the above is a case of applying blanket rules for a 50-screen cinema complex as for a single-screen independent cinema because Disney doesn't need to zoom in to that level of detail. Fine lines. The law is an ass.
Similar situation for a Disney-exclusive streaming service. That'd be similar to Disney buying up a chain of cinemas and only showing their <s>films</s> movies in those cinemas.
The flipside is that independent cinema's should make these sorts of anti-competitive behaviours known to their customers: "Sorry, we can't show Star Wars: The Last Jedi because Disney has enforced conditions that we, as a small, independent cinema, can't comply with whilst remaining profitable. We do, however, recommend the following great movies that we have the freedom to screen at our discretion..."
The aggregator doesn’t care, it’s not their problem, in fact the only way it becomes the aggregator’s problem is when the companies who use the aggregator as part of their sales funnel, that means big movie studios pulling advertising revenue from aggregators that don’t do what they like.
If the cinema can get enough “organic traffic” then the rules are different but the majority of cinemas these days other than specialists, like Arthouse or foreign film focused theatres, seem increasingly beholden to the aggregator driven customers. But I’m not an industry expert so I could be wrong.
And the vast majority of people have stopped reading.
As a matter of fact, they didn't even begin reading. Because they looked up showtimes for what they wanted to see elsewhere and went to a theater that is showing what they want to see.
Here's the deep, dark secret you are ignoring: No one cares. And that's why the studios can pull these tactics. They have the product that people want. If a theater doesn't show it, the customer will just go to a theater that does. They don't want to see "a movie", they want to see "The Last Jedi".
John Roper is general manager of the Phoenix Theatre in Fort Nelson, which is home to about 4,000 people.
In other words: Blah blah unrealistic idealistic blah blah. But it makes me feel better.
I mean, Disney does have the power in this regard. They're the ones with the product. Theaters are just technically middle-men in this regard.
I have read the comics. The stories are better. But to maintain a big corporation, stories need to be dumbed down to appeal to as many people as possible.
Everybody gets to see a good movie, but nobody gets to see the movie they would like the best.
> It’s possible that Disney is the only reason Star Wars is back too.
Disney and extended copyright is the reason you don't see more Star Wars content. If Star Wars copyright had expired, you will see a lot more content about that fictional universe.
Look for "Alice in Wonderland" and you will find card games, video games, reeditions, new interpretations in comic, film, and books (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/27554.Best_Retellings_of...)... Because it is part of the public culture.
Star Wars is part of a lot of people youth. If Star Wars was free to use it will have one hundred times more content than an old book, even a very famous one, like "Alice in Wonderland".
Disney has its own negative word to describe how negative is that impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyfication
Disney does good movies, indeed. But it doesn't mean that it is the best option to do so.
When Disney acquired LucasFilms my first thought was that they will probably kill the Star Wars Extended Universe and in a sense they did. There was a tremendous amount of Star Wars comics from Dark Horse during the 90s and 00s that built upon the whole Star Wars mythology. The "Old Republic" series (including the games) is probably the most enjoyable Star Wars story I've ever encountered but alas everything was rendered non-canon when Disney worked their magic. Now everything Star Wars revolves around the original chronology rehashing the same things over and over again in a "panem et circences" manner with no hope of seeing any new stories of any kind.
It's a shame
Star Wars's copyright would have only expired if we were still under copyright law from before 1909. And even then, that would technically be only for the first movie. So the characters from that movie could be used, but not any characters in the later movies. You could have Han Solo, but not Lando. Obi-Wan, but not Yoda, etc.
And you'd likely also have to deal with trademark issues, which are separate from copyright.
And there is still plenty of Star Wars content out there and being made.
Copyright is as anti-capitalism as it gets. Copyright in its actual expression is part of corporativism. "Corporatism is the organization of a society by corporate groups and agricultural, labour, military or scientific syndicates and guilds on the basis of their common interests."
Copyright was extended to benefit a special interest group. It has nothing to do with improving market efficiency. If any, it damages market efficiency introducing an artificial monopoly enforced by the state.
(Fixing Copyright: Is Copyright A Part Of Free Market Capitalism?) https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121204/02422821219/fixin...