Nolan's Shodyssey Is a Next-Level Humiliation Ritual
When will the Right realize that losing money IS the point?
A long time ago, in “New Right” years, I worked at the very beating heart of capitalism: the trading floor. Not just any trading floor, the corporate bond trading floor of asset management giant BlackRock. Unlike the stock market, which is a distraction for boomer dads, the bond market is where real shit goes down. This is where America’s companies (medium or large) return every week to beg asset managers and pension funds for money. Conning those institutions into believing the money will be spent wisely is the job of investment bankers and syndication teams. Trading the aftermath of said delusion was what I did.
During that time I saw industry after industry fall prey to the ZIRP1 mindset that if revenues were down, instead of correcting course and trying to earn money again, they could just borrow. Since I’d been educated as a financial “engineer” this was supposed make sense for me. Financial Engineering is a quasi-demonic discipline that arose out of the sheer greed of grad schools to charge exorbitant tuition and feed said graduates to financial intermediaries. Those intermediaries (banks, investment managers, hedge funds) would then eagerly to cater to the corporate desire to borrow instead of earn by means of said ‘engineering’. The whole system is like a dog stopping to chase its tail only so it can eat its own barf.
However, instead of growing numb at the sight of investment managers heedlessly gobbling up multi-billion dollar debt issuances I grew suspicious. AT&T and Verizon were constantly issuing new bonds by the tens of billions, but no national fiber-optic network was built and 5G was offshored to CCP-run Huawei. Same with biotech companies, who were simply borrowing tens of billions and buying competitors instead of innovating their own pipelines. Where were the “science and research jobs” that the Hal Holbrook’s venerable character chided Bud Fox about in Wall Street?
It didn’t take long to see where the money was going: stock buybacks, C-suite payroll, buyout funds and, of course, refinancing older debt at lower rates. The economy be damned if it didn’t grow! Still, I maintained, these companies must be turning a profit, they’re still here after all?
It was around then that a friend of mine, who works as a senior creative in one of the entertainment industries, told me capitalism was dead. Take the movie industry, he said, they were already producing flop after flop, insensitive to the lack of popularity of each feature. There seemed to be no end in sight. This was where I interrupted to lecture him that “once they’d lost enough money they would learn their lesson. That’s how capitalism works.” Cause would beget effect and sooner or later these errant studios would get shut down, hallowed stars snuffed out and powerful execs turned out onto Skid Row. It would all happen any time now I assured him.
I disagreed with my friend for quite a while until I saw more and more of what capitalism couldn’t explain right there on the trading floor. Indeed, Hollywood was the merely most truant cases of the inversion of Marshall Field’s aphorism. In this case the customer was most certainly always wrong. It’s one thing for a pharma giant to buy out a smaller competitor, cannibalize their drug pipeline and live off it for a few more years, but movies flop and leave huge holes in studio budgets. More than a few of those and you’re out of business. And if I’ve learned anything about the movie business from Entourage, it’s that movie execs hate losing money!
Surely this was true 60 years ago, but since the 80s studios have been owned by media conglomerates. This means that a company like Disney can lose money on its movies and still tell the shareholders to fuck off as long as its other business channel (theme parks, cruises) are profitable. Throw in a cable sports channel for fun and movies can lose money for a long time before analysts detect a hit on the consolidated balance sheet. And even if the conglomerate is losing money it can just borrow, like I’d been seeing day after day.
Finally it hit me. These companies could keep on losing money for a long time before market raptors would descend.2 They could keep selling the customers slop that they didn’t want until the customers vanished. They could even keep telling the customer that he was wrong without much apparent consequence. None of it mattered anymore because these companies could simply substitute revenues with borrowed money. Capitalism truly was dead.
The Invisible Hand that Rocks the Cradle
Which brings us belatedly to Christopher Nolan and the latest round of “woke hasn’t been put away”. Now, I honestly don’t know any serious commentator on the Right who believed it had been put away, but here we are feigning surprise at Nolan’s Shodyssey and nailing the appropriate proscriptions to the Senate door.
The Shodyssey apparently has a production budget of $250M so as long as it returns that much at the box office it’s hardly the woke albatross we’ve made it out to be, right?
Wrong, on at two counts. First, that’s just the production budget which is “somewhat” low because Nolan is a parsimonious director. There won’t be months of post-production, just the inflated figures paid out to the Hollywood A-listers enlisted to give Homer’s epic a edge against such high-brow generational competition as Skibidi and 6-7. The “low” estimate for production isn’t what will kill this purported blockbuster, it’s the marketing budget.
Marketing budgets are kept under wraps by the studios for very good reason - they tell you how hard a time the studio is having convincing people that a 3 hr lecture on transphobia will be entertaining. In this case it hasn’t been going well.
