Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly

A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?

Adam Mastroianni May 02, 2022

You may have noticed that every popular movie these days is a remake, reboot, sequel, spinoff, or cinematic universe expansion. In 2021, only one of the ten top-grossing films––the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy––was an original. There were only two originals in 2020’s top 10, and none at all in 2019.

People blame this trend on greedy movie studios or dumb moviegoers or competition from Netflix or humanity running out of ideas. Some say it’s a sign of the end of movies. Others claim there’s nothing new about this at all.

Some of these explanations are flat-out wrong; others may contain a nugget of truth. But all of them are incomplete, because this isn’t just happening in movies. In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one.

I’m inherently skeptical of big claims about historical shifts. I recently published a paper showing that people overestimate how much public opinion has changed over the past 50 years, so naturally I’m on the lookout for similar biases here. But this shift is not an illusion. It’s big, it’s been going on for decades, and it’s happening everywhere you look. So let’s get to the bottom of it.

(Data and code available here.)

Movies

At the top of the box office charts, original films have gone extinct.

I looked at the 20 top-grossing movies going all the way back to 1977 (source), and I coded whether each was part of what film scholars call a “multiplicity”—sequels, prequels, franchises, spin-offs, cinematic universe expansions, etc. This required some judgment calls. Lots of movies are based on books and TV shows, but I only counted them as multiplicities if they were related to a previous movie. So 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t get coded as a multiplicity, but 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze does, and so does the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake. I also probably missed a few multiplicities, especially in earlier decades, since sometimes it’s not obvious that a movie has some connection to an earlier movie.

Regardless, the shift is gigantic. Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.

Original movies just aren’t popular anymore, if they even get made in the first place.

Top movies have also recently started taking a larger chunk of the market. I extracted the revenue of the top 20 movies and divided it by the total revenue of the top 200 movies, going all the way back to 1986 (source). The top 20 movies captured about 40% of all revenue until 2015, when they started gobbling up even more.

Television

Thanks to cable and streaming, there's way more stuff on TV today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows ruled the early decades of TV, and now new shows constantly displace each other at the top of the viewership charts.

Instead, the opposite has happened. I pulled the top 30 most-viewed TV shows from 1950 to 2019 (source) and found that fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves. In fact, since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).

Two caveats to this data. First, I’m probably slightly undercounting multiplicities from earlier decades, where the connections between shows might be harder for a modern viewer like me to understand––maybe one guy hosted multiple different shows, for example. And second, the Nielsen ratings I’m using only recently started accurately measuring viewership on streaming platforms. But even in 2019, only 14% of viewing time was spent on streaming, so this data isn’t missing much.

Music

It used to be that a few hitmakers ruled the charts––The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson––while today it’s a free-for-all, right?

Nope. A data scientist named Azhad Syed has done the analysis, and he finds that the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades.

Chart by Azhad Syed

And since 2000, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been increasing.

Chart by Azhad Syed

(Azhad says he’s looking for a job––you should hire him!)

A smaller group of artists tops the charts, and they produce more of the chart-toppers. Music, too, has become an oligopoly.

Books

Literature feels like a different world than movies, TV, and music, and yet the trend is the same.

Using LiteraryHub's list of the top 10 bestselling books for every year from 1919 to 2017, I found that the oligopoly has come to book publishing as well. There are a couple ways we can look at this. First, we can look at the percentage of repeat authors in the top 10––that is, the number of books in the top 10 that were written by an author with another book in the top 10.

It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each.

We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous––say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too.

In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.

Video games

I tracked down the top 20 bestselling video games for each year from 1995 to 2021 (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and coded whether each belongs to a preexisting video game franchise. (Some games, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, belong to franchises outside of video games. For these, I coded the first installment as originals and any subsequent installments as franchise games.)

The oligopoly rules video games too:

In the late 1990s, 75% or less of bestselling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%. At the top of the charts, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto.

Why is this happening?

Any explanation for the rise of the pop oligopoly has to answer two questions: why have producers started producing more of the same thing, and why are consumers consuming it? I think the answers to the first question are invasion, consolidation, and innovation. I think the answer to the second question is proliferation.

