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Answerman - Why Are Big Hollywood Studios Buying Anime Distributors?

War. War never changes.

TheAnimeRevolutionizer wrote:

Do they not know that their originating medium gave way to their beloved cash cows? And that their medium helped make sequential art an actual thing? Do they not have an ounce of creativity and fighting drive to make a statement in this world? I know they have a deal in China and they are big in Japan, but what they are doing is suicide, and as you've stated, it appears they want to do it. Pitiful and pathetic.

Disney is farming out limited Marvel rights to indie publisher IDW in the coming months. If that isn't a sign of what is coming, I don't know what is.

I haven't had cable television for going on SEVEN years now. Seven. It was difficult at first but then all the major stations in the US on air went digital. My city gets nearly 80 air channels just using an antenna (Mohu Leaf, which was well worth the purchase). There's really no reason to have 700 channels and me not even watch 695 of them.

Plus like you state most all smart TVs nowadays have apps or can cast from your phone.
All of my TVs can cast or have apps. When you have free streaming services like YouTube at your disposal for free that you can watch on a 4K TV it's kind of hard to justify cable. Networks like CBS and the like push free channels on TV apps and Roku as well.

I do pay for Crunchyroll (it's a pretty good service despite any of the 'normie' memes people want to post) and I pay for a free other services. However combined they're drastically less than even most basic cable packages, and that's with near unlimited content that's not held down by cable TV slots.

Jose Cruz wrote:

In a decade companies like Netflix and Amazon will eventually wipe out the likes of Disney/Paramount/20th century Fox/Columbia Pictures.

Someone still has to make the content to feed the ravenous hordes. I agree the movie companies are likely to be moving away from motion pictures, but they're still well positioned to produce original content.

This is such a bizarre viewpoint. Unless you are absurdly rich and have a huge amount of interior space, there's no universe in which even a higher-end home-theater setup can duplicate the scale and power of a theater screening, and the majority of us out there don't even have anything resembling an actual "home theater." Likewise, CDs to this day remain by far the most convenient means of getting the highest-quality audio in DRM-free format, content that doesn't vanish when a subscription runs out. (Not that that seems to stop people from willingly choosing inferior quality: the fact that people are willing to sit through a movie viewed on a 4-inch screen utterly blows my mind.)

Look at it this way, they're doing that to target the middle grade market, which some analysts think is the fastest growing market in book publishing in general, and graphic novels in particular. If we want their comics to do well in comic form, they have to reach kids, and if IDW has the authors to cater to kids, this is a brilliant business move.

The *bad* business move is to keep pretending it's the '80s and continue to focus primarily on adults via Diamond distributed floppies in specialty comic book shop. That has been an outdated business practice for decades now!

If comic book shops die, comics die. Marvel farming licenses out to IDW can not be interpreted as anything positive. IDW is a floundering company. Why would Marvel go to them if they wanted a bigger audience? Various people, the head CEO included, have been jumping ship from IDW for the past few months, and their profits are in the toilet.

I personally find a typical current LED TV to be better than typical movie theater screens. Anyway, digital movie screens often have the same resolution and to be the image looks worse. Frankly, I don't understand this obsession with movie theaters: it's just a big room for a large group of people to watch a big TV screen together whose image has lower quality than a 200 dollar LED TV.

You act as if they haven't already tried that. They've hired tons of people who don't write comics to write comics over the past decade because they want other audiences to flock to comics, like YA authors and bloggers. But they never do. They always end up making the lowest selling Marvel books out there because those people don't read comics.

If comic book shops die, comics die. Marvel farming licenses out to IDW can not be interpreted as anything positive. IDW is a floundering company. Why would Marvel go to them if they wanted a bigger audience? Various people, the head CEO included, have been jumping ship from IDW for the past few months, and their profits are in the toilet.

Agent355 wrote:

Look at it this way, they're doing that to target the middle grade market, which some analysts think is the fastest growing market in book publishing in general, and graphic novels in particular. If we want their comics to do well in comic form, they have to reach kids, and if IDW has the authors to cater to kids, this is a brilliant business move. The *bad* business move is to keep pretending it's the '80s and continue to focus primarily on adults via Diamond distributed floppies in specialty comic book shop. That has been an outdated business practice for decades now!

You act as if they haven't already tried that. They've hired tons of people who don't write comics to write comics over the past decade because they want other audiences to flock to comics, like YA authors and bloggers. But they never do. They always end up making the lowest selling Marvel books out there because those people don't read comics.

If comic book shops die, comics die. Marvel farming licenses out to IDW can not be interpreted as anything positive. IDW is a floundering company. Why would Marvel go to them if they wanted a bigger audience? Various people, the head CEO included, have been jumping ship from IDW for the past few months, and their profits are in the toilet.

You act as if they haven't already tried that. They've hired tons of people who don't write comics to write comics over the past decade because they want other audiences to flock to comics, like YA authors and bloggers. But they never do. They always end up making the lowest selling Marvel books out there because those people don't read comics.

If comic book shops die, comics die. Marvel farming licenses out to IDW can not be interpreted as anything positive. IDW is a floundering company. Why would Marvel go to them if they wanted a bigger audience? Various people, the head CEO included, have been jumping ship from IDW for the past few months, and their profits are in the toilet.

Comic shops dying will kill creativity, especially foreign and special interest books.
But at the same time they should embrace the mass exposure other avenues offer. You don't get much more traffic for people who impulse buy anything than Walmart.

After a quick look, I can't find anything about IDW's financial status. All I can really find are sales numbers and a list of acquisitions that IDW has had (which can be inferred by walking into a comic book shop...or, in my case, the Frank & Son Collectible Show).

Archie Comics does not do the standard distribution for their central lines though, so if comic book shops go, people will continue to see Archie on shelves at supermarkets and convenience stores and such. If comic book shops go, though, I'm certain the publishers will find alternate means to sell them. Pinball's still going, for instance, even though arcades are very hard to come by nowadays.

There is no reason to have cable specially now that a much higher variety of stuff is available in streaming.

Jose Cruz wrote:

There is no reason to have cable specially now that a much higher variety of stuff is available in streaming.

Please stop making sweeping statements like that. That's your experience, but it's not everyone's. It's pretty difficult if not impossible to watch live sports unless you have cable or a cable-like substitute like Playstation Vue. Sometimes you can buy a package that lets you watch out-of-market games via streaming, but that doesn't help if you live in the same market as the teams you are following. I follow the Red Sox, the Celtics, and the LPGA on a regular basis and need NESN, NBCSports Boston, and The Golf Channel to watch them live.

I follow my Brazilian soccer team even though I live in North America through streaming services. Without streaming I wouldn't be even able to follow the Brazilian soccer league since I don't know any cable service that airs all matches of the Brazilian soccer league in North America.