Real people work in this industry, though. A merger of this size is bound to come with some layoffs and canceled projects.

It's not as bad as food scarcity, of course. But it can do some collateral damage.

That, plus fewer studios mean less creativity goes to the mainstream. If you thought AI slop was bad, go re-watch Star Wars Episode 8.

Me and my wife were Star Wars fans. The last Star Wars media we watched was episode 8. I almost walked out the theater.

my biggest problem with episode 8 was that they freed the camels but not the camel jockey slave children

I've watched and enjoyed Andor since, but yeah other than that zero star wars movies and TV shows since episode 8. I hear 9 was also hilariously bad, but I'll not ever bother seeing it.

Star Wars is synonymous with Andor at this point. The original trilogy is second, but it isn't a close second.

Oh really? What’s Andor?

I mean, 8 was easily the most functional of the new trilogy, if a somewhat overly ambitious muddle, so that's a bad example.

There is a real problem with too many sequels and adaptations though.

8 is at least the fourth best Star Wars movie.

Maybe 3rd. Jedi is gorgeous but the script for everything past Jabba’s Palace is a mess. Doesn’t know what to do with all its characters, feels the need to have them all around anyway.

If 8 had followed through on its narrative promises, it would have had a chance. But unfortunately, much like a modern LLM that exceeds its context window, it lost its way in the final act.

As for sequels, we are at a weird time in history. Due maybe in part just how prevalent media is and how easy (relatively) it is to create, we've been super-saturated in "like X but with Y" stories. We have dedicated websites mapping tropes. It's hard to come up with anything that hasn't been done a few million times. AI will probably accelerate that, and I can't say I know what comes next.

You will still have Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney, and NetMax spending billions each on content and streaming and Sony being the mercenary creating content for the highest bidder.

WB under Discovery was already becoming an also ran and more financial engineering than a real company.

Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.

Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.

Complete with "this guy will help us" to "oh no, they betrayed us!"

Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.

It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.

It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.

Does that mean the DCU Movies might get delayed or canceled?

One can only hope.

That's the only thing most people are looking forward to from WB!