Probably not, but given the choice (term used loosely) between “ignore it at best, get rid of it at worst” and “fire the journalists and replace them with state-funded sycophants”, the apathetic option suddenly seems more appealing. Obviously the preferred option is “stop letting the big companies eat all the smaller ones,” but I don’t see any formal crackdown on that any time soon, what with that slime mold and all.
Oh, make no mistake, it’s still a bad merger. It’s just that someone was going to buy Warner either way, and the main competing bid was from Paramount-Skydance with the express purpose of gutting CNN to appease the strange grayish-yellow slime mold that’s been growing in the White House, because the news won’t stop telling people how slimy it is. Which, of course, gives the adherents of the slime mold reason to try and turn public favor against Netflix’s acquisition. Or something along those lines, I’d be lying if I said I was all the way in the loop myself. Maybe there’s some other reason it’s propaganda, I don’t know. It does certainly seem to be echoing the same victim complex that cinemas have been playing up since COVID, but I’m not sure “theater propaganda” is really a thing.
I may be inclined to more sympathy had theaters and cable providers made any effort to stay competitive in the, what, 15 years since streaming started to take off? These guys are about to get hit by an oncoming train that they’ve been standing motionless in front of for a decade, have made no effort to save themselves - barring, perhaps, having Nicole Kidman politely ask the train to stop - and are now at the last possible minute begging the engineer to switch tracks, even though it would run over like a dozen other people in the process and, really, there’s no guarantee the train would actually be going fast enough to hurt them beyond the word of some people that have, again, been sitting in front of an oncoming train for 15 years, one of whom is the guy in the tophat and handlebar mustache that tied all those other people to the tracks in the first place. Sorry fellas, you woulda had my condolences six years ago but now you’re on your own. I’ll be over here in my much cheaper boat with a five-meter-high stack of DVDs, which in this metaphor represents a five-meter-high stack of DVDs.
Also, I can’t make this fit the train metaphor, hasn’t Netflix been doing more theatrical runs recently anyway? Like, as recently as last week? Am I just completely misremembering that one K-Pop movie having to add screenings because too many people bought tickets, drawing a bigger audience than the competing Disney and Dreamworks movies in the process? If anything, these guys have got to be salivating at the idea of being able to charge people $19.99 for one movie plus arbitrary processing fees and 30 minutes of unskippable preroll ads.
What can I say, I like me a big casserole.
Shame the nephews won’t be there to enjoy it…
What’s a good way to give my green bean casserole a little extra kick this holiday season?
learned quite a bit about being a whackadoodle from playing murdock, though
This would presumably be after teaming up with a samurai, a pirate, and a cowboy to send a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
no, but it does pass the Smurfdel Smurf
God, we were truly robbed of one of history’s greatest power vacuums. That shit would’ve made the Death of Stalin look like a church picnic. It starts with Vance saying he should be the obvious front-runner because he was totally the pick for VP, you just gotta trust him guys, he doesn’t have anything in writing because it was a secret handshake deal but he was totally gonna be the VP, ask anyone, and it ends with Ron DeSantis burying Mike Pence in cement while Nikki Haley soaks the convention center in gasoline.
I was thinking a sock full of old batteries might be cheaper if you buy in bulk.
I’ve had to construct an entire narrative around this to make it make sense but I think I’ve saved it.
Realtor goes out to survey the property or whatever the hell they do. She takes some notes on those little flip-out notepads that they stopped making around the time everyone got an iPhone. 3 bedrooms. But, the twist! Her handwriting is shit. Maybe it smudges a little. Who knows. She heads back to the realtor store and hand the notes off to an intern. She’s got a hot date, doesn’t have time to stick around all night Zillowing. But the intern, see, he left his glasses at home and then he spilled coffee on his keyboard. So he’s there squinting at the notepad dictating into the text-to-speech software. He gets to the bedrooms. Reads the number wrong, but quickly corrects himself. “8- oh, 3 beds.” Doesn’t notice the mistake. He’s in a rush. He’s got a hot date too. With the realtor. Scandal ensues. Everyone gets too caught up in the resulting HR investigation to realize until it’s too late, and the house is on the market. And now the district attorney wants to buy the house, and they only have three days to build 800 bedrooms or they’re going to jail for architecture fraud. Eva Longoria, Joe Keery, and Walton Goggins star in Halfway House, from the director of The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and The Tooth Fairy, and visionary producer Timur Bekmambetov, in theaters this January. “This estate is anything but real.” Rated PG-13.
Better close your fuckin eyes then 'cause I don’t play this game
one brief incident in '94 notwithstanding
Which, much like the AI Bubble, is piloted by a digitally-synthesized clown and is always at least five minutes away from being swallowed whole by a series of increasingly-bigger fish. And it only works if you dump an entire planet’s worth of water on it. And it’s our heroes’ only hope in the fight against the corporate warlords and their army of clanker- Okay so it’s not a perfect metaphor.
Call me when they get a baseball team. I wanna see the St. Louis Cardinals square off against the Actual Cardinals.
i ain’t playin this game
motherfucker could’ve died of a ruptured appendix and they’d still probably claim Bill Gates remote-detonated a microchip in his bloodstream to do it
Obviously not. Too small a target.
that depends. you doing anything later?