Cartoon Network Studios and Warner Bros. Animation are consolidating into a single unit, and that's an ominous sign for the future of new, original Cartoon Network animation.
Good news for M I D D L E A M E R I C A :grillman: :solidarity: :porky-happy:
Under boss David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery has expressed a desire to focus more heavily on IP across all its businesses, so now that CNS has to share development and production resources with WBA, it’s difficult to imagine a future in which the studio’s original animation output can match what it has been in the past. As long as Zaslav is king, Cartoon Network Studios is likely to shift more strongly towards reboots of its existing catalog, as it is currently doing with The Powerpuff Girls, than launching new IP.
Wanna know the future of animation? Look at video games. It's gonna be huge studios churning out the same characters and stories year after year, because of unexamined and self-fulfilling truisms.
"New IP just doesn't make money!"
They'll repeat that over and over - so much and for so long - that bespoke independent studios will start forming and producing original memorable artwork. And they will still insist, "New IP just doesn't make money!"
Honestly I think we'll see IP's created and used for the sake of video games. Cyberpunk, LoL, and The Witcher all saw huge waves of video game customers from their shows. WB is already there with their smash clone.
So it'll be cartoons viewed as marketing for video games basically. Probably mostly free to play skinner box shit marketed at kids.
Yup, except there's no more cocaine being given out and sadly the soviet union does not exist anymore. So just an even shittier version of the 80s :rust-darkness:
President DeSantis of the breakaway free nation of Floridastan joins the Russian Federation, meanwhile President Kamala Harris chastises the remaining southern states for legalizing the stoning of anyone not white and baptist/evangelist.
It's funny because Powerpuff Girls has been rebooted multiple times already and every single attempt flopped, while CN's strongest performers for the past decade at least have all been relatively new shows.
obviously Zaslav is a reactionary, a century earlier and he'd be in a room with Prescott Bush trying to woo Smedley Butler
that being said I see this as less of a culling of LGBT shows and more just a culling of new programing period. Anything that doesn't exist as a loss leader commercial/isn't Teen Titans Go reruns is going to vanish from the network. Look at Adult Swim's schedule tonight.
08:00 PM Bob's Burgers
08:30 PM Bob's Burgers
09:00 PM American Dad
09:30 PM American Dad
10:00 PM American Dad
10:30 PM Rick and Morty
11:00 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:15 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:30 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
11:45 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
12:00 AM The Boondocks
12:30 AM Rick and Morty
01:00 AM Futurama
01:30 AM Futurama
02:00 AM Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil
02:15 AM Mary Shelley's Frankenhole
02:30 AM The Shivering Truth
02:45 AM The Heart, She Holler
03:00 AM Bob's Burgers
03:30 AM Bob's Burgers
04:00 AM King of the Hill
04:30 AM King of the Hill
Mike Tyson Mysteries has been canceled for two years and Norm's dead. ATHF, despite a desire from the cast to continue, is dead. The Boondocks has been dead for almost a decade, the attempted revival was canned, and even if it wasn't season 4 was bad. Frankenhole's been gone for over a decade, and even when management was slightly more favorable to creators on the network, they're never giving Dino a blank check again (despite the fact that the last time they did, he made one of the best seasons of television ever). The other three have been off the air for at least a couple of years, and if you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you a thing about them. The rest, making up a majority of the runtime, other than Rick and Morty (which prints money in a way will ensure it's continued airing, even if it ends up as a show that only exists to sell plastic garbage like The Simpsons) are syndicated shows. You're not getting anime dubs regularly airing again, you're certainly not getting Big O Season 2 on weeknights again (if at all). If they have something homegrown laying around to fill up the time slot, great, but otherwise there's enough content out there that they can rerun and probably get good enough ratings, especially for the cash they save.
To me, this is the encroachment of what we've seen from smaller cable channels in the past decade. As the costs of production get higher and rate of profit continues to decline, you're going to see the "G4ification" of what remains of cable. Original programing would need to pull in numbers that no show on cable could to survive, and even if it did, it'd still probably be less than reruns that the few remaining boomers who still use television tune in for out of habit. I don't think that they're going to start airing more Million Dollar Extremes or explicitly reactionary content (if that were the case, The History Channel would be airing the same wildly reactionary shit it did in 2005), I think it'll get to the point where channels have one or two new shows that still crank out merch money, and the rest is totally recycled. With how quickly we're seeing media contract and how these contractions (based off of 2008/late 70's) don't usually return to normal (the streaming service boom was a new revenue stream for capital and it's already dry to the point of dying itself), I could see new western animation stopping outright.
