Lemmy will appreciate the final thoughts. I especially liked the part about Comic-Con.

What has changed is our awareness of how such things work. There was a time when only the subscribers of Hollywood trade magazines knew much about which movies were in development, to say nothing of which were canned. But audiences today are as intimately acquainted with upcoming projects as they are with the financial maneuvering behind them.

This isn’t just a matter of more of us reading entertainment news. Normal people have been forced to attend to this stuff — baroque tangles of licensing and distribution rights — just to be consumers. Feel like streaming a favorite sitcom? You’ll need to know which subscription matches that media and then keep up with whatever agreements, disputes or mergers will dictate its availability or shift it into another company’s library. Even ownership of media has become an intricate concept. You might “purchase” a movie from a platform like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+, but you’re still subject to the vagaries of the deal; things may simply disappear from your digital library because of expiring agreements.

The mechanics have been laid bare, and it is consumers who have been burdened with navigating them. It is particularly maddening that this visibility doesn’t translate to malleability: No matter how well you know the ecosystem, you remain under the thumb of corporate arrangements. […]

Consider too the barrage of marketing campaigns intended to monopolize our attention through every stage of a film’s development, from conception to release. Marvel Studios has its “phases” announcements, in which it outlines years of planned movies and shows in splashy events designed to keep fans in a frenzy about the long-term strategy of a major media company, as though a shareholder meeting has broken out at Comic-Con.

[…] This is one impact of media consolidation: Studios can work very hard to hold your attention before deciding, at the last possible moment, that they’re better off throwing out artists’ work than letting you pay money to see it. “Coyote vs. Acme,” the Warner spokesperson says, “remains available for acquisition.” Just not by you.