My issue is that the series felt like Willow when they got it right. I gave it a huge chance because of that. But when they got it wrong, they got it terribly wrong, and so, IMO, they alienated the Willow fans, and didn't manage to draw in new fans from... whatever goddamn source they were aiming for. Tik Tok addicts? Comatose patients? Porcelian garden gnomes? I got no clue.

Hell, I wanted to love this show. I couldn't make it 15 min. through the first episode. I've been extremely sad to see shows get cancelled over the years.......but not this one. It's more relief, like putting it out of its misery.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on March 17, 2023, 10:24:20 AM
I feel kinda bad for Warwick Davis though.

Yeah, me too. None of this was his fault.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on March 17, 2023, 10:32:50 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on March 16, 2023, 12:50:12 AM'Willow' Cancelled On Disney Plus

My two main takeaways are these:

1) Not every old movie or TV show needs to be a multi-generational franchise. Some movies are just movies, especially those that have a very narrow audience age range. This is because most movies don't have a broad enough background to support a sequel or a TV show. Even Star Wars, as good as it was, doesn't have much to offer once you remove Luke, Vader, and the Jedi. They had to completely rewrite much of the established lore just to have new shows like Andor or Mandalorian to the point where they are just generic sci-fi series.

2) Disney+ is screwed. For these subscription services to work, they need a constant input of new shows to get new subscribers and to keep their current subscribers from canceling their subscription. Yet Disney has realized that it can't afford to produce quality shows with the money it currently makes from subscribers. So it either needs to go into debt and hope new people show up or it needs to cancel a bunch of projects and hope people don't leave. Hope isn't much of a business plan.

Personally, I just rotate through the streaming services, Netflix one month, Paramount+ the next, etc. For the price of one streaming service, I can watch 100% of the shows that all these services create.

I think franchises strangle creativity more than anything else. Yeah, it's nice to have a highly detailed fictional universe, but at a certain point it either loses it identity and becomes generic, or it remains idiosyncratic but crowds out any other potential stories, and/or it turns into a turd due to poor direction or was never good in the first place. Meanwhile, there are a ton of IPs that died in the cradle when they could've contributed to the genres. Many of those are still unique to this day. This goes across genres.

I'm disappointed that TSR's Star*Drive died. The setting's individual parts aren't unique, but the whole is. In trying to be generic, it produced something that isn't replicated elsewhere. It would've been a great setting for a crpg, since it has several adventures and metaplot developments to serve as the plot.

I want to see urban fantasy crpgs that aren't Harry Potter.

I want to see more creativity.

Not just cancelled, but getting pulled completely from streaming in a week.

It was a disappointment, but that seems a little harsh.

Quote from: Thornhammer on May 19, 2023, 08:08:37 PM
Not just cancelled, but getting pulled completely from streaming in a week.

It was a disappointment, but that seems a little harsh.

If it's not pulling in views... *shrug*

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 19, 2023, 09:56:20 PM

Quote from: Thornhammer on May 19, 2023, 08:08:37 PM
Not just cancelled, but getting pulled completely from streaming in a week.

It was a disappointment, but that seems a little harsh.

If it's not pulling in views... *shrug*

If it's not driving subscriptions up, remember where they get their money in the streaming model.

Quote from: Thornhammer on May 19, 2023, 08:08:37 PM
Not just cancelled, but getting pulled completely from streaming in a week.

I don't understand the economics here. The IP is owned by Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm produced the show. So how are their ongoing costs associated with just keeping the show on Disney+?

Clownfish TV seems to think that they are doing this so they can sell the streaming rights to some other streaming service but I don't see why anyone else would want to pay for a known loser with no prospect of a season 2.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on May 20, 2023, 03:02:32 PM

Quote from: Thornhammer on May 19, 2023, 08:08:37 PM
Not just cancelled, but getting pulled completely from streaming in a week.

I don't understand the economics here. The IP is owned by Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm produced the show. So how are their ongoing costs associated with just keeping the show on Disney+?

I don't know much about the nuts and bolts of streaming services, but I imagine the costs involve having hard drive space dedicated to holding a whole series. It's gotta be huge to store a modern TV show digitally. I know Netflix would rotate shows and movies in an out on a regular basis. If a show isn't performing they might want to use that storage space for a show that's getting more views.
And if it's not performing, it's not going to be appealing for another service to pick it up.

That's nonsense. Hard drive space is easy to buy. No, they're probably removing it so they can make it a tax writeoff. HBO Max did that for a bunch of their stuff recently. Legally, they have to keep private copies in perpetuity as evidence.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 27, 2023, 08:37:57 AM
That's nonsense. Hard drive space is easy to buy. No, they're probably removing it so they can make it a tax writeoff. HBO Max did that for a bunch of their stuff recently. Legally, they have to keep private copies in perpetuity as evidence.

This is correct, the big expense is the band width, keeping a show/movie that gets very few people watching and drives zero people to subscribe it's better to write it off.

But don't worry, the LGBTQWERTY raised a stink so they are not gonna remove some of those shows because istophobia.

I did a little digging since my last post and here's a quote from an article from Variety:

"A Disney rep confirmed that dozens of titles will be pulled off Disney+ and Hulu (see list below), starting on Friday, May 26. On the earnings call, CFO Christine McCarthy said Disney expects to take a write-down in the June quarter of $1.5 billion-$1.8 billion from removing content from its streaming platforms. By writing down the value of the content assets, Disney can remove that from its balance sheet and reduce its tax bill."

Again, I'm not super familiar with Hollywood accounting but generally if you'll save 1/3 of the loss in taxes. I seems strange that TV shows would have some sort of depreciation value but that's what it appears like. WB did the same thing with the Batwoman movie, figuring that they'll lose less money cancelling it then spending money on advertisement to try and get people to watch it.

I will say that Disney has done this sort of thing before; taking a short term benefit at the costs of term revenue. Bob Iger cancelled the Disney Infinity game and shut down their entire video game division because he was sitting on tons of unsold stock (mostly Marvel characters). The sad part is that the manager that decided to over produce the figures saw it coming and managed to transfer himself out of the video game department before it was shut down. So the person literally responsible for Disney Infinity's failure was the one guy that didn't get laid off.

The assinine thing about streaming services is, when it was just Netflix, I could, y'know, watch stuff with one sub.
Now everybody and their dog has a streaming service, and I've either got to have seperate subs for each distributor, or hop subs.
Right now I have none, I let my brother pay and mooch off of him. I just got tired of it.

It seems to me that the last stage of a property after you pull it off of streaming should be to release it on disc.

Why leave money on the table?

Quote from: Lurkndog on June 01, 2023, 09:30:29 AM
It seems to me that the last stage of a property after you pull it off of streaming should be to release it on disc.

Why leave money on the table?

Because there was no money to be had there.

I mean, if they'd rather take the tax writeoff, that tells me Willow's numbers must've been flat fucking terrible.