[COLUMN] A Eulogy for the Streaming Age | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It was confirmed this week that Disney spent $705m on Andor, which makes the show more expensive than any of the individual movies.

Of course, there are a couple of caveats here. Most obviously, Andor was not a single movie but instead a 24-episode two-season television show with a combined runtime roughly equivalent to the central nine movies (discounting Rogue One and Solo: A Star Wars Story). Even with this revised budget, Andor remains one of the cheapest pieces of live action Star Wars ever made on a minute-to-minute basis.

More than that, there is also the simple reality that Andor is very good. It is the rare piece of modern franchise media that is truly transcendent, a masterpiece both within the larger franchise and in the broader context of contemporary television. If these gigantic corporations were always going to throw big piles of money into the bottomless pit marked streaming where there was never any chance of financial return, Andor is a better investment than The Book of Boba Fett.

Still, this news confirms something that has been true for a little while now. The golden age of franchise streaming is over, and Andor stands as perhaps the crown jewel of this strange cultural moment, perhaps the only object that will emerge from this movement of any true value. In the late 2010s, chasing the massive success of Netflix, the major studios all pivoted sharply towards streaming. The idea was for each company to build a self-contained, subscription-based ecosystem.

Streaming was always intended to compete with theatres, to draw customers away from cinemas where their spending would be split with third party businesses and instead convert that into a steady revenue stream that went entirely to the studio itself. As a result, what streaming offered audience members had to compete with cinemas. It had to have the same name recognition and production costs. It had to be expensive and it had to be familiar.

Following this logic, the major studios pivoted towards putting expensive and high-quality brands on their bespoke streaming services, with no expense spared. For Disney, that meant live action Marvel and Star Wars shows that looked as good as (and featured the stars of) the movies. For Paramount, it meant a substantive investment in Star Trek. At Warner Bros., spin-offs like The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy were conceived as streaming shows on HBO Max branching out from popular films.

These shows were incredibly expensive. Disney was reportedly spending between $15m and $25m per episode on its streaming series. To be fair, at least part of this was down to the peculiarities of streaming, where above-the-line actors and creators needed to get paid more upfront to account for the fact that streaming did not generate the same residuals as film or television. Which, paradoxically, made the shows even more expensive, as they did not generate revenue.

Even at the time, this seemed like insanity. Without advertising, it was impossible to calculate the financial value of any individual streaming show. Sure, an average subscriber to HBO Max might check out Peacemaker, but was Peacemaker the reason that HBO Max got the user’s subscription fee or was it just something that the viewer was watching just because they had the subscription anyway? What was the long-term value proposition? Was The Mandalorian an “ever-green title?”

It is interesting to wonder what history will make of this strange period of shared streaming psychosis. As it was happening, it seemed unlikely that it could ever work. Sure enough, it didn’t work. The past couple of years have seen a reconfiguration of priorities almost as sharp and sudden as the embrace of streaming in the first place. Figures like Bob Iger all but acknowledged the damage caused by this “cultural fracking”, the effort to extract maximum value from this intellectual property.

These brands pivoted sharply back towards cinemas. The Mandalorian wrapped up after three seasons, and is getting a theatrical spin-off with The Mandalorian and Grogu next year, while the second season of Ahsoka remains the only live action Star Wars project on the slate. The next live action Marvel show, Wonder Man, had mostly finished filming in February 2024 and completely finished by April 2024, meaning it has been on the shelf for over a year.

There is no sense of what the streaming future for Star Trek looks like, beyond the two commissioned seasons of Starfleet Academy, starring Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti. Paramount was recently bought by Skydance and one of their first moves was announcing a new theatrical Star Trek movie from the Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves team. Predator: Badlands saw the franchise leap back to cinemas after the streaming success of Prey.

However, there is something vaguely disheartening in looking back over this era of streaming popular culture. For the better part of half a decade, studios took their biggest brands and properties, cast movie stars, and pumped insane amounts of money into them. It was never a model that was actually going to work. It was always a house of cards waiting to collapse. However, as the era winds down, it feels somewhat frustrating that this is what resulted.