Invasion

Software and the internet have made it easier than ever to create and publish content. Most of the stuff that random amateurs make is crap and nobody looks at it, but a tiny proportion gets really successful. This might make media giants choose to produce and promote stuff that independent weirdos never could, like an Avengers movie. This can’t explain why oligopolization started decades ago––YouTube only launched in 2005, for example, and most Americans didn’t have broadband until 2007––but it might explain why it’s accelerated and stuck around.

Consolidation

Big things like to eat, defeat, and outcompete smaller things. So over time, big things should get bigger and small things should die off. Indeed, movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. Maybe it’s inevitable that major producers of culture will suck up or destroy everybody else, leaving nothing but superstars and blockbusters. Indeed, maybe cultural oligopoly is merely a transition state before we reach cultural monopoly.

Innovation

You may think there’s nothing left to discover in art forms as old as literature and music, and that they simply iterate as fashions change. But it took humans [thousands of years](http://www.essentialvermeer.com/technique/perspective/history.html#:~:text=In its mathematical form%2C linear,De pictura [On Painting]) to figure out how to create the illusion of depth in paintings. Novelists used to think that sentences had to be long and complicated until Hemingway came along, wrote some snappy prose, and changed everything. Even very old art forms, then, may have secrets left to discover. Maybe the biggest players in culture discovered some innovations that won them a permanent, first-mover chunk of market share. I can think of a few:

• In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
• In music: sampling. Musicians [seem to sample more often these days](https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/03/2019-the-state-of-sampling-draft.html#:~:text=1 in 5 Songs on,usually between 20-25%). Now we not only remake songs; we franchise them too.
• In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them. Marvel, DC, and Star Wars are the most famous, but there are also smaller universe expansions like Better Call Saul and El Camino from Breaking Bad and The Many Saints of Newark from The Sopranos. Video game developers have understood this for even longer, which is why Mario does everything from playing tennis to driving go-karts to, you know, being a piece of paper.

Proliferation

Invasion, consolidation, and innovation can, I think, explain the pop oligopoly from the supply side. But all three require a willing audience. So why might people be more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again?

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.

Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance. When the only way to watch a movie is to go pick one of the seven playing at your local AMC, you might take a chance on something new. But when you’ve got a million movies to pick from, picking a safe, familiar option seems more sensible than gambling on an original.

This could be happening across all of culture at once. Movies don’t just compete with other movies. They compete with every other way of spending your time, and those ways are both infinite and increasing. There are now [60,000](https://www.gutenberg.org/#:~:text=Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60%2C000 free eBooks) free books on Project Gutenberg, Spotify [says](https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/#:~:text=Discover%2C manage and share over,ad-free music listening experience) it has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and humanity uploads 500 hours of video to YouTube [every minute](https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/#:~:text=As of February 2020%2C more,for online video has grown). So uh, yeah, the Tom Hanks movie sounds good.

What do we do about it?

Some may think that the rise of the pop oligopoly means the decline of quality. But the oligopoly can still make art: Red Dead Redemption II is a terrific game, “Blinding Lights” is a great song, and Toy Story 4 is a pretty good movie. And when you look back at popular stuff from a generation ago, there was plenty of dreck. We’ve forgotten the pulpy Westerns and insipid romances that made the bestseller lists while books like The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, and Animal Farm did not. American Idol is not so different from the televised talent shows of the 1950s. Popular culture has always been a mix of the brilliant and the banal, and nothing I’ve shown you suggests that the ratio has changed.

The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk. Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs. It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy.

We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us. How much does it stunt our imaginations to play the same video games we were playing 30 years ago? What message does it send that one of the most popular songs in the 2010s was about how a 1970s rock star was really cool? How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999? How inspiring is it to watch tiny variations on the same police procedurals and reality shows year after year? My parents grew up with the first Star Wars movie, which had the audacity to create an entire universe. My niece and nephews are growing up with the ninth Star Wars movie, which aspires to move merchandise. Subsisting entirely on cultural comfort food cannot make us thoughtful, creative, or courageous.

Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns.

De quoi « V for Vendetta » est-il le masque ?

