cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14484060

This is one impact of media consolidation: Studios can work very hard to hold your attention before deciding, at the last possible moment, that they’re better off throwing out artists’ work than letting you pay money to see it. “Coyote vs. Acme,” the Warner spokesperson says, “remains available for acquisition.” Just not by you.

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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Over the last few years, Warner — which also owns channels like TNT and TBS and streaming platforms like Max — has whittled down its content-and-development holdings in an effort to reduce costs and chip away at its $45 billion gross debt.

    The video was taken down after a copyright claim, but it had already revealed some of the ingenious mayhem that audiences would miss out on: squished cars, real clouds of dust kicked up by an animated roadrunner, charming prop renderings of the cartoons’ rocket skates and hand-painted signs.

    The movie was based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by the humorist Ian Frazier, which had Coyote filing a lawsuit over the indignities he had endured at the hands of Acme’s unreliable explosives and physics-defying spring shoes.

    We might complain today about pop culture governed by algorithms and data, but it’s not as though 20th-century decisions about which movies hit Blockbuster or which songs dominated the radio were based on some high-minded meritocracy; we have always been at the mercy of boardrooms.

    Marvel Studios has its “phases” announcements, in which it outlines years of planned movies and shows in splashy events designed to keep fans in a frenzy about the long-term strategy of a major media company, as though a shareholder meeting has broken out at Comic-Con.

    As much as a satirical legal filing written from the perspective of a cartoon coyote’s lawyer can speak to the moment, there’s a section toward the end of Frazier’s story that maps out a bit of the daffy labyrinth consumers now face.


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