I don’t want to be a downer for the new Harry Potter TV series from HBO Max. Clearly, many people have put a substantial amount of effort into it, as have the people who helped make the film series (like me). But given both Warner Bros. and Paramount’s debt, it doesn’t seem likely to me that either can go on continuing to spend substantial sums of money on flogging remakes or continuations of franchises such as The Lord of the Rings without something giving way.
I’m concerned that, in several years, either WB or Paramount (or the combined entity) will eventually succumb, leading to IP asset stripping and being sold to the vultures that I’m sure are circling the properties of both companies as I type this. It wouldn’t surprise me that a company like Netflix couldn’t then just swoop in and bag those properties for themselves at a price substantially cheaper than what it would have cost them to have bought Warner Bros. in the first place.
We’ve seen in recent days that you can’t take anything for granted. Epic Games, makers of Fortnite and a former potential employer from last year when I applied for a data wrangling job within their Metahuman division, announced on Tuesday that they are laying off 1,000 employees because people weren’t engaging enough with Fortnite. What hasn’t helped is Epic fighting (and subsequently spending a shit load of money on) Apple and Google over third-party payments and stores in Apple’s and Google’s ecosystems.
A week earlier, Sony Pictures announced the imminent closure of Pixomondo, the visual effects company responsible for film and television visual effects on major series, including virtual production on recent Star Trek series such as Discovery, Strange New Worlds, and Starfleet Academy (which in itself has just been cancelled by Paramount within the past week). Some of the company will be absorbed into Sony Pictures Imageworks – but I’d certainly expect to see a substantial number of layoffs as a result.
Creative Corporate America seems to be suffering from Shit Hitting The Fan syndrome at the moment. Spending more money than is being earned (“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.” – The Micawber Principle) and subsequently flailing (and failing) to find the right investors who will bring them back on track, even after restructuring.
And all of this is not helped by a certain useful idiot causing worldwide economic chaos because nobody will tell him “no”.