On the topic of money and property. Earlier this year, following the cancellation of several black television shows, you wrote“Studios and streamers no longer care about loyalty or lasting legacy.” Why is Hollywood, in 2024, still having so much trouble aligning its legacy with its business?
Well, the thing is, in the legacy business, they feel like that work is behind them.
But isn’t that what Hollywood is built on?
Yes, but for them, creating a new legacy and new paths is less important than extracting every dollar possible from existing intellectual property. It’s more expensive to, quote, create something than to rest on existing laurels. The beginning of the end of this, for me, was when Warner Brothers and UPN merged to form The CW. Now, 20 years later, The CW is a shell of itself. In mergers, you’re no longer competing with someone to make the best content. With the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, they own, what, a quarter of television? That era of competition in television is over.
Which has a direct impact on the creative aspect.
The legacy-based model only applies today out of vanity. That’s why so many stars use their own distribution or first-look deals to produce stuff. And that’s the majority of people who are allowed to create. What does Hollywood mean, then, when the only people given freedom are those who have already done the hard work (if they have at all) to become stars? Hollywood isn’t in the business of guarantees. Everything must be proven before it’s even created.
And if that is the case, many people are left out.
The fight for nostalgia as a currency comes at a time when some of the most valued things are not white. This is no coincidence. It is as if television, media and cinema are becoming manifest destiny in the wrong way. And there is nothing sadder.
Maybe we need better frameworks.
People have turned industries upside down to chase Netflix, and no one has managed to catch up. Everything has fallen into that chase. What’s happening now is that people are just duplicating the best and the most watched. There’s no diversity in the way things are offered.
You once described “post-2020 Black media as something akin to a modern-day blaxploitation boom.” It made me think of platforms like Tubi and AllBlk, which are sometimes derided for being a kind of streaming ghetto, but those same streaming services have also given opportunities to young creators.
Blaxploitation, as I was saying, gives way to Spike Lee, gives way to the black independent movement of the 80s which of course shapes everything we know about modern black cinema and modern black media. In every valley there is a peak. It’s the nature of life. So what do I think is a head? We should be thinking about the independent models that have existed before our current era. There are many ways to make media. Now that pilot season is pretty much dying, as the studios have announced, what are some ways that black creators can come together to make what they want?
I don’t know if I have the answers, but I am curious. And often curiosity and interest (and putting them into practice) can transform our way of understanding history and the future.