Par William Audureau et Damien Leloup Publié le 16 mars 2016 à 20h24, modifié le 17 mars 2016 à 17h54

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AnalyseDix ans après sa sortie, le film de superhéros anarchiste a prêté son visage à toute une génération de sympathisants.

Medek, 16 ans, interrogé en novembre dernier dans les allées de la Paris Games Week, est vêtu d’un t-shirt arborant le masque de Guy Fawkes. Il le porte « parce que c’est stylé, on porte ce t-shirt comme on pourrait porter un t-shirt Nike ». Il connaît le film V for Vendetta, « un film sur un rebelle », mais cela ne l’inspire pas plus que cela. A ses côtés, Hubert, 15 ans, lui aussi fan de l’objet, n’a pas trop d’explication sur son attachement à ce masque et la portée du film. Il admet volontiers un côté politique, mais sans particulièrement y prêter attention.

Il y a encore cinq ans, le masque de Guy Fawkes, avec son sourire figé, insolent et insondable, était le symbole de toutes les luttes. Indignés, Occupy Wall Street, jeunes du printemps arabe, militants anti-G8 et G20, sans oublier Anonymous, tous les mouvements de contestation l’arboraient. Mais depuis qu’il a été popularisé par le film V for Vendetta, qui fête ses dix ans aujourd’hui, le costume est aussi devenu un code populaire, presque une marque, indice public sinon d’une revendication, du moins d’une insoumission affichée.

Comme le comics dont il est l’adaptation, V for Vendetta est un film politique : il raconte le dernier coup d’éclat de V, superhéros anarchiste vengeur, qui à la manière de Guy Fawkes, instigateur au XVIe siècle d’une tentative d’attentat ratée contre le Parlement anglais, cherche à mettre à feu et à sang une Angleterre dystopique aux mains d’un régime fasciste. Sur le film, de nombreuses analyses ont été rédigées, tantôt pour en saluer l’indocilité joyeuse et enragée, tantôt pour épingler son manichéisme et, ironiquement, son esthétique fascisante.

Le masque que porte le héros est tout simplement tombé dans la culture populaire, grâce au marketing du film et à son adoption sans réserve par les sympathisants du mouvement Anonymous. Ce dernier en a fait le symbole de l’indivisibilité et de la détermination vengeresse du peuple, face à ce qu’il identifie comme des puissances corrompues ou oppressantes.

« Ce masque appartient à tout le monde, il est dans le domaine public : libre à chacun d’en faire ce qu’il veut », se félicite son concepteur, David Lloyd, ravi qu’il ait été repris par des mouvements contestataires.

« V pour Vendetta est l’histoire d’une résistance contre l’oppression et la tyrannie. Partout où le masque a été employé jusque-là, ce le fut dans ce même but et dans ce même esprit. Pour moi, son utilisation est conforme au message véhiculé dans notre œuvre. »

Lire l’entretien avec David Lloyd : « Le masque de V appartient à tout le monde »

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Time Warner et usines au Brésil

Pourtant, le masque omniprésent n’est pas vraiment dans le domaine public. Si son créateur a donné sa bénédiction à toutes les personnes qui souhaitent se l’approprier, les droits sur l’objet appartiennent en réalité à Time Warner, producteur du film de 2005. Ironiquement, une multinationale du divertissement touche donc une commission sur chaque vente des masques « officiels », utilisés notamment par des militants qui dénoncent la mainmise de grandes entreprises sur la création et la liberté d’expression... D’autant plus que certains des masques sont fabriqués au Brésil ou en Chine, dans des usines où les conditions de travail sont plus que difficiles. La publication, en 2013, de photos prises dans une usine près de Rio, avait poussé une partie des militants d’Anonymous à s’interroger sur leur utilisation du masque.

Peut-on pour autant en conclure que ce masque est une coquille vide et hypocrite, une version modernisée du t-shirt à l’effigie de Che Guevara ? Comme le t-shirt rouge de Guevara, le masque de Guy Fawkes est porté aussi bien par des personnes qui le trouvent « stylé » que par des militants qui choisissent de le revêtir parce qu’il porte une signification politique. Comme le film V pour Vendetta, le masque mêle dans un même objet consumérisme grand public, effet de mode et engagement.

