Disney's $3 billion cut into Marvel programming seems more significant.

Paramount and peak TV in the same headline.. interesting

The article reads more like a obituary than getting excited for anything on Paramount+Showtime.

It's say it will unlikely bring in new subscribers and risk turning the ones away.

Even goes on to say they want to resurrect dead shows and make them into franchise, instead of trying to take risks.

Showtime was stupid to gut those shows and should had tried to promote them.

Anyways the article basically saying Paramount+Showtime is playing it safe.

I have 2 more days in my subscription and I'm cancelling it. Literally nothing is worth the price on there for me.

I’m just here for the Star Trek. That’s it

They’ve already started the process of taking movies and turning them into series there’s a pink ladies grease spin-off series coming I think fatal attraction , the Italian job and flash dance are all in some form of development too

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What you’re seeing is the slow killing Showtime to appease Viacom legacy brands. Last fall, Showtime’s CEO of 15 years left. After that they announced MTV Networks people would take over. Then they pivoted saying the Pluto CEO will take over. Then earlier this week, lots of Showtime execs left while a ton of people at the network were laid off. Viacom has a history of acquiring and destroying. Paramount keeps stumbling into money makers like Top Gun and Yellowstone so they’re just going to keep trying to do super broad stuff without really understanding why those things worked. They might stay alive but it will be through luck and not good decisions or talent.

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I can assume that we will have something around only 2 shows per month (new shows or new seasons) in the vast majority of streams. I imagine 24 "big" shows is a limit for them. I used quotes around "big" because they aren't necessarily good shows, most being unoriginal (a prequel, a sequel, a franchise; oh god I hate franchises right now).

All they have is old IP. When they launched, they had a superbowl commercial that had a bunch of characters climbing their peak. It included Picard, Beavis and Butthead, Spongebob Squarepants etc.

I mean, they friggin made a TV show about an awesome movie they made in the 70s! It's wild how they are clinging onto past successes.

It would be nice if niche things made a comeback from these huge conglomerates but unfortunately I think this will be the tactic. Shallow, broad content until everyone buys each other out.

Even the legacy brands are struggling. They moved RuPaul’s Drag Race from VH1 over to MTV hoping that it might get some people to actually watch MTV for the first time in a decade.

Half of the $1.5 billion write down is folding Showtime into Paramount. So it looks like they've have a couple hundred million in programming, but the majority of the savings seems to be coming from integrating staff and budgets from Showtime.

Not sure about Disney but I'd guess some of that number might be from an anticipated combination of Hulu and Disney as well.

Like I said, I’m here for the Star Trek. I don’t care if it is old IP

Paramount Global is everything that is wrong with the super mega corps. If it were several (maybe 10) smaller companies, they could all be successful and produce slow and steady growth for shareholders. Those companies could actually employ many, many more people who could afford to subscribe to even more individual media platforms.

Disney can’t combine Hulu into Disney+ without resolving Comcast’s stake.

Which could cost Disney around 9 billion dollars to buy Comcast’s third part of Hulu, even the CEO hinted they might look to sell it instead and just move their content over to Disney+ or perhaps Star+ as it’s already known for outside the US.

Haven't seen any Star Trek around here since at least 14 years ago. Though that was a partially flawed action version (though very good action despite its flaws).

Interesting

Then MTV hilariously cut its runtime, created a new program they hoped to promote to the demo, so they put it between RuPaul's Drag Race and RuPaul's Drag Race Untucked.

This made it so the new show can be easily seen as to blame for stealing Drag Race's runtime, maybe making people want to watch it even less when some of its cast already made some Drag Race fans not eager to watch it.

So... made Drag Race shorter and noticeably missing segments, made people have to wait for Untucked, put a person of questionable popularity among the audience in said show, and made the show look completely to blame.

And then nobody wanted to hate watch.

So... that was a great move on MTV's part.

(Also, made a Teen Wolf movie without writing a script first, and without one of the core characters.)

