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No movie has ever had a budget anywhere near $1.75 billion. This is more like... making the 5 most expensive movies of all time, in a row, and flopping all of them.

That's a completely different level of failure.

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But nobody would pay for it if there was zero or not enough to convert trial users content, so they needed lots of it to engage and keep users.

They absolutely did not need to speed a billion upfront on an unproven format. Nobody had tried this format before, so they could not have been confident that there was a market. They could have instead, for example, commissioned a few of their more promising shows and offered them for free to gauge interest in the format.

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