Bigger is not always better but tell that to Marvel when they continue to make billions of dollars on their big budget superhero style of production! Tell Disney that the giant theme parks and movies that directly tie into merchandising and after marketing and make them ridiculously rich to stop. DC dreams of producing movies as popular as Marvel and Disney. All of them believe bigger is better. I disagree. Not only do I disagree with what they all are doing, I believe that the quality and future profitability of all their products are vastly decreasing. They dream of a world pre-Covid 19, that is a dream that even Disney World can’t have, we all must live with the new norm.
Smaller is better. I never enjoyed going to the US Open in the 2000’s because the crowd was everywhere. There were few places you could get a breath of fresh air or a second to breathe. The tennis was amazing, but the watching live part stopped being fun. The USTA wanted to make more money, so it got bigger, and it is now the biggest in the world. It is also the least fun to attend, I now watch the matches at home and switch between matches with a push of a button. I still miss being there, but I will never miss waiting on line for a half hour to go to the bathroom. The old tournaments had more charm and less fans. Smaller was better.
Smaller can be better, but that doesn’t stop people from growing. Jones Beach Theater was my favorite place to see a concert. There wasn’t a bad seat in the house, even the upper back row was fun. Then the remodel - bigger, with obstructed view seats. The parking lot, no public transportation to JBT, was a nightmare. A savage rush for two lanes by two giant lots. A mass of tired, stoned, or drunk fans, rushing to go home and getting nowhere! The perfect place to see a concert became a hassle and if you wanted to go to concert you needed to be early and leave late. Smaller was more fun.
Marvel made several great shows on Netflix. They were gritty noirs, great detective stories with a superhero element. Daredevil was excellent, as was Luke Cage and Jessica Jones. My favorite, Iron Fist, was a comic I read during my childhood that I absolutely loved. Together they were “The Defenders,” a team-up of all the Netflix Marvel heroes. I really enjoyed that series. Then Marvel, in their infinite wisdom, felt the need to join forces with Disney and pull all of their Netflix shows. They have yet to recreate that level of quality and imagination. The Disney shows are bigger, not better!
The idea of Television, radio, internet, and more have been blended into a vehicle called streaming. Content has broken free from where it was born, and it now swims in the streaming ecosystem. YouTube offers everything. Spotify does podcasts and music. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney, and many more offer streaming content of both shows and movies. The entertainment pie is being cut up before our very eyes with one idea, get bigger! But content must be made and there is the biggest problem: who will make this content and where do the ideas come from?
Netflix and Amazon have made entertaining content in the past, but it was done at a huge expense. Disney has entered the field dropping boatloads of cash. In the 1990’s and 2000’s many ideas came from San Diego Comic Con. There, both large and small comic book creators would promote their titles and attempt to get the most publicity possible. Then Hollywood came calling! These comics were so successful as movies, comic companies became the most fertile ground for new movie products. Comic companies became entertainment empires and with it they lost what made them great, the small creators writing and drawing the comics. Bigger will be their downfall, with the best path to prolonged profitability is to sustain the environment that created the ideas in the first place. Smaller is not only higher quality, but it’s sustainable!