They were not actually making a profit from Disney+. What is making them the money are the parks.

Any time a company destroys IP for a tax write off, that IP should immediately become public domain.

Fuck this fake "loss" by willfully deleting shit.

I think that's Disney's ace card. They will just tell Comcast (that pulled all their content from Hulu last fall) that they can have it- unless they offer it to Hulu at an excellent price. If neither blink, Disney'll sell it to the highest bidder, pull their content from Hulu, and wish the new owners well with the remnants.

The new leadership at Disney seems averse to paying out the nose for Hulu and Comcast being an a$$ and pulling its content last fall can't be helping. On the bright side, maybe getting Hulu sold off to a neutral third party would help it become a relevant content aggregator in the future.

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You do know that Paramount’s marketing department did no write the article, right?

Hey if you spent your whole life watching procedural bullshit on the networks I could understand why a boomer would think Yellowstone is prestige television.

It's like they stopped at a gas station way off the highway, the one that services a small community near some provincial park and kept renting DVDs up until 5 years ago because the internet out there sucked. Then they dug through the discount DVD bin now that they're getting rid of them. The 3 for $5.00 bin. And those three movies are what they decided to make TV shows out of lol. Such a random, disjointed and mediocre mix.

Yeah but I wonder who would buy Hulu, Comcast is the obvious choice but with the rumors of them buying WBD next year I don’t think they’re interested in Hulu, other than Comcast every other media company has already a streaming service and given their losses I seriously doubt they’ll dump almost 30 billion into a service that includes no content so it’s really impossible to predict right now, everything could happen.

> I mean, they friggin made a TV show about an awesome movie they made in the 70s!

Which one is this referring to?

Downvotes for what?

Excellent point, you nailed it. How far down the Top list do you have to go to find a Paramount TV show? Yellowstone is hot garbage from the intro to episode 1, unless your regressive idiot views left you with only one possible kind of program to watch, and this one has Kevin Costner!

I'm assuming they mean "The Offer" which is about the production of The Godfather

Sony has nothing on that scale. But it would be kinda strange still.

You’re right but I don’t think Sony would be able to dump 30 billion in Hulu, I think the biggest buyout they’ve ever done is Bungie for 3.5 billion, so almost ten times that for a platform with no content I don’t think it’s worth it.

As a fan of Star Trek and Yellowstone I have no problems with this.

paramount has like 15 subscribers

Yeah, the ship has sailed on new entries to the streaming wars. Some could argue Sony won by staying out of it. Hard to say.

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Correct. And I found it pretty entertaining (though absurd)

Haha, I forgot about the pink ladies show. As the person below guessed, I was talking about the offer

All these streaming services take hits overseas and merger with other sites. They then claim they lost too much and raise prices on the only place dumb enough to keep paying, yep us here in the USA. Drop them like its hot tons of free options

Not public domain, it’s rights should immediately revert to the creators, who then get to do with it as they please.

The FTC would block any Comcast WBD merger. No way would that be allowed.

Well they already approved the Fox and Disney merger so it’s not out of question, however there would have to be some or several structural remedies such as getting rid of CNN as they already own NBC.

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The Fox Disney deal was approved under a Republican FTC, this would be going before a Democratic FTC, Democrats would be pounding the table to block this. In an election year Biden might also be. No way does it get approved.

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Not a bad synopsis, although "Have Gun Will Travel", "Branded" , "The Rifleman" and dozens of other westerns come to mind. It would be difficult to explain the phenomenon if it were not for IMDB.

If we didn't see 'em in real time, they were on syndication - still are ( see Grit TV in all its pharma ad and reverse mortgage ad glory ).

I'm not sure it's really prestige though. Too soapy really. I'll still watch it because it's mildly ridiculous and does a decent job of rewarding willing suspension of disbelief.

Also didn't help that Phase 4 didn't make any money for them and phase 5 is looking to be worse.
The only movie that made a real profit is Spider-Man and they only get 25% of the profit as the rest goes to Sony, and this will repeat for the next Spidey movie.

