+ Cinema is not dying because audiences stopped caring about + film. It is dying because the people running it stopped + making decisions that could produce anything worth caring + about. That is a business problem, not a cultural one - and + it has a clear and traceable cause. +
+ +How You Optimize a Creative Industry to Death
+ ++ Every major studio is ultimately answerable to capital. That + is not unusual - most industries are. What is unusual about + film is that capital and creative quality are in unusually + direct tension. A film that takes a genuine risk might return + ten times its budget or nothing. A sequel to an established + property will almost certainly return two or three times its + budget, reliably, with predictable variance. For a public + company managing quarterly earnings, the choice is not + difficult. You make the sequel. +
+ ++ The problem is that this logic, applied consistently across + an entire industry over twenty years, does not produce a + stable business. It produces a slow erosion of the thing + that made the business worth having in the first place. + Audiences do not go to cinemas to see sequels to sequels. + They go because occasionally something extraordinary happens + on a screen and they want to be in the room when it does. + Strip out the extraordinary, and you have stripped out the + reason to show up. +
+ +The Franchise as a Business Model
+ ++ The Matrix is a precise case study because the original + trilogy was, by design, a complete thing. Three films with + a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The story resolved. + The characters finished where they were going. Whatever + criticisms one might make of Reloaded or Revolutions, the + trilogy had the structural integrity of something that knew + it was going to end. That is increasingly rare, and it + matters - because an ending is what separates a story from + a content pipeline. +
+ ++ The correct response to owning the Matrix IP after the + trilogy was either to leave it alone or to build something + genuinely new inside the same universe. The world the + Wachowskis constructed is large enough. New characters, a + different era, a different corner of the machine war, a + different question about the nature of the simulation - any + of these could have been the basis for something that + respected the original while standing on its own. A current + audience does not need Neo. It needs a new conflict with + real stakes and a story it has not already seen. +
+ ++ What Warner Bros. produced instead was The Matrix + Resurrections in 2021 - eighteen years after the trilogy + ended - with the same lead actors, the same Agent Smith, + and a plot that literally resurrects the characters the + previous films had concluded. The decision to bring back + the same faces was not a creative one. It was a calculation + that name recognition and nostalgia would lower the + perceived risk of the investment. The studio did not believe + in the universe. It believed in the brand. The audience + noticed. The film failed - not because the Matrix concept + is exhausted, but because the film offered nothing except + proof that the people making it were not willing to find + out whether it could work without a safety net. +
+ ++ Star Wars industrialised this dynamic at a scale that was + previously unimaginable. The acquisition of Lucasfilm was + not a creative decision - it was a content library acquisition. + What followed was the systematic conversion of a mythology + that had genuine cultural weight into a production pipeline. + Films, series, spin-offs, prequels, sequels, all released + on a cadence driven by release windows and subscriber targets + rather than by whether anyone had something worth saying. + The audience eventually signalled, clearly, that it was + exhausted. The response was not to slow down - it was to + try different combinations of the same components. +
+ ++ A franchise is not a creative decision.+ +
+ It is a risk management strategy dressed as one. +
Marvel and the Pipeline Fallacy
+ ++ The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the most important case + study in modern film economics because it succeeded + spectacularly for long enough that the people running it + drew the wrong conclusion from their own success. From Iron + Man in 2008 through to Endgame in 2019, the MCU produced + something genuinely unusual: a connected series of films + that were, individually, mostly good, and collectively + something audiences had never experienced before. The + shared universe worked. Characters crossed over. Threads + built across years. When it paid off, it paid off at a + scale that reshaped the entire industry's assumptions about + what a film could be. +
+ ++ The mistake was in identifying why it worked. The shared + universe was not the product. It was the reward for the + product. Audiences invested in the connections between + films because the films themselves had earned that + investment. Iron Man was a good film. The Winter Soldier + was a good film. Guardians of the Galaxy was a good film. + Each one worked as a standalone experience, which meant + that when they intersected, the intersection meant + something. The connective tissue had weight because the + individual pieces had weight. +
+ ++ What Marvel - and Disney, which had acquired it - took + from this was a different lesson: that the pipeline itself + was the asset. That releasing four films and multiple + Disney+ series per year, all tagged as MCU content, would + sustain audience engagement indefinitely because the brand + had accumulated enough goodwill to carry anything attached + to it. This is a category error. Goodwill is not a + renewable resource. It is the residue of past quality, + and it depletes every time it is spent on something that + does not deserve it. +
+ ++ The post-Endgame MCU inherited an audience that had spent + eleven years being rewarded for paying attention. What it + offered in return was volume. Films that were + competently assembled but existed primarily to move pieces + into position for the next film. Disney+ series that were + mandatory viewing if you wanted to understand the cinema + releases, effectively converting a leisure choice into + homework. Characters introduced and abandoned. Storylines + launched and quietly dropped. The shared universe, which + had once been the payoff for engagement, became the reason + engagement was required just to follow along. The audience + began to disengage - not because superhero films stopped + being possible, but because the implicit contract had been + broken. The pipeline had forgotten that it was dependent + on the films being good, not merely connected. +
