Buy Marvel Universe Online
On Target Markets:
Some of you may have been aware of the brief life of Drive, which showed three episodes before Fox canceled it. It was a drama about a cross-country road race sponsored by a shadowy conspiracy. Which, I fear, is mostly why it got canceled.
Because it was a good show. Funny, smart, entertaining, all that kind of stuff. There are a lot of people who would enjoy it. But nobody watched the first episode to find out, you see. Because the show is about shadowy conspiracies and car racing. So it looked like it would appeal to people who were fans of both X-files and NASCAR, and nobody else bothered to watch.
For commercial media, the value equation is (number of people in audience * how much money each person will pay). You can see them squeezing that second number higher with spinoffs, merchandizing, etc. Trekkies will keep spending money on Star Trek even after they own every episode and every movie.
"Number of people" is calculated from (size of "potential" audience * fraction of potential audience that will give you money). That "potential" audience is what killed Drive: it had really high audience retention (because it was good), but the number of people who gave it a try was very small. Obviously, the inverse is true: something with a very high potential audience that's crap will make little money, because people will get turned off quickly. BUT: that's how bad horror films work. They're cheap to make and have a big potential audience. If 1% of all horror buffs are bored enough to see Scream 5 or Saw 11, it's a financial success.
Of course, that's the soulless commercial media. It's tricky to try to grade Art by any standard, and I don't think the value of Art is a purely democratic affair. At the same time, Art (especially big Art, like movies and video games) takes resources to produce; I think it's naive not to care about the quantity of support a work of art can gather. So I want to criticize Drive a little for having such a hard-to-grasp concept, and especially its advertising team for not getting that concept across to the public.
At the same time, I'm painfully aware of the number of crappy video games that sell because they have good cover art or a licensing deal, but which actually suck. I almost wish that instead of deciding how much I'll like a movie based on a trailer that tries to tell me everything that happens in the movie, there were some benevolent dictator who could watch the movie and then tell me whether I'll like it or not. Perhaps several such people. And then their recommendations could be merged into one "score" between 0% and 100% for each work of art as a handy shorthand. If we had a system like that, people wouldn't have to watch bad movies ever again, and the good ones would finally get the audiences they deserve.
Some of you may have been aware of the brief life of Drive, which showed three episodes before Fox canceled it. It was a drama about a cross-country road race sponsored by a shadowy conspiracy. Which, I fear, is mostly why it got canceled.
Because it was a good show. Funny, smart, entertaining, all that kind of stuff. There are a lot of people who would enjoy it. But nobody watched the first episode to find out, you see. Because the show is about shadowy conspiracies and car racing. So it looked like it would appeal to people who were fans of both X-files and NASCAR, and nobody else bothered to watch.
For commercial media, the value equation is (number of people in audience * how much money each person will pay). You can see them squeezing that second number higher with spinoffs, merchandizing, etc. Trekkies will keep spending money on Star Trek even after they own every episode and every movie.
"Number of people" is calculated from (size of "potential" audience * fraction of potential audience that will give you money). That "potential" audience is what killed Drive: it had really high audience retention (because it was good), but the number of people who gave it a try was very small. Obviously, the inverse is true: something with a very high potential audience that's crap will make little money, because people will get turned off quickly. BUT: that's how bad horror films work. They're cheap to make and have a big potential audience. If 1% of all horror buffs are bored enough to see Scream 5 or Saw 11, it's a financial success.
Of course, that's the soulless commercial media. It's tricky to try to grade Art by any standard, and I don't think the value of Art is a purely democratic affair. At the same time, Art (especially big Art, like movies and video games) takes resources to produce; I think it's naive not to care about the quantity of support a work of art can gather. So I want to criticize Drive a little for having such a hard-to-grasp concept, and especially its advertising team for not getting that concept across to the public.
At the same time, I'm painfully aware of the number of crappy video games that sell because they have good cover art or a licensing deal, but which actually suck. I almost wish that instead of deciding how much I'll like a movie based on a trailer that tries to tell me everything that happens in the movie, there were some benevolent dictator who could watch the movie and then tell me whether I'll like it or not. Perhaps several such people. And then their recommendations could be merged into one "score" between 0% and 100% for each work of art as a handy shorthand. If we had a system like that, people wouldn't have to watch bad movies ever again, and the good ones would finally get the audiences they deserve.