Le masque continue d’ailleurs d’inspirer la peur de certains régimes autoritaires : en 2013, bien après le printemps arabe, les gouvernements du Bahrein et d’Arabie Saoudite l’ont déclaré illégal, et ont interdit son importation. Le gouvernement d’Arabie saoudite estimait alors que ce morceau de plastique « diffuse une culture de violence » et « encourage les jeunes à ne pas respecter les forces de sécurité et à répandre le chaos dans la société ».

Anonymat, Anonymous et action collective

Pourquoi ce masque inquiète-t-il autant certains gouvernements ? Pour ce qu’il représente, d’abord, mais aussi pour ce dont il est la fuite : le rejet d’une société orwelienne où forces médiatiques et politiques contrôleraient la vie de chaque individu.

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Né en bonne partie sur le forum 4chan, temple de l’anonymat et de l’inconséquence en ligne, le mouvement Anonymous n’a pas adopté un masque comme symbole commun par hasard : l’émergence médiatique du mouvement est strictement contemporaine de l’explosion de Facebook et de l’autofiction en ligne. Comme le relève sur son site l’anthropologue Gabriella Coleman, auteure de l’étude Anonymous. Hacker, activiste, faussaire, mouchard, lanceur d’alerte (éditions Lux) :

« Alors que les Anonymous doivent taire leur identité et cacher leurs actions, le groupe exige la transparence du gouvernement et des grands acteurs. Aux yeux de Mark Zuckerberg, de Facebook, la transparence consiste à partager en permanence des informations personnelles ; il est allé jusqu’à proclamer la mort de la vie privée. Anonymous offre une antithèse provoquante à la logique de l’autopublication constante et de la quête de gloire. »

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A travers le masque de Fawkes, le mouvement Anonymous redonne également corps à l’idée d’une force collective qui ne serait pas l’addition de ses composantes, mais leur multiplication, à la manière de ce que Musil évoquait, dans L’homme sans qualités (éditions Point), comme « l’aurore d’un nouvel héroïsme, énorme et collectif, à l’exemple des fourmis ».

Le visage rieur de l’anarchiste terroriste prolonge, comme le remarque Gabriella Coleman, les intuitions de l’historien Michel de Certeau. Quelques années avant la publication du comics original de V for Vendetta, dans L’invention du quotidien, il suggérait l’idée d’un « anonyme rieur », « sage et fou, lucide et dérisoire », navigant dans les interstices de la collectivité, qui résisterait aux discours généralisants, aux lectures systémiques, à toute analyse figée, et ramènerait toute construction intellectuelle à l’inéluctabilité de la mort.

David Lloyd dit-il autre chose, lorsqu’il justifie l’étrange rictus de son masque ? « D’un côté, il n’y a rien de plus effrayant que de voir quelqu’un vous tuer tout en souriant. De l’autre, un sourire est par définition une marque d’optimisme. »

Why Does Everything On Netflix Look Like That?

Even if you don’t know what to look for, you’ll probably be able to guess if something was created for Netflix just based on a few frames.

Against all odds, Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman is a very good show. But why does it look like that?

You know what I’m talking about—the so-called “Netflix Look.” Netflix’s in-house produced television shows and movies tend to all have the same look and feel, to the point that it’s sometimes really distracting. Although it’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes all Netflix shows look the same, a few things stand out: The image in general is dark, and the colors are extremely saturated; Especially in scenes at night, there tends to be a lot of colored lighting, making everything look like it’s washed in neon even if the characters are inside; Actors look like the makeup is caked on their faces, and details in their costumes like puckering seams are unusually visible; Most annoying to me, everything is also shot in an extremely conventional way, using the most conventional set ups to indicate mystery or intrigue as possible—to indicate that something weird is going on the framing always has a dutch angle, for example—or more often just having everyone shot in a medium close up.

Much like you can instantly recognize a Syfy channel production by its heavy reliance on greenscreen but not as expensive computer-generated special effects, or a Hallmark movie by it’s bright, fluffy, pastel look, Netflix productions also have recognizable aesthetics. Even if you don’t know what to look for, it’s so distinct that you’ll probably be able to guess whether or not something was created for Netflix just based on a few frames.

