We Don’t Need An Entertainment Conglomerate

We need stories told with risk, with the promise of rattled cages. We need filmmakers to downscale and produce work on a budget, solving problems in-camera rather than in post.

Or better yet, in the screenwriting phase.

They exist, they are out there — but they are working online — through YouTube and Vimeo. They excel in short films rather than getting the opportunity to produce something on the scale of a feature film.

In this day and age, they are working for diminishing returns, making it a less glamorous avenue with reduced prospects for success. It’s always been a lottery ticket of an industry, but now it’s becoming a factory.

Why is this a cause for concern?

Disney is moving to a model of greater and greater influence over its hunger for ownership of every major producer of IP — in an effort to create cookie-cutter moulds for production and consumption.

This will pose a major problem when this model goes stale and the playbook needs to be re-written.

Over-saturation of content will be a headache that may not be rearing its head in the short term, but you can bet that the recent spate of ‘nostalgia bait’ put forward will one day be a thing of the past.

The antidote? create new IP.

New IP will eventually lead to a new wave of nostalgia. It’s a form of future-proofing.

This involves taking risks — betting on the vision of a new and exciting filmmaker and his or her plans for storytelling.

This risk was made in the mid ’70s when a major studio (20th Century Fox — cinema backlog now owned by Disney) took a chance on a young filmmaker named George Lucas and his space opera.

This nostalgia has paid dividends.

Now is the time to engage in this cycle once again.