Explaining the Business of Entertainment
In 2022, the media coverage certainly took a negative turn. I’m no exception. What started as me pondering “worst case scenarios” at the beginning of March shifted to believing that literally every force buffeting the entertainment industry got worse. (I’ll have a piece on that for the Ankler at the start of
The first weekend of August-2022 probably had the biggest collection of streaming films we’ve ever seen debut in one week, including Apple TV+’s Luck, Disney+’s Lightyear, Hulu’s Prey, Prime Video’s Thirteen Lives, and Netflix’s Uncharted. It truly was a “streaming film traffic jam” (SFTJ?). I called it “epic” at the
Are you still here? I only ask because we’re getting awful close to the holidays, a time when internet traffic in the Western world tends to plummet. Coincidentally, it’s weird that news websites and social media use plummets during the holiday season, isn’t it? That would imply that, instead of
When Nielsen published Peacock’s ratings for the first time a few weeks back, I held my breath. Sure, Peacock let us know that Halloween Ends did really well for them, but if you’ll remember, HBO Max once let Nielsen tell us that Wonder Woman 1984 was a huge smash on
Yesterday, I went over the data on how well the MCU is doing. Read the whole thing here, but in short, it’s a mixed bag. The films haven’t done as well as they have in the past, especially with audiences’ ratings, but Marvel Studios is still cranking out huge hits.
If I had to pick one word to describe the MCU in 2022, it would be this: Uneven. Even though I’m a huge, die hard MCU fan, my most common reaction after watching an MCU TV show or movie has been, “Oh, that was pretty uneven.” And that pretty accurately
Due to the long Thanksgiving weekend, I didn’t publish a streaming ratings report on 25-November. But that meant analyzing an extra week’s worth of ratings data and assembling a double issue and, of course, it took me working through the weekend to get it finished. (Fingers crossed, we’re back on
Let’s talk about “the wisdom of crowds”. Traditionally, this is the idea that if you independently ask a bunch of people for their opinion on something, as individuals, most of them are wrong, but collectively, their estimates are right. The go-to example is the “count the jellybeans” classroom experiment. A