The past half decade has seen a glut of lavish spending on beloved franchises: WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Star Trek: Discovery, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Mandalorian, Skeleton Crew, Ahsoka, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Star Trek: Picard, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, The Acolyte, Dune: Prophecy, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Hawkeye, Secret Invasion. That is an insane amount of media, produced (on paper) to the highest quality.

It is the glut of output that most fans had yearned for during the nineties, during long draughts. The individual seasons might be shorter, but the Star Trek franchise was as productive as ever in this window. There was more Marvel content produced in the five years after Avengers: Endgame than in the eleven years running up to it. However, as the haze clears and the fog lifts, a lot of this media lacks “stickiness.” For all that volume and expense, the actual material itself has no real permanence.

There are exceptions, of course. Andor is a masterpiece and one of the best pieces of Star Wars ever produced. It deserves to be in conversations with Pluribus regarding the best show of the year. Prey is a phenomenal take on the Predator franchise that frankly looks more cinematic than several of the prior entries in that specific franchise. However, a lot of the highs of this era fall into the “that was pretty good” camp, like Loki or Star Trek: Lower Decks, rather than becoming perennial classics.

It's important to acknowledge that this may just be subjective. This might be the perspective of an older fan, frustrated that modern takes on Star Trek or Star Wars lack the novelty that they once had. It is entirely possible that – as with the Star Wars prequels – a new, younger generation of fans will emerge over the coming decades who see The Book of Boba Fett as a holy text to be lauded and celebrated with its own strange rituals and revivals.

It's also worth acknowledging that this might not be an issue with a lot of the media itself, but instead a reflection of the form. Streaming is designed to be “content” to be “binged”, an approach that prioritizes consumption ahead of appreciation that does not lend itself to longevity. Audiences watching The Empire Strikes Back in theatres weren’t concerned about “second screen viewing”, and so the media itself wasn’t tailored towards needing to be understood by a viewer on their phone.

There is a reflexive reaction against the nostalgia of complaining about new media while lauding old media. There has always been bad franchise media. And while some of these streaming releases are bad – in ways that are frankly unforgivable – many are just “fine.” More than that, they feel like they were grown in a lab specifically for the purpose of being “fine”, unburdened by any loftier ambitions. They are designed to fill minutes and hours, and by that metric they are an unqualified success.

Looking back over it, it feels like such a waste. The money spent on these shows and films was always being thrown into a gigantic money shredder. The studios never had any real chance of competing against Netflix. If that money had to be spent, why not spend it on things that tried to be good? Why not take big swings? Why not give the money and complete creative freedom to artists? There was never going to be any financial return anyway, so why not make something worthwhile?

The answer, by the way, is as obvious as it is frustrating. Actual creatives were marginalized within this process. Marvel refused to spend the money and grant the freedom necessary to hire experienced showrunners. There were constant stories of talented creators being hired and fired from these projects, with Obi-Wan Kenobi replacing the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Drive and The Wings of the Dove with a guy from “the Transformers writers’ room.”

It's no coincidence that part of what brought this era to the end was a massive strike by writers who felt like the industry no longer valued or respected their contributions, no longer created clear paths to sustainable living. In many ways, this push to minimize the role of creatives in the process of creating feels like it paved the way for the current fixation on generative artificial intelligence, the belief that media can be created without a perspective or a personality.

There is undoubtedly a financial motivation for this. A large language model is theoretically cheaper to maintain than a writers’ room. However, these studios have been abetted in some ways by certain segments of organized fandom, which has a tendency to react incredibly strongly towards any creator who dares to push a given property somewhere even remotely novel. There is a very vocal audience that seems like all it wants is to eat reheated leftovers reconstituted from decades-old ingredients, and that’s where Hollywood has been trending.

Even on the law of averages, given the sheer amount of money spent and volume of material generated, it feels impossible that Andor should be the only work at that level of quality to emerge from this glut. It takes real work to avoid hitting a home run so consistently. That is what is so upsetting about all this. The issue isn’t that Disney spent $705m on Andor. It’s that the industry spent billions on other streaming media that is nowhere near as good.