BW Media Spotlight

It’s an…interesting time in the world of storytelling media.

There seems to a battle for dominance, or at least some mutual benefit, some kind of understanding, when it comes to our comics, shows, games, and so on. Between tempers, egos, and the activists who happily manipulate both for their own ends, the storytelling industry is losing steam. American comics are selling worse despite more people in the world, streaming services are losing subscribers (even our recent cord cutting is only sending us to ad-sponsored free offerings), game trailers inspire rage more than anticipation, theaters are not coming back from the 2020 lockdowns like they should, and everybody is fed up for their own reasons. Old stories are getting a second look while new stories fail to live up to the past even as they try to replace the past.

There is a three-faction struggle for the fate of entertainment: the creators, the studios (or publishers, but for the sake of convenience I’m going to group them all under “studio”), and the fans. Each has their own goal, and there was a time when more often than not something came out that made everybody happy or at least satisfied with the result. Creators told their stories, fans enjoyed their stories, and studios made money from the stories and related merchandise. Sure, we still got the stinkers, and not everything worked out as planned for reasons often unique to that product’s creation, but for the most part everybody found something to love and the people behind it reaped the financial and resume benefits while the fans found their money well spent on something that they needed to deal with the day’s nonsense.

This is no less and less the case, as these groups are now screwing each other, though one group is getting it worse than the other because they’re the most disconnected from the storytelling process, no matter what certain “news” outlets try to say otherwise. Understanding where both groups are succeeding, failing, and being forced to fail is important to try to make sense of the future of the properties, pop cultural and regular cultural icons, and the future of media itself. Maybe this is what led to the Star Trek future where only plays, choir and jazz music, and a few books remain of media.

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