The Sandman, despite having great writing and great acting, suffers from these aspects of the Netflix look. Although the main character’s domain is the world of dreams, often in the show dramatic moments are reduced to scenes of characters talking in a medium close up. Fans of the show have also gotten frustrated by the show’s aspect ratio, which makes the frames look like they’ve been stretched upward. Tom Sturridge’s face looks especially made up as Dream—his lips are so red they’re almost distracting. Worst of all are the muddy colors, especially because the comic that The Sandman is adapting had such an exuberant color palette.

J. D. Connor, an associate professor in Cinema and Media Studies at USC, told Motherboard that the reasons for the Netflix look are varied, but one important reason is that Netflix requests some basic technical specifications from all its productions, which include things like what cameras to use, Netflix’s minimum requirements for the resolution of the image, and what percentage of the production can use a non-approved camera.

“It started as a big topic in the cinematographer community,” Connor told Motherboard in a phone call. “Netflix had an accepted camera list for its Netflix branded products. The initial list, while there were ostensibly open parameters for what cameras might qualify, there really were only like two. And yes, you can do a ton within those parameters. But it meant that this was one way that the uniformity emerged, was through their real insistence on that.”

Netflix’s list of approved cameras on their Partner Help Center website now has a lot more cameras than just two. The company explained in a video why it has a list of approved cameras, with Netflix camera systems specialist Krys Pyrgrocki saying, unhelpfully, “One of the biggest priorities for us as a studio is helping our filmmakers do their very best work. We want our filmmakers to not just feel enabled, but also encouraged to use the latest and greatest capture technologies out there to tell their stories.”

Connor says that these cameras are important to Netflix products beyond just wanting creators to use new technology.

“The other thing that really drove a lot of this was, they did what they call future proofing their content. They wanted it all to be shot in 4K HDR, ” he said.

It isn’t a totally unreasonable idea to want to make sure Netflix content still looks good when 4K televisions become more common, but it does limit your options as a filmmaker in terms of what technology you can actually use. 4K video files are also extremely large, and when compressed through streaming, that compression changes how the image looks to the streamer. It’s also important to note that Netflix, which chargers customers more for the full 4K experience (a basic subscription costs $9.99 a month while the Premium “Ultra HD (4K)” subscription costs $19.99 a month), also has a financial incentive to increase the amount of 4K content in its catalog.

“When it gets compressed, and jams through the cable pipe, or the fiber to get to your television, Netflix takes as much information out of that as they can through compression in order to reduce the amount of data that's going through, so you have a smoother streaming experience,” he said. “One of the weird things that happens when you have a very high resolution image, in general, when you shrink the amount of information the edges get sharper.”

Connor said to think about it in terms of movies from the 70s, whose visual effects look great on a huge screen, because the film grain blurs some of the details, but much worse on a smaller television.

“But when you take a movie like the original Superman or something and put it on television, all the edges get really sharp, all the blue screen looks really hacky,” he said. ”Something quite similar happens when you take a big 4K image and you jam it through a massively compressed amount of data to put it on TV.”

All of this helps to explain why the Netflix productions look uncanny. But some of the unpolished details are due to a more mundane issue: money.

Connor described the budgets on Netflix projects as being high, but in an illusory way. This is because in the age of streaming, “above the line” talent like big name actors or directors get more of the budget that’s allotted to Netflix projects because they won’t get any backend compensation from the profits of the film or television show.

“They're over compensated at the beginning,” Connor said. “That means that all of your above the line talent now costs, on day one that the series drops, 130 percent of what it costs somewhere else. So your overall budget looks much higher, but in fact, what's happened is to try to save all that money, you pull it out of things like design and location.”

“So the pandemic hurts, the technology of capture and then post production standardization hurts, the budget point squeezes all the design side stuff, and that hurts,” Connor continued.

Connor pointed out that there are many projects on streaming services that skimp on things like production design, and that some of this is due to ongoing impacts from the pandemic. But it can be particularly noticeable in Netflix productions because it happens so often.

