Little Things That Irk You IX

[wakka]

I think Laura K is not a B (why are women always targeted more than men?)

Agreed.

[Anpanman]

To be fair, the BBC do make some good programs and have a good world news service.
Here in Japan we need to pay for NHK which are total ****e! In the 27 years I've lived here I've never ever watched anything on NHK. They do have premium cable and satellite channels but you need to pay extra for those. The BBC offers quite a lot for the cost.

They do still make good programmes yes but for us there isn't anything of interest. If you watch any live TV - sports for example even though it may be an overseas broadcast and not on the BBC you still have to pay the licence which is insane.

Japanese TV - yes it must be the worst in the developed world, even the advertisements here have more invention about them than J-TV.
That said we have NHK World as part of our package and some of the stuff is interesting, Japanese castles and ideas for scenic walking/hiking I've been recording.

[egparadigm]

They do still make good programmes yes but for us there isn't anything of interest. If you watch any live TV - sports for example even though it may be an overseas broadcast and not on the BBC you still have to pay the licence which is insane.

It’s public service broadcasting, that’s why you pay even if you don’t watch. It also pays for BBC Radio which you can access either way.

If the licence fees go, eventually the BBC will die. It’s already on life support as it is. The alternative is everything streamed from California and an even faster decline into billionaire megalomania.

The whole bias issue is part of that trend, too, Tories polluting the well and dividing people on yet another front. When lefties attack the BBC they are doing their dirty work for them.

While I’m on the subject I’d recommend Borgen (I think it was season 3) about when Disney takes over the Danish state broadcaster and gradually twists the news towards sensationalism.

[Anpanman]

You're correct of course, I just think that today there could be a better or different way to fund it, it seems mired in the past but that may just be me.

If you go overseas the website is the international version filled with adverts, even if you sign in you can't see the UK version, I'd like to see your BBC ID linked to your licence so you can watch UK content overseas, there may be some legal restriction on this but at least the website pages could be advert free..
The news channel overseas also has - or used to have - adverts as well, I remember quite well seeing adverts for AMEX and Cathay Pacific on the BBC News Channel in my Beijing hotel room in 2000. I don't think any of us want ITV quantity of adverts but the BBC could show them in the blank space between programmes just like they advertise for paying the licence and promote other BBC output.

Our daughter does not and I don't think will ever watch the BBC or buy a licence and this is probably the same for tens of thousands of others in her age bracket, if the BBC wants to survive I think it really does have to change.

Also agree with you on the sensationalism element, the website news story headlines or some of them at least are chasing clicks - if that is the correct way of phrasing it.

[Brad]

The whole thing is massively outdated. TV licenses are per property. This worked in the days when houses had at most one TV. It does not work when there are a dozen devices, some portable , all capable of using iPlayer.

[Neon Ignition]

The thing with the BBC is that, as much as its fans understandably want to protect it, it's days as a public information broadcaster are over. To the vast majority of people now it's a TV channel they're forced to pay for. Few would offer more than a shrug if they had to switch to running adverts on their services and the trouble with trying to maintain the Beebs position in politics etc is that it overlooks how heavily Conservatives have infiltrated it and that aside from that it's far from where most get their news and information from anymore.

Each time around the license fee renewal is just one more circle around the drain, the licenses axing is an inevitability

[Brad]

Another Netflix £2 increase. I cancelled it just now.
That leaves me with Prime and Apple TV.
A lot of interesting shows always seem to be on a platform I don't subscribe to anyway. I do feel that the fragmentation of these streaming services (which I applauded when they first arrived) is going to push people back to getting stuff through other means. Personally we'll just watch less TV I Imagine.

[Neon Ignition]

Hollywood Accounting

Last week the stories from Paramount made no sense about their recent hits.

Last year the press had a good time calling out Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire as a box office bomb for making $202m off a $90m budget. This year though it's the story of how Paramount is planning multiple new Paddington movies after the huge success of the recent third film.

Paddington in Peru cost $90m - it's so far made $133m and isn't likely to rise that much more dramatically
The second film made $290m, whilst the first made $326m.

