Edit: Here’s the exact same clip on the standard YouTube Watch page.
courtesy of zagorath
Brandon Sanderson the fantasy author
For those uninterested in watching a youtube short (sorry), the theory is pretty simple:
COVID and the death of theatres broke the film industry’s controlled, simple and effective marketing pipeline (watch movie in theatres -> watch trailer before hand -> watch that tailer’s movie in theatres …) and so now films have the same problems books have always had which is that of finding a way to break through in a saturated market, grab people’s attention and find an audience. Not being experienced with this, the film industry is floundering.
In just this clip he doesn’t mention streaming and TV (perhaps he does in the full podcast), but that basically contributes to the same dynamic of saturation and noise.
Do note that Sanderson openly admits its a mostly unfounded theory.
For me personally, I’m not sure how effective the theatrical trailers have been in governing my movie watching choices for a long time. Certainly there was a time that they did. But since trailers went online (anyone remember Apple Trailers!?) it’s been through YouTube and online spaces like this.
Perhaps that’s relatively uncommon? Or perhaps COVID was just the straw that broke the camel’s back? Or maybe there’s a generational factor where now, compared to 10 years ago, the post X-Gen and “more online” demographic is relatively decisive of TV/Film sales?
Perhaps, but that would still mean Sanderson is wrong here in attributing the blame to straight-to-streaming, when it’s actually due to the rise of social media. Which has meant that for my age group (young millennials, going through teenage years through the mid-to-late ’00s to early ’10s) it’s been true the whole time we’ve been paying our own way to the movies.