What a week. And it’s only Wednesday.
The world is in flames. The apocalypse is here and we are in it, only instead of the Four Horsemen we get the Paul Brothers.
This week’s media news is pretty apocalyptic but instead of going “Whoa!” I find myself saying “wooah!” That was Snowy the dog’s wail from Tintin (“Wouah” in the French original.) That’s it. That’s the scene, me sitting wailing like a cartoon dog. Let’s take it in order of magnitude.
WARNERMOUNT: It is happening after an astonishing cave by Californian attorney general Rob Bonta. I’ll try to avoid politics, so let’s get back to the tiny sliver of this impending train wreck that concerns us here: What does it mean for DC Comics?
Back in the happy, idyllic times of February, I wrote:
While it’s true that the new “Warner-mount” will need hits at the box office, the Ellison bid is being financed by the Saudis, who are unlikely to run out of money, so profits may not even be the main concern for a while. Ellison has shown a liking for loud, colorful action movies – the biggest hits at Skydance, his solo shingle, include Top Gun Maverick and the Mission Impossible franchise – so once again, keeping a steady supply of hit DC superhero movies would seem to be a desired outcome no matter who buys the studio.
This is still true, although the Saudis actually are running out of money, or at least being a bit more mindful of how they spend it.
Ellison has said that James Gunn and Peter Safran will keep running DC Studios, at least until the end of their five year contract. A lot will depend on how Man of Tomorrow does next year, especially after the Supergirl disaster. Gunn’s previous politics have made him a target for a significant faction, but nothing succeeds like success. I foresee twists and turns.
But it is still true that studios need to put out movies, and superheroes are still (somehow?) popular. The DC characters remain some of WarnetMount’s most valuable IP, which they now have an abundance of. (BTW everyone keeps mentioning Harry Potter as part of their IP but they only have the rights to make Harry Potter adaptations. The fandom for that particular IP has been dealt a severe blow by the revelation that their creator is a heartless bigot who also refuses to make any new material.)
But will they put more of an ideological spin on that IP? Rob Salkowitz takes a look at DC’s fortunes in an excellent column, and suggests that fans can’t be force fed shoddy work:
Those are the building blocks of one of the most extensive story universes ever created. And it all runs on one thing: fan sentiment. DC continues as a viable engine of entertainment and revenue because its creators continue to inspire fans to care enough to read, watch, collect, and celebrate those creations. If people lose faith in the product or the brand, all that’s left is an assortment of unusual names, costume designs and backstories based on forgotten and often farfetched mythologies.
I’d like to believe this is true but in a world where people medicate themselves with flicking through AI generated short videos, I’m not so sure quality is a concern.
And what about DC Comics, the tiny outlier publishing company embedded within DC Studios?
DC Comics has already been stripped down to the basics by the previous two WB acquisitions (AT&T and Discovery), undergoing layoff round after layoff round. My understanding is that the very trim organization has been profitable for a while, something that it made it a stand out among other WBD divisions.
In recent times, with the success of Compact Editions and the Absolute Line, DC Comics was glowing with both critical and fiscal success. As I previously reported, when Netflix looked to be DC’s buyer, DC Comics seemed to be in a very good position with Ted Sarandos and Co.
The combined WarnerMount will undoubtedly undergo a punishing series of layoffs to remove redundancies, so DC could get trimmed yet again. It isn’t actually redundant with any Paramount division though, so hopefully cuts would be small.
The thing is, we don’t actually know how David Ellison feels about publishing comic books. Maybe he has no feelings at all, but surely some finance whiz will. In the short term, DC has its towering characters and making profitable entertainment based on those characters will be an absolute priority for the new WarnerMount.
In the long term….well, I guess we’re transitioning from worrying about Marvel Comics to worrying about DC Comics.
TAPAS SHUTS DOWN: This is a huge, huge story….it’s like if one of the Big Two publishers just went away overnight. So many creators relied on Tapas for income and exposure, and Tapas is home to many of the best known webtoons: Let’s Play, The Beginning After the End, and Solo Leveling.
We’ll have much more analysis of this shake-up here and at KComicsBeat, but in short, the entire webcomics world has been upended. This news is also bad for WEBTOON, as several people pointed out to me yesterday. The appearance of a growing worldwide industry for scrolling comics was key to their operations in the US, and this has dealt that image a severe blow. Wooah.
The news was also a complete shock to the US staff and creators, some of whom learned about it from the media. TurtleMe, creator of The Beginning of the End, one of the most successful webtoon properties worldwide, posted on Twitter:
You’ve probably seen the news by now: Tapas, the company that currently produces and publishes the TBATE comic and Soul Forged novel, is shutting down. For the past 8 years, Tapas has been my home, our home.
I’m still trying to understand what exactly is going on, but suffice to say, I’m still in shock. I don’t know what comes next, so please bear with me while I try to figure things out with Tapas.
What I can tell you is this:
I will do everything in my power to make sure our series keeps going. I know we’ve been through a lot and I appreciate everyone who has given us grace in figuring it all out.
And lastly, I urge you to reach out to your favorite creators on Tapas and let them know how much they’ve meant to you. It always felt like we had more time to give our thanks to all of those who made this place possible, and I truly wish that there was more time.
A lot of creators like myself are in the dark and unsure of what comes next, so be sure to follow them on their socials to help continue supporting them beyond Tapas.
To the creators, fans, and staff of Tapas, thank you for all the love, guidance, and memories over these 8 years. Though the platform may be gone, I believe the impact of this wonderful community will last forever.
I’ll update you when I can.
When even a superstar like TurtleMe is “still in shock”, what are the rest of us to make of it?
In a global sense, Kakao’s decision to end their foray into worldwide expansion still seems short sighted. Although Kakao has gone through a lot of tumult with its core Korean businesses, the most successful IP still has global reach and throwing in the towel is a sign they couldn’t compete on the world stage.