+ ++ Streaming did not fix this dynamic. It accelerated it and + added a new and more corrosive incentive on top: subscriber + acquisition. A studio making theatrical films needs a film + to be good enough that people will pay to see it. A streaming + platform needs content to exist in sufficient volume and + variety that enough different people will start a subscription + and not cancel it. These are genuinely different problems, + and the second one does not require quality - it requires + surface area. +
+ ++ Altered Carbon is a personal example of what this looks + like from the other side. The first season was genuinely + good - ambitious production design, a coherent adaptation + of its source material, the kind of science fiction that + takes its own premise seriously. I liked it. I kept + watching. I was exactly the subscriber Netflix should want + to retain. The show was cancelled after two seasons + regardless, and I eventually cancelled the subscription. + Those two facts are more connected than they might appear. +
+ ++ The issue is not that Netflix made a bad decision by its + own logic. The issue is what its logic measures. A + subscriber who genuinely loves three or four ambitious + series and watches them carefully registers identically to + a subscriber who half-watches twenty shows and never + finishes any of them - as long as both keep paying. The + metric that matters is new sign-ups, because that is what + the market rewards. Retention of engaged viewers who care + about specific content is a secondary concern at best. + Cancelling Altered Carbon did not cost Netflix the number + it was optimizing for. It cost them me - eventually - and + I was never the unit being counted. +
+ ++ What this produces is a library optimized not for quality + or loyalty but for the minimum threshold of good enough to + keep someone paying while the next acquisition drives new + sign-ups. The service does not need you to love it. It + needs you to not quite hate it enough to cancel. That is a + meaningful distinction. A library built around that + incentive looks very different from one built around making + things worth watching - and over time, the difference + becomes visible. +
+ +| Model | +Primary incentive | +What it produces | +
|---|---|---|
| Theatrical studio | ++ Maximise opening weekend and franchise + extension potential + | ++ IP acquisitions, sequels, safe casting, + risk-averse greenlight decisions + | +
| Streaming platform | ++ Subscriber acquisition and retention + across the broadest possible audience + | ++ High volume, uneven quality, early + cancellations, content churn + | +
| Franchise extension | ++ Extract value from an established + property at minimal creative cost + | ++ Diminishing quality per instalment, + audience fatigue, brand erosion + | +
| AI-assisted production | ++ Reduce per-unit content cost to near + zero while maintaining surface coverage + | ++ Structural collapse of the floor — + unlimited slop at no marginal cost + | +
AI Is Where This Was Always Going
+ ++ The question AI puts to the industry is not a technical + one. It is a choice: do we hire a writer, or don't we? + Do we commission a director with a specific vision, or do + we generate the output that vision would have produced? + That choice is now explicit in a way it was not before. + And given everything the industry has already demonstrated + about its priorities - the franchise logic, the subscriber + metrics, the systematic elimination of creative risk — + there is not much reason to expect most studios and + platforms to choose the human when the alternative is + cheaper and more controllable. +
+ ++ This is what artists have been worried about, and they are + right - but not quite for the reason usually given. The + concern is often framed as AI producing bad films. The more + accurate concern is that AI produces films optimised for + the same thing the industry already optimises for: volume, + familiarity, minimum acceptable quality. AI does not + introduce a new set of values into the pipeline. It + enforces the existing ones more efficiently. A model + trained on what has performed before will reliably produce + more of what has performed before. For an industry that has + spent two decades treating proven formula as the safest + bet, that is not a warning. It is a feature. +
+ ++ What gets lost is not quality in the narrow sense - an + AI can produce something watchable, and watchable is + already the threshold most of the industry is aiming for. + What gets lost is the possibility of something genuinely + unexpected. A writer or director brings a specific + perspective that did not exist before, that cannot be + interpolated from what came before, and that occasionally + produces something the market did not know it wanted until + it arrived. The first Matrix was that. The early MCU was + that. The pipeline, fully enforced by AI, eliminates the + conditions under which that becomes possible. Every film + becomes a variation on the centroid of everything that + already worked. The ceiling does not disappear - it just + gets permanent. +
+ +What Would Fix It
+ ++ The honest answer is that the incentive structure would + need to change, and there is no obvious mechanism by which + that happens from inside the industry. The studios that + consistently produce the best work are either small enough + to be insulated from franchise logic, backed by individuals + with enough capital and conviction to override short-term + return calculations, or operating in markets where the + economics of Hollywood do not apply in the same way. +
+ ++ Audiences have some leverage. Theatrical attendance is a + direct signal. Not watching a streaming series past its + first episode is a direct signal. The platforms and studios + read these signals carefully - they just tend to read them + as evidence that they need better marketing rather than + better films. That misreading is itself a symptom of an + industry that has fully internalised the idea that the + product is secondary to the pipeline. +
+ ++ +
+ Cinema at its best is one of the few experiences that cannot + be fully replicated on a phone screen with half your + attention elsewhere. The industry has spent twenty years + making content that can be. That is not an accident. It is + what you get when every structural incentive points toward + volume, safety, and extraction - and nobody in a position + to change it has a strong enough reason to try. +
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