“Red Notice to me is like the pinnacle of this sort of thing I’m talking about. It cost a fortune because they had to pay the stars a ton. It was shot in the pandemic, so they're cutting around absences in ways that are at times very, very funny,” Connor continued. “And the whole thing just looks when I watched it on my TV, and I have a fairly good TV, I thought it looked just horrible, beginning to end. A sort of brutal experience.”

That’s not to say that the Netflix look is always bad. There are a lot of kinds of projects that Netflix makes, ranging from the prestige work of Martin Scorsese to schmaltzy young adult fare like The Kissing Booth. When you’re making a young adult romance story, the Netflix look doesn’t feel totally out of place. In fact, it’s not too far off from what shows produced for the CW, like Riverdale, already look like. When you’re watching The Sandman, which is based on a beloved and very experimental comic, it comes off as totally incongruous with the story that they’re trying to tell. The technical specifications that Netflix enforces on its productions wouldn’t feel so out of place in a different genre of story.

“It all, kind of, totally works with the Adam Sandler comedies,” Connor said. “The budget point is fine, because Adam Sandler gets all the money, and like, the things just look fine. Nobody is making really theatrical comedies anymore, that whole market segment is just vaporized. And you know, I kind of want to live in a world where there's a Hubie Halloween rolling out in mid October and my theaters but like, barring that…”

Television and movies also, generally speaking, don’t have to look like that. Connor repeatedly mentioned Tokyo Vice as an example of a show with particularly rich production design, and other works on HBO, like the drama Station Eleven and the comedy Rap Shit, also put a great deal of time and care into their visual presentation. Shows like The Bear on Hulu, nominally a comedy, is extremely considered in how it frames its characters, and builds out its kitchen set with a lot of personal details. As streaming television, these shows will also always suffer from what happens to images when they’re compressed—but these shows are also shot in ways where that’s not as noticeable to the streamer on the other side.

The contagious visual blandness of Netflix

Last week I saw M3GAN, the new horror-comedy starring Allison Williams and a robot-doll in a blond wig. I liked it enough. The doll character is genuinely well-done—a seemingly hard-to-nail mix of creepy and campy—but I walked out of the theater with a vaguely empty feeling. I couldn’t quite place it until I started talking with my friends about where the movie was set, and I realized I had no idea. One answer is somewhere in Silicon Valley, given its bald critique of big tech. It didn’t actually feel like Silicon Valley, though. It didn’t feel like anywhere at all. (Update: I’ve been informed it’s set in Seattle, although it didn’t feel like there either.) Every backdrop was generic and crisp: the scrubbed tech-compound where Gemma (Allison Williams) works; the bland, Wayfair-decorated house she lives in; the clean, non-specific streets she drives on. I thought little of this while watching. The movie looked expensive and professional, or at least had the hallmarks of those things: glossy, filtered, smooth. Only after it ended did it occur to me that it seemed, like so many other contemporary movies and shows, to exist in a phony parallel universe we’ve come to accept as relevant to our own.

To be clear, this isn’t about whether the movie was “realistic.” Movies with absurd, surreal, or fantastical plots can still communicate something honest and true. It’s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def. This applies to prestige television, too. There are more green screens and sound stages, more CGI, more fixing-it-in-post. As these production tools have gotten slicker and cheaper and thus more widely abused, it’s not that everything looks obviously shitty or too good to feel true, it’s actually that most things look mid in the exact same way. The ubiquity of the look is making it harder to spot, and the overall result is weightless and uncanny. An endless stream of glossy vehicles that are easy to watch and easier to forget. I call it the “Netflix shine,” inspired by one of the worst offenders, although some reading on the topic revealed others call it (more boringly) the “Netflix look.”

In a 2022 Vice piece called “Why Does Everything on Netflix Look Like That,” writer Gita Jackson describes the Netflix look as unusually bright and colorful, or too dark, the characters lit inexplicably by neon lights, everything shot at a medium close-up. Jackson discovered this aesthetic monotony is in part due to the fact that Netflix requires the same “technical specifications from all its productions.” This is of course an economic choice: more consistency = less risk. They’ve also structured their budgets to favor pre-production costs like securing top talent. So despite the fact that their budgets are high, they’re spending it all on what is essentially marketing, pulling resources away from things like design and location. This style-over-substance approach is felt in most things Netflix makes, and it’s being replicated across the industry. (For more proof of concept, Rachel Syme’s recent New Yorker profile of Netflix Global Head of Television Bela Bajaria is perfectly tuned and genuinely chilling. I’m still thinking about her “Art is Truth” blazer and lack of jet lag despite constant world travel. She’s a walking metaphor.)