While some folks have hinted at a marketing budget of $100M, many (anonymous) industry insiders use a 2.5x factor as a more reasonable estimate. That would bring the budget to $625M+$250M = $875M, of which almost all is allocated to bloated “star” salaries and marketing. All of which tells us the obvious: the natural audience for this fare is violently disinterested and ignoring every attempt by the industry to hook them on what will be another hot-loaf of garbage. They’re not wrong:
And this:
This is Instagram folks! This is supposed to be a safe place to market Hollywood’s wokest abominations like She Hulk and Woman King and receive a ticker-tape parade of praise for how “brave” the casting choice was, or how “timely” a reminder it is that slavery is bad. Moreover, this kind of ratioing is everywhere on these ostensibly Industry-friendly platforms.
This brings me to the second count of why the bad economics of the film are even worse. Let’s say the all-in budget is just shy of $1B. Anything short of $1B globally is just breaking even, not a success. It needs at least $1.5B to be credibly viewed as a success. Back in the day the studio could at least console itself with a lifetime of DVD sales and merchandising to feel better the morning after a box office flop. But the economics are different today. Universal is releasing the Shodyssey, which is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast. That means that after it limps out of the box office it will get premium billing on streaming giant Peacock, lol. After which it will be shunted to Netflix (where it’s sure to boost subscriptions) and then to whatever other third rate streaming packages exist like Sling, Pluto, Tubi until finally it reaches DirecTV like some tragic foster child.
Given the antagonistic state of the target audience and the high threshold of economic success, it makes you wonder what sane capitalist executive at Universal thought that greenlighting this would be a good idea? A trick question, because neither Universal nor any other media/entertainment company in business today employ any capitalists. They know this movie is likely going to underperform (at best) - a sin that an 80s studio exec would have been fired for. They don’t care.
Making money is not the point. It hasn’t been the point in the entertainment industry for many years. In fact, losing money is the point. While the studios won’t make any money for their armchair owners, the HR harridans in charge will still self-congratulate with every Variety or New York Times review that glazes it as “a compelling display of Black power” or a “splashy popcorn movie with a social conscience”.3
Losing money and producing flops is what makes Hollywood great these days (according to Hollywood) because it’s about the message. This is what happens when you put the ‘People Not Profits’ people in charge. And if that message falls on deaf ears, does it make a sound? Again, that question isn’t constructive and doesn’t align with company values. Moving on.
If it seems that modern corporations (and especially those involved in the monetizing and popularizing of cultural preferences) are completely disinterested in turning a profit you would be correct. So what is their purpose? Have they really coopted the greatest culture-propagating engine in history into irrelevance? No, of course not.
It’s far worse than just that.
The purpose is to humiliate the audience, which surely consists mostly of straight white men, but there are plenty of others (dis?)affected by the cooption to boot. The industry knows their message is not popular, but their trust in academic credentialing tells them that this is achtxually a sign that they’re on the “right side” of history. Thus losing money isn’t just okay, it’s a moral imperative. The customer isn’t just wrong, he’s a stupid piece of shit, ex-boyfriend who listens to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. In other words he’s a “bad human being”. Gasp.
You see, they’re like saviors for our entire civilization. Every bit as heroic as John Brown or Martin Luther King Jr., they will usher in a messianic world where - surprise - they, themselves, will be the elect decision-makers. Each retconning of a fan-favorite IP, each re-booting of a beloved classic, brings us closer to that Kingdom!
However far ‘effect’ has been distanced from ‘cause’ (thanks to financial engineering and free money) the reckoning fast approaches. The hostility to the film’s culturally and historically meretricious casting and production values will be the desired effect. No one cares anymore what Hollywood produces. AI content may be hoovering up farmland with data centers but it will also supplant Hollywood’s (and the entire entertainment Industry’s) primacy as purveyors of culture. What will there be left for them to purvey once all else is taken from them? I’m not sure. I’m only certain they won’t ask the customer.
If you enjoyed this essay, consider getting a copy of my novel, The Toll of Fortune, available on Amazon and elsewhere. You can find out more about it here.
Zero Interest Rate Policy
Economists call this ‘Efficient Markets Theory’ or EMT. In the “strong” version information is disseminated to price discovery agents quickly and “shit hits the fan”. Where this takes more time they say that EMT is still working, just weakly. When it takes decades and trillions of misallocated capital, do they still call it efficient? Yes, they’re economists.
In fact if you’d like to enjoy a good olde fashioned Hollywood circle-jerk of adulation look no further than Rotten Tomatoes on The Woman King and you’d think it was more popular and successful than Titanic.
Maybe people will be driven by this cultural vandalism to read the classic texts and be enriched. One can always hope.
You are right.. But I would go one step further. It is about punishing the gullible slaves who keep supporting a system (of which media is a part) that clearly shows it hates them. Like a narcissist testing how far he/she can go before the abused grows a backbone and says 'fuck off'.