I’ve been told several times that as Kakao tried to make it in the US, they insisted on doing business the Korean way….which isn’t as effective here. They were told they needed to be more flexible but they didn’t listen….and here we are.
VIDEO GAME APOCALYPSE: I don’t really follow the ins and outs of the video game world, so my analysis here will be very uninformed, but the most popular medium of all is also en fuego. Wooah. The Saudi-backed Public Investment Fund invested some $38 billion in video game companies over the last few years, and made other huge acquisitions, which may have seemed like a sure thing in a normal world, but we don’t live in a normal world any more. The Saudis are considering merging EA – which they acquired for a mere $55 billion – with Savvy Games, owner of everything from Pokemon Go to Monopoly Go through subsidiary Scopely. This could be a massive conglomerate with unknown consequences in an already volatile industry.
Meanwhile, Xbox Game Studios also laid off more than 200 employees this week, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima can’t make a game at Playstation – he was dumped in a Zoom call, he says – although he did get his new game, Physint, picked up by Xbox. Sony ditched the game due to reported budget concerns, and is being more thrifty in general:
As suggested yesterday by analysts speaking to IGN in the aftermath of the news breaking, Sony appears to be reigning in its spending after a woeful run of first-party game flops and cancellations. After wasting hundreds of millions of dollars developing the short-lived Concord, Naughty Dog’s now-canned The Last of Us Online, and the still-limping Marathon, Sony is apparently enforcing stricter production milestones.
Making an AAA game is a huge undertaking – budgets of $200-300 million are common – and they can still completely flop. But the risks are getting even riskier.
Like I said, I’m no video game industry expert, but this all seems to be in total “nobody knows anything” territory.
POPVERSE SHUTS DOWN: We now turn our attention to the teenyest, tiniest sliver possible of the global entertainment conglomerate: comic book news sites.
I don’t know what to say about this that I haven’t said before but, the media isn’t dying. It is dead. There is just no way forward when the tech giants that control access and platforms have no interest in supporting informative human-made content and instead push all too effective UGC social media platforms to a willing public in order to solidify their terrifying investment in AI that will either take our jobs or kill humanity. It’s called “interest media” and it consists of showing you more and more of what you already like, for a feedback loop of AI-generated slop. Wooah.
I can’t think of a more perfect encapsulation of the moment than ReedPop’s statement on closing Popverse:
Popverse is not shutting down. While Popverse will no longer serve as an editorial news platform, we remain committed to our original mission to provide our passionate fans with a hub for content, community, and fandom in all its forms. We will continue serving fans through streaming access to panels and members-only content. Popverse Superfans will still get exclusive access to presale tickets, photo ops and autographs, as well as merchandise discounts. We will continue to develop the platform to find new ways to delight and inspire our fan communities.
Replacing human-created, intentional communication with a “community hub” is just more biffle baffle. We already have 8 trillion ways to communicate with our fellow fans, and they are all exhausting.
Like, why can’t a $55 billion company just want to, you know, do something fun and nice with people who are fun and nice and smart? Is that so impossible? In today’s the stakeholders say THAT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE!
Gary Vaynerchuk (CEO of Vee Friends) posted a paeon to “interest media’ back in March:
All you have to do is make organic social media content over and over and over again in as many different ways as possible across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, LinkedIn, different thumbnails, different hooks, complete insane psycho discipline. You need to become a psycho at that. Do you know that if you went outside right now and made a video of eating a banana and drinking a rum and coke and posted it that people that have a high propensity of interest in bananas and rum and coke might be the first people that see that content?
The world we’re in now allows you to close the gap very quickly. Your third TikTok, if you make the right piece of content, can fundamentally change the course of your career. It’s about the intoxicating nature of the merit of a single post now, not what you’ve done to get to that single post.
I can’t think of a more soul-crushing advice. A video of you eating a banana is not equivalent to writing Moby Dick and it should never, ever be. The “attention economy/interest media” world is fraught with looksmaxxing idiots whose main talent is being so horrifying that you can’t look away. Wooah.
I don’t have an answer for this, but I can say that The Beat is doing as well as it ever did, and in some ways better. The audience is steady, our ad support is strong, and the content is still (I hope) useful and engaging. The reason we can keep going is that I live a frugal lifestyle in a rent-stabilized apartment, and sadly most of the staff works on a volunteer basis, something which I try every day to change, with varying degrees of success. The Beat would be nothing without its amazing staff who are even more dedicated to this than I am. And they would be nothing without our dedicated readers who seem to like and trust us. And we all do it because we love comics. Very simple. Like Alex Ross said:
I don’t think that equation is that hard. As our colleagues/competitors drop away one by one, staying pretty much the same seems to have become a virtue. Being reliable is as good as eating a banana on video. And I stand by that.
Speaking of which, one last log on the media funeral pyre, a post from Threads:
Hey, so, quick question. If Wonder Man, Spider-Man Noir & Daredevil Born Again can’t get season renewals and Moon Knight hasn’t been able to make another appearance in the MCU four years after his show released, how is any MCU fan supposed to get excited about or emotionally invested in future live-action MCU Disney+ Shows?
Even when we like something, it is a failure!
The answer of course is that the MCU is moving away from TV, and Disney+ has given up on new Marvel shows, for whatever reason. Everyone thought the MCU was dead, and then Spider-Man One More Day becomes the biggest domestic film of all times. There is life in them thar comics! But even Disney and MCU don’t know what to do with their own universe. There is so much of everything that almost nothing can hold enough interest or attention to survive, not when millions of people must spam every possible platform with their banana eating videos to make a name for themselves.
Wooah.
Anyway, it is only Wednesday, Captain. What shocks and joys will today bring?