I’m not a film buff, so I write this from a layman’s perspective. But every time I watch something made before 2000, it looks so beautiful to me—not otherworldly or majestic, but beautiful in the way the world around me is beautiful. And I don’t think I’m just being nostalgic. Consider these two popular rom-com movies stills: The first from When Harry Met Sally, shot on film in 1989, the second from Moonshot, shot digitally in 2022.

The latter is more polished and “perfect,” but to what effect? It looks strange, surreal, both dim and bright at the same time. Everything is inexplicably blue or yellow, and glows like it’s been FaceTuned. Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, meanwhile, are sitting in a downtown New York deli that actually exists. The image is a little grainy, the lighting falling somewhere in the normal daytime range, and they look like regular human beings. The table’s lopsided, the kitchen’s bent out of shape—the charm is earned. Today the restaurant might be built on a sound stage, or shot in front of a green screen, the appearance of daylight added in post-production. They could make it look convincing and moody, but it would lack character. It would feel somehow outside the world we inhabit every day, because it would be.

At the risk of using an anonymous Redditor as an expert, lol, I found a comment under a thread called “Why do movies look so weird now?” that captures a lot of these same complaints:

“Everyone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it. Commercials use the same cameras and color correction so everything looks the same. Every shot looks like it could be used in a stock photo and it looks completely soulless. No film grain, no shadows on faces, and no wide shots. I have a theory that going from tungsten to LED lighting added to this as well. Tungsten allows for more accurate color in camera but LEDs are cheaper, cooler, and more convenient. So the solution is to film on a nice digital camera and fix the color in post. However, this makes for less creativity on set and less use of shadows. Green screens make it worse as they also require flatter lighting to work. Marvel films are very obviously mostly made in post and they all look very flat and not real. Even shitty low-budget 90's comedies look better and I think this can be attributed to the lighting.”

Another user mentioned that shooting on film required a level of forethought, planning, and patience that digital simply doesn’t. Similar to the predicament brought on by smartphone cameras and our now-endless photo rolls, the result is more, sure, and at higher fidelity, but not necessarily better. A photo today has never been worth less. I’ve long believed that constraints can improve creative work. But today’s shrinking production budgets, paired with the limitlessness of computer technology, aren’t inspiring scrappiness. They’re inspiring laziness. It’s too easy to fix things in post. Why wait around all day for the light to be just right when you can make it look half as good in Final Cut Pro for half the price? There’s an expansive possibility to digitization that defies the logic of constraint.

That the film and TV industry is obsessed with making as much money as possible isn’t a surprise. But as with any cost-cutting strategy, the approach is necessarily an expression of priorities. What’s worth the trouble? What isn’t? Looking at what studios are and aren’t willing to spend on today paints a pretty unflattering (if predictable) picture of modern values. And what’s interesting is how recognizable those values are across other pillars of culture. To name a few: the idea that imperfection is inhibitive to beauty; an over-emphasis on growth, speed, ease, and innovation; a cynical over-reliance on marketing; a lack of interest in locality and place; the funneling of resources to the top; the focus on content over form, entertainment over art. I could be talking about anything here—the beauty and cosmetics industry, tech, corporate America, manufacturing, social media, politics, labor disputes.

I’m not saying the proliferation of shitty-looking shows and movies will bring about our cultural downfall, only that they express, in a satisfyingly literal way, a specific wrong-think that’s pervading our off-screen lives, too. Most usefully, their hollowness offers, by way of counter-example, a key to what does feel meaningful: texture, substance, imperfection, slowing down, taking the scenic route, natural light, places you can touch, making more considered creative choices, making less. There’s a certain momentum to the mid right now, but there are other ways forward, if we’re willing to indulge them.