I honestly don’t know…

A viewer asked whether the West will ever get back to innovating in entertainment the way it did decades ago. Here’s my honest answer, and why it gets harder every year that goes by.

The question came from King Khalil in the comments on my video about the loop we’re stuck in. A corporate entity puts something out, people respond and criticize it, an entire economy forms around the criticism, the feedback never gets digested the way a consumer would digest it, and then it repeats. We’ve reached the stage where people expect the mainstream to simply adjust, and the economics don’t incentivize that at all.

So will we get back to it? The longer this goes on, the harder it becomes, because we’re raising a generation that doesn’t go discover anything. I’m not blaming customers for that. Everything is algorithmic now and nobody is encouraged to discover. People also yearn for a shared culture, and the only entities with the capacity to deliver something at that scale are the corporations sitting on the capital, because audiences are drawn to spectacle and to things that feel big and ambitious.

That’s what makes it so difficult for an independent or a new property to break through unless it’s attached to a mega corporation. Go look up the breakouts yourself. The new studio everybody points to usually had an enormous amount of money behind it from investors or a publisher. It usually wasn’t hungry independents pooling their resources. I did that with the Rippaverse and put my own money where my mouth was, but I’ve always told you that’s an outlier.

Here’s the part that actually bothers me. I’ve been doing this since I was 16, so 2006 to now. We have more tools and more direct access to an audience than we have ever had in history, and it has gotten harder, not easier, to say “I made a thing you might like, would you give it a shot.” That was easier years ago. I hate being that guy, but that’s the honest truth.

And go look at the numbers before you argue with me on the remakes and sequels thing. People online are tired of it. The numbers don’t say that.

The fix isn’t education, it’s cultural. People have to be incentivized to go discover, and that includes the ones who are already aware, because most folks griping about the mainstream still send most of their attention and their money right back to whatever the mega corporation put out last.

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#Entertainment #Hollywood #IndieComics #Innovation