Yeah I don't see why they would buy Hulu. It's not worth much, they don't own stuff themselves (even Hulu Originals are owned by Disney or Universal). I guess the user base is nice but that can be converted on Disney+

No one really. Especially if Disney leave, Hulu has nothing it would be a service with users but no content.

You’re absolutely right, perhaps they’ll just wait and see what happens in the election before making a deal with WBD, only time will tell.

A lot of things were created by the companies themselves and/or the creators are dead. The reason there should be a public aspect is because it's public money that is back filling the write off. But ya, for things where the rights were bought from individuals or the studios of origin, something should be done to wrap them in.

Saddest fucking thing was the post where the creator of a cartoon found years of work and dozens of episodes just fucking gone all so some bastards could get a discount.

I mean if the creators are dead, sure, but the vast majority of these shows being buried and written off for tax purposes are very recent and the creatives are very much alive. They should get the shows back before they enter the public domain.

Imagine if Disney decided to scorch earth "their" IPs so a mercenary CEO could get a bigger bonus. SEARS and Toys R Us at least had physical real estate to deal with. All some prick has to decide with IP is that, say, no one gives a shit about Marvel or Starwars anymore.

Pop! Gone. No more comic books, no more Jedis. Anything they get their hands on they burn and throw in the trash.

It's a fucking joke.

I just don't see it happening becouse it would never get approved. Even the Republicans might be turned against it, Comcast would probably be forced to sell almost all of WBD off only to end up with the cable channels minus CNN which they probably don't want. Better chance Comcast buys Netflix or something.

Shared license in that case. Unless the creator wants to buy back the rights. Creator gets the primary commercial rights, but the public still has derivative rights. Seems like a good middle ground where tax payer money is involved.

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Phase 4’s theatrical releases averaged $214 million to produce and grossed an average of $815 million each - $630 million if we don’t count Spider-Man.

That’s amazing.

Sony is worth ~100 billion. Total.

There is a 0% chance that Sony thinks that the name and platform of hulu with 0 content is worth 1/3 of their company.

Movies need to make around 4x to 5x their production costs to break even, let alone show a profit.
Hell Spielberg said himself that Avatar 2 actually needed to make 2 billion in order for it to make a profit which is 4.9 times the budget, the same applies to Marvel movies they need to recoup, and they aren't doing that.
The global box office for Marvel movies not counting Spider-Man is down by half for the current phase.

So it looks to me that people are only interested in a lot of the current movie line up, save for maybe 1 or 2 titles like Spidey and Guardians. The fatigue seems to be setting in.

> Movies need to make around 4x to 5x their production costs to break even, let alone show a profit.

No.

Uhm yes.

Spielberg and several other directors have explained this in full in various interviews, which you can find online.

Production cost of movie
Marketing domestic and international
Cut off each ticket that goes to the theatre that shows the movie
Various other costs
Add all of the above up, and you need to make 4 to 5 times the production cost to break even.

Super bowl trailer spots in commercial break went as much as 30 million dollars.

No one says this:

>4x to 5x their production costs to break even

You are wrong.

Peak TV means quantity, not quality. The very fact that paramount has a streaming service is emblematic of peak TV.

Maybe you mean Cameron.

Sounds like a you problem. In the last 5ish years we’ve got new series: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy.

Two soap operas, an animated comedy, (have not seen SNW yet but I hear it is Marvel Trek), and a little kids cartoon.

"Star Trek"

And the animated comedy and little kids show wouldn't even bother me if they were not canon with the "main" universe AND we actually got thoughtful, well-written main shows. But instead we get very badly written soap operas.

🙄 Do at least give SNW a try. It’s the best of the bunch, and does a great job capturing the spirit of older trek while also having characters that aren’t cardboard cut outs

Yup my bad Cameron is the man I was writing about.
No clue why I said Spielberg.