Wanna know the future of animation? Look at video games. It's gonna be huge studios churning out the same characters and stories year after year, because of unexamined and self-fulfilling truisms.
"New IP just doesn't make money!"
They'll repeat that over and over - so much and for so long - that bespoke independent studios will start forming and producing original memorable artwork. And they will still insist, "New IP just doesn't make money!"
Honestly I think we'll see IP's created and used for the sake of video games. Cyberpunk, LoL, and The Witcher all saw huge waves of video game customers from their shows. WB is already there with their smash clone.
So it'll be cartoons viewed as marketing for video games basically. Probably mostly free to play skinner box shit marketed at kids.
China saw it coming
So it's like the 80's again but it's cartoons for video games instead of cartoons for toys.
Yup, except there's no more cocaine being given out and sadly the soviet union does not exist anymore. So just an even shittier version of the 80s :rust-darkness:
Just wait until President DeSantis starts secretly buying and shipping krokodil from Russia to fund Pro-US insurgents
President DeSantis of the breakaway free nation of Floridastan joins the Russian Federation, meanwhile President Kamala Harris chastises the remaining southern states for legalizing the stoning of anyone not white and baptist/evangelist.
Similar to the concept of anime adaptations of light novels getting greenlit exclusively as marketing without any intention of finishing the story.
It's funny because Powerpuff Girls has been rebooted multiple times already and every single attempt flopped, while CN's strongest performers for the past decade at least have all been relatively new shows.
obviously Zaslav is a reactionary, a century earlier and he'd be in a room with Prescott Bush trying to woo Smedley Butler
that being said I see this as less of a culling of LGBT shows and more just a culling of new programing period. Anything that doesn't exist as a loss leader commercial/isn't Teen Titans Go reruns is going to vanish from the network. Look at Adult Swim's schedule tonight.
08:00 PM Bob's Burgers
08:30 PM Bob's Burgers
09:00 PM American Dad
09:30 PM American Dad
10:00 PM American Dad
10:30 PM Rick and Morty
11:00 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:15 PM Mike Tyson Mysteries
11:30 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
11:45 PM Aqua Teen Hunger Force
12:00 AM The Boondocks
12:30 AM Rick and Morty
01:00 AM Futurama
01:30 AM Futurama
02:00 AM Lucy, The Daughter of the Devil
02:15 AM Mary Shelley's Frankenhole
02:30 AM The Shivering Truth
02:45 AM The Heart, She Holler
03:00 AM Bob's Burgers
03:30 AM Bob's Burgers
04:00 AM King of the Hill
04:30 AM King of the Hill
Mike Tyson Mysteries has been canceled for two years and Norm's dead. ATHF, despite a desire from the cast to continue, is dead. The Boondocks has been dead for almost a decade, the attempted revival was canned, and even if it wasn't season 4 was bad. Frankenhole's been gone for over a decade, and even when management was slightly more favorable to creators on the network, they're never giving Dino a blank check again (despite the fact that the last time they did, he made one of the best seasons of television ever). The other three have been off the air for at least a couple of years, and if you put a gun to my head I couldn't tell you a thing about them. The rest, making up a majority of the runtime, other than Rick and Morty (which prints money in a way will ensure it's continued airing, even if it ends up as a show that only exists to sell plastic garbage like The Simpsons) are syndicated shows. You're not getting anime dubs regularly airing again, you're certainly not getting Big O Season 2 on weeknights again (if at all). If they have something homegrown laying around to fill up the time slot, great, but otherwise there's enough content out there that they can rerun and probably get good enough ratings, especially for the cash they save.
To me, this is the encroachment of what we've seen from smaller cable channels in the past decade. As the costs of production get higher and rate of profit continues to decline, you're going to see the "G4ification" of what remains of cable. Original programing would need to pull in numbers that no show on cable could to survive, and even if it did, it'd still probably be less than reruns that the few remaining boomers who still use television tune in for out of habit. I don't think that they're going to start airing more Million Dollar Extremes or explicitly reactionary content (if that were the case, The History Channel would be airing the same wildly reactionary shit it did in 2005), I think it'll get to the point where channels have one or two new shows that still crank out merch money, and the rest is totally recycled. With how quickly we're seeing media contract and how these contractions (based off of 2008/late 70's) don't usually return to normal (the streaming service boom was a new revenue stream for capital and it's already dry to the point of dying itself), I could see new western animation stopping outright.
:yea:
And Cartoon Network produced the second season on its own dime back then, I think.
Bazinga brains and :grillman: making the Ready Player One setting come true one lazy nostalgic IP stagnation at a time.