A Fan’s Mega-IP Playbook

Treat Lore as Myth, not Canon. Tier Production. Know the Statistics.

News came out this week that The Acolyte had not been renewed for a second season, ultimately implying that it’s cancelled. I enjoyed the show. It was a bit rough around the edges, but ultimately, fresh & interesting to me. I *want* my mega IP to take risks. Beyond my personal desires, I argue that it’s imperative that they do. If they don’t, they inevitably oozify.

narrative oozification is the process where modern media IP inexorably containerises and protocolizes its story world in order to tell more stories.

Symptoms of narrative oozification is:

• World building foundations become more rigid or explained.

• Characters become APIs. Their impacts on the world become more predictable. Flanderization is a great example of this. Characters become more stereotyped versions of themselves. Less nuanced.

• Stories are less about the world, and more about the characters. The environment impacts them less. Characters increasingly have less agency to change the world. New stories are often just character APIs thrown together.

• Aesthetic/thematic innovation declines. It looks more the same over time.

• It becomes increasingly self-aware of its own past, incorporating elements such as callbacks or rhyming story tropes.

• It has to eventually reinvent itself.

The ultimate result is that any big swing toward the fences have to thread an increasingly smaller needle. It has to keep getting more things right. Given the propensity for mega IP to spend big to earn big, the odds are even worse. The Acolyte didn’t do as well, but it found a passionate niche of fans within Star Wars who are very upset by this.

Comparatively, at lower stakes, it’s similar to a band having to continuously thread the needle between appeasing fans of their older work and actually creating something new, interesting, and exciting. The longer a band continues in a certain direction, the more momentum and resources it takes to veer away from it.

Unlike music, however, there are some self-inflicted wounds that I feel that mega-IP should consider to avoid this oozification. I’m sure there’s a lot of smart people inside these mega-corps and so my opinion is a laymen and fan looking in from the outside.

They are:

• Treat Lore as Myth, not Canon.

• Tier Production.

• Stick to It.

Treat Lore as Myth, not Canon.

To paraphrase: you either end a piece of media, or live long enough to see it all turn into a multi-verse.

To avoid oozification, instead of deprioritizing the primacy of canon, any scif-if IP usually trend to multi-verses: a play-ground to keep telling new stories, but to also nostalgia farm well-loved characters (and their actors). But, multi-verses can’t last forever as they continuously navel-gaze and eventually result in dealing with similar themes (“if life can be made up of any life I could’ve lived, how do I find meaning in the life I have?”).

To avoid the turn-off to the multi-verse, mega-IP should instead treat lore like myth: not canonized and leave new media open to (re)interpretation. Star Wars Visions is a prime example of treating lore as myth. Give a 20min episode to a fresh studio with a simple directive of imagining Star Wars afresh. None of it takes places in established canon, yet all of it feels decidedly Star Wars. The IP has thus established a mythic quality of similar themes, ideas, systems, and aesthetic resemblance to still present itself as Star Wars without being attached to canon.

It works.

There’s some benefits to it:

Fans do *not* require extended context when watching it. Even in the case of stand-alone films, there’s implicit context involved. Rogue One is great. You can probably watch it alone, but you need to know the Death Star and Darth Vader, for example. Not requiring additional context also means that it forces the storytellers to actually be better storytellers. They actually have to show the world-building if they wish to actually get a story done. It means in general it brings complexity down, not just for the storyteller but also the viewer. Take The Acolyte: if it was not canon, the Force usage in the show would be mysterious and thus acceptable to have strange things happen from it. Instead of this tangle where fans have to wonder how this Force usage fits into what they’ve seen before. All fans have to do accept is one leap of faith: it’s space magic and some users use space magic differently. It’s no different to establishing world-building in any new fantasy of sci-fi world. You have limited capacity to do this exposition and forcing the storyteller to do it well means that fans aren’t bringing in their own pre-conceived ideas of the exposition from other works in the series. They only bring a mythic weltanschauung from the lore to the story: a worldview of aesthetic similarity in the same way that genre holds similar stories intact.

Another benefit of this, is that storytelling often thrives in the retelling. In the many ways that Spider-Man has been retold, for example, it emphasizes and demotes various themes through each retelling. It’s interesting in how it approaches similar themes through new lenses. If you retold A New Hope and gave it to new writers and directors not from the USA, how would they retell it?

It also hamstrings the reliance on lore as a third place. Fandoms appeal to canon as a way to draw boundaries around their community, often in self-sabotaging and negative ways. Canonized lore is an outlet to exclude new storytellers and other fans in a way that keeps their idea of the community, sacred. If canon isn’t a thing, or seriously deprioritized, then the IP can more readily thrive.

Tier Production

This is one of those things that I’m pretty sure must be talked about internally. It’s way harder to succeed if you’re *only* going to take a few $180m bets (which was The Acolyte’s budget).

Again, Star Wars Visions had it right. Get studios across the world to produce 20 minute shorts. Animation can be expensive, but it can be tiered down. If you go very, very high-end, like Inside Out 2, it can cost up to $2m per minute. Tiering down: Kung Fu Panda 4 cost around $1m per minute, roughly (reportedly) the same as the excellent Spider-Man: Across The Spiderverse. Then, you tier down to animation like The Rise of Blus, which cost ~$37,500 per minute (thanks to open source blockchain DAO communities, we actually get the privilege to see what these productions cost at this scale).

If I’d bet, it’s probably likely that Star Wars Visions animations, on average was between $100k per minute to $750k per minute.

If we ballpark $500k per minute, you can get 6 hours of quality animation for $180 million. About 18 different visions of 20 min shorts for Star Wars Visions. Enough to re-think the concept of a “pilot” in the age of streaming. It’s engaging content and serves a springboard to potentially develop and de-risk the IP. You’re also likely hitting more fandoms.