How is that a franchise enjoying huge success? So much BS in Hollywood

[Dogg Thang]

How is that a franchise enjoying huge success? So much BS in Hollywood

There are a lot of factors at play here. One obvious one is possible differences in marketing spend, which can vary dramatically. This is something very difficult to ever gauge because so much of marketing spend is territory by territory, so we could perceive a film as having almost no marketing when in fact they spent a fortune elsewhere or vice versa. Someone recently expressed surprise to me about the failure of the Lord of the Rings animated film because it had so much marketing... in LA and pretty much nowhere else at all. The marketing spend can be vast, or not.

Another factor which relates to both franchises here is licensing and merchandising. If one drives strong merchandise sales and one doesn't, equal figures at the box office don't tell the full story.

And yet another factor comes down to your first two words: Hollywood accounting. Certain percentages of any money made goes to actors, writers, producers etc and those percentages can vary massively depending on the deals. So two films making the exact same amount of revenue can have very different results for the studio. It's almost never like for like.

It's a complex picture and the basic numbers never tell the full story.

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, I think the reason why Paddington stood out to me is that GB is a merchandising money train and perhaps more critically owned by the studio. Paddington is a licensed property so I would have thought the studio would stand by default to make a smaller cut of the takings. Plus, even pushing GB aside, the Paddington franchise is on a pretty steep decline film by film so the emboldened stance behind it seems odd.

[Dogg Thang]

GB is a merchandising money train

Is it though? I haven't seen figures recently so perhaps it is but my gut tells me, in the current climate, that's it not making anywhere near as much as they probably thought it would.

[wakka]

Ghostbusters feels like something which has an extremely, EXTREMELY vocal and passionate fanbase (which I have never really understood cos it's like, one good action comedy from the 80s, calm down guys) but really doesn't have a ton of cultural relevancy beyond that. Like I have not heard one (1) person IRL mention the recent Ghostbusters films.

That fanbase is probably pretty lucrative to sell stuff to but I'm not sure if they're really all that big of a group in the grand scheme of things.

Paddington on the other hand feels like it has a ton of broader cultural relevancy thanks in large part to the recent films. I haven't watched the films myself but I've heard plenty of people mention them IRL and adults and kids alike seem to love them. Paddington 2 even got that (very amusing) mention in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent a couple of years ago.

[Neon Ignition]

GB has always been a solid merchandising gravy train, especially considering the many years where no new films or series came out. I imagine much of that is why Sony set up Ghost Corps to oversee safeguarding it. Similar with its non-Cinema performance:
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire among top ten physical media releases of 2024 - Ghostbusters News
It was the 8th highest selling physical media release of 2024 and the highest PVOD seller for much of the first few months of release - Sony's only high performer and outperformed films like Wonka and Bad Boys 4 which did stronger cinema numbers. The franchise definitely struggles to expand its audience, that and the perception that it has to become a heavy hitter rather than continue at the scale as is.

Paddington seems pretty well marketed etc, with the series etc it's hard to tell how much the film contributes to the tally of that.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, you're both hitting on something that could be true, even if GB merch does sell well: how much the films actually contributed to and built the brand. As you say, GB merch sold without any new movies so it could be that this movie didn't really move that needle at all. Whereas I have to imagine Paddington merch has been influenced recently because this film series is relatively new. So maybe it has paid off more internally.

There is also another factor: reporting across news sites can be incredibly inconsistent and they love making out like lucrative franchises are flops.

[wakka]

Yeah, realistically, I wonder how much more Ghostbusters Lego and figurines and stuff sell off the back of the new movies. I can't imagine they've at all hurt but I reckon that merch, as Neon points out, would be a big seller anyway as I think the core appeal to the fans is very much rooted in the 80s and 90s stuff. And I honestly do think the majority of the people buying the stuff are probably middle aged (although I don't have figures or anything to base that on).

Whereas with Paddington I think they have introduced a whole new generation of kids to this character very very successfully and I can see them seeing dollar signs for the franchise going forward on that basis.

There is also another factor: reporting across news sites can be incredibly inconsistent and they love making out like lucrative franchises are flops.

Also very true and that distorts things.