While something like Star Wars relies on spectacle (and thus big budgets), it doesn’t *have to*. There’s also substantial space to create slice-of-life content with a handful of sets and compelling character drama (give me a Star Wars that’s just about internal politicking in the Galactic Senate. Senator Jar Jar Binks as Galactic Veep? 😅)

Tiering production like this: starting with smaller pilot-like non-canonized animation feels like a no-brainer and I’m not sure why this is more readily considered.

Stick To It

Many have pointed out that well-loved shows prior to the conglomeration of producer and distributor in the form of streaming services, would’ve been cancelled today, partly because they aren’t being given time to grow.

The economics are unfortunately different then to now. But, creatively, I agree. Sometimes teams need to learn and make mistakes. Talent, across the board, fall into this trap where in order to create great work, you need to actually be given a chance to do so. Because they aren’t, studios are less likely to bet on them, and thus, you have fewer top-ranking creatives doing most of the work. With tougher economics, it’s even more likely to happen.

For TV, specifically, in the past, there used to be longer shows with more episodes. Statistically it means that for each episode, the odds of making great TV is higher. Nowadays, for film and TV, there’s not enough production to statistically prove that the result is due to *actual* poor skill.

In Leonard Mlodinow’s great book on randomness (Drunkard’s Walk), he shows examples in everyday life where success can’t be practically measured because the amount of times of execution is less than statistically significant.

For example, in head-to-head competition, say, the World Series in Baseball, if the actual reality of a head-to-head is that team A is 55% likely to win due to the team’s strength and team B 45% likely to win, then you have to play a best of 269 (!) games to definitively get this result.

If a CEO has a 60% rate of being successful in a given year (with metrics determined by the company), for a five year period, they only have a 1 of 3 chance of performing to their underlying skill.

Thus, in reality, we end up with either CEOs performing far above a baseline such that they actually have successful year-on-year execution, or they actually just get lucky if they perform above their actual baseline skill. If you’re doing fewer bets, you have to really believe you are going to perform above just getting lucky.

It’s more complicated than this in reality, but in practice, success is measured with way too high budgets on too few swings. If Lesley Headland’s *actual* performance in producing great media was 80% over time, any executive would keep pouring buckets of money onto her. But there’s this belief that on every swing, every creative need to hit out of the park. And because studios are taking fewer swings that have to overperform, everyone starts to lose.

As Mlodinow writes:

Executives’ winning years are attributed to their brilliance, explained retroactively through incisive hindsight. And when people don’t succeed, we often assume the failure accurately reflects the proportion with which their talents and their abilities fill the urn.

Creatively, there should be a return to more swings at the bat for cheaper, for longer. It not only allows media to get luckier, but also allow more creatives to get *better* at their job. It also means that there’s less insane over-analysis from the third-place-sanctity guardians. Less eyes trying to nitpick every single damn detail and making countless inane WTF DISNEY SUCKS reaction videos.

It might be that they de-risk through other means: like focus groups, or internal teams like the brain trust at Pixar.

Drop the over-reliance and sanctity on canon, tier production and start smaller with more teams, and stick with teams for longer on smaller scales of execution. From this, you can eventually scale to execute at much bigger levels of production with more certainty. You’re also then doing right by not only the fans, but also the creative talent. I’m curious what the tradeoffs are in practice. I hope we get to learn more eventually on how decisions are made internally.

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Bonus Content!

📚 Reading - At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell

Finally finished this and really enjoyed it. I enjoy how philosophy is embedded in the people and time it happens. Seeing how 20th century Europe shaped the existentialists and how they in turn shaped 20th century Europe was fascinating. At the end, she makes the point that earlier in her life, she was most interested in the ideas themselves, but later in life found that it was the people themselves that was the most interesting. It resonates.

🏃‍♂️Running - Vacation Mode

I must admit. In prep for my half-marathon in mid-September, aiming to go under 2hrs, comfortably, I’m getting a bit nervous. July was notoriously hot in DC and it hampered my ability to get in good volume. Now, on holiday, I’m also struggling to run enough. I despise treadmill running. Even if I’m watching something on my phone, it feels like ages. So, I’m aiming for doing speed work on the treadmill + strength training versus putting in longer miles. If you’re a runner and you are on holiday, how do you maintain your fitness?

💾 Links

Mint Moment

I enjoy seeing NFTs be used for more esoteric forms of collectability. Dune, a blockchain analytics dashboard, added the ability to mint these data visualizations.

Maybe another way for analytics gurus to make a living without paywalling trends or insights. :)

Gambling to Blockchain as Porn to the Internet

I’m sure it’s been said many times before, but sometimes saying it again like this in such a succinct way is great.

On some days, it’s tough to look at blockchains as nothing more than casinos instead of the economic coordination engines they are. Freedom of access to information led to abundance of porn just as freedom to access to global programmable economic tools led to abundance of speculation. It all co-exists. Older generations might have looked to the web and only seen scaremongering, amorality, and questionable forums. Hopefully in time, the mainstream might hopefully come to see blockchains as not just casinos.

The Doc Web

I love this article from Jay, speaking to Google Docs as a publishing platform. I’ve been wondering how I might want to change my own weekly writing practice and this resonated. I have a desire to capstone more of my work that I’ve done here. Eg, collect all the articles on media and publish it. As I write more, I can pave the cow paths I’ve walked through merely writing each week. Starting with a doc to simply tag/collect the links together is a great start. Going to be sincerely thinking about this. It’s also beneficial for myself as I also tend to refer back to previous articles more and more.

🎶 Music

Yves Tumor - Lovely Sewer

Hat tip to my wife for introducing this artist. Great track.

That’s it for this week! Have a lovely sunset.

Simon