A Catholic's Analysis of Dear Santa (A Blasphemous Christmas Movie?)

*Sigh* well this is a movie I have thoughts on. Hello catholiccontriversy here and while scrolling through paramount plus I came across a movie called "Dear Santa," "a movie about a kid who writes a letter to Santa and a spelling error causes a crazy mix-up" according to the description. I've heard the joke about "dyslexic kid writes a letter to Satan on accident," I knew what this was going to be from the set-up, and I had some kind of calling to analyze this. If you're new here, don't think I'm one of those "Harry Potter is the work of the devil" people (I've actually defended it on multiple occasions), nor am I one of those "to show evil is evil" kind of people (to know what to be on guard against one first must know what to even look for), but "strait up Satan" is not something to be taken lightly since one of his tricks is he makes you think he's nothing to be worried about, and "a dark comedy about a boy and Satan from religion mocking Hollywood for a platform that also has Satan submitting to the President of the United States" does not exactly instill confidence of "this will treat the subject of eternal damnation with the seriousness it deserves." First I'll get the "technical stuff" out of the way, as a movie it's very mid; it's a direct to streaming movie and it shows, not a lot of special effects but as a "reality based movie" it doesn't need much, the acting is serviceable but there isn't really much that needs emotion, Jack Black is kind-of playing Jack Black but it is different from his other roles, if it wasn't for the themes of the movie neither I nor Pokematic would be talking about it because it's just so nothing. If you just want an entertaining movie, don't bother with this. The movie is also PG-13 and earns it; there's an above average amount of swearing so even if you think the themes are "just fantasy" it's still "not for little kids." With that out of the way, time for the reason I'm talking about it. Oh, and spoilers ahead.

As I said, the plot of this movie is an 11 year old boy writes a letter to Santa, he doesn't fully believe in Santa but he's kind of doing a Pascal's Wager of "if he's not real, I wasted 10 minutes writing a letter to no one, but if he is real then I'm getting my wish." He also has dyslexia, so when he addresses the letter it goes to Satan (played by Jack Black, who I'll refer to as going forward to differentiate him from actual religious analysis) and not Santa. Jack Black then materializes in the boy's room one night saying "I got your letter, I don't get a lot of kids writing me" and the boy thinks he's Santa, but is confused by how he doesn't have a white beard or a red suit and how he has antlers instead of the reindeer. Jack Black picks up on this and tells the kid "I just dresses like this to not get noticed, here I'll show you" and then turns into a classic icon of Santa. Jack Black then tells the boy "tell you what, instead of giving you presents on Christmas I'll just give you 3 wishes right now, they can be anything, do we have a deal" (for which the rest of the deal is after the 3 wishes he gets the boy's soul, that he didn't tell him about) and the boy doesn't really know what he wants, but he would like the girl he has a crush on to give him a chance, and Jack Black says "done, you'll see tomorrow." So this first thing was pretty good; Satan does deceive, he makes himself look like someone to be trusted and that's how he gets you. While generally not quite as literal, he does present himself as "trustworthy leaders" and "good looking temptresses" and such, and to the eyes of a child Santa Clause would be fall under that category. Additionally, Satan doesn't directly tell you about the true consequences of your sins; in the Garden of Eden Satan through the serpent made a promise to Eve about what the fruit would do but didn't tell her the consequences of that action (God did, he warned them "if you eat this fruit you will die," but not Satan), so Jack Black not telling the boy the consequences of the wish is not far off. Allegorically, this is a decent depiction of Satan's temptation and deception.

The next day the girl the boy has a crush on says she likes him too, and Jack Black shows up in a hamster cage to tell the boy to go ask her out. Jack Black also gets the boy tickets to a Post Malone concert "as freebies" because "give me a chance" wasn't enough of a wish, and shortly after this the boy's best friend points out that he's not talking to Santa, he's talking to Satan, which after that realization the boy doesn't want anything to do with him but can't get away because he already made a wish. This is when things get a little complicated. First, good on the boy for immediately rejecting Satan, once one realizes he's sinning he should do all that he can to stop. I know there is debate between denominations about "is sin the act or the intent, and is ignorance of the sin or accident not a sin," but once an act is understood to be a sin then it is definitely a sin, and once the boy knew what he was doing he wanted to stop. He also argues that he didn't know, but Jack Black tells him "too bad, you already set this train in motion," and the boy does all that he can to not make another wish. Again, a decent depiction of "the spiral of sin." Once a sin is done it can't be undone (you can receive forgiveness, but you can't rewind time), and with many sins once you get that first hit it's really hard to not do it again. He got his wish and it felt great (more than great because Jack Black over delivered), but at a really high cost, and it was really hard to then deny himself that pleasure so as to not incur the cost. Again, not exactly "a bad allegory." Jack Black also over delivers, because the wish was "just to get a chance" but Jack Black give him "an amazing date." I am of 2 minds here, because this is presented as "Jack Black is just a nice guy who wants to do you a favor." On the one hand, sin has a way of over delivering on the rush; you think "it's not that bad" and then get a flood of pleasure to where you want to do it again, and the movie could be showing that in a more literal sense. On the other hand, this could be the movie saying to the viewer "Satan isn't that bad of a guy, he wants to make you happy," and is Satan working through the movie to make you lower your guard to him. It's not really clear which way it goes, either in the moment or in hindsight (which I will cover later). The same can be said with all the times Jack Black helps the boy to lie to or otherwise antagonize troubling adults in the movie (like when Jack Black makes a guy that's harassing the boy get violent diarrhea) which the boy doesn't necessarily want (he likes it but doesn't want it); it could be "Satan lures you into a false sense of security" or "Satan is friendly," and since it's not exactly shown to be "in the wrong" aside from the fact that "a clearly evil being is doing it" it's hard to really say.

After much temptation and rejection, the boy makes a second wish to fix his best friend's teeth so he can have the confidence to ask a girl out, after rationalizing "I'll still have 1 wish left, and I'm doing it for someone else." This is a decent depiction of the kind of mental gymnastics we humans do when we choose to sin. There are many situations where we say "well I've already done a bad thing, so long as I don't cross this line I'll be fine to continue, plus it's for a good cause;" an example of such would be stealing a loaf of bread and giving it to a homeless person, and then stealing a pack of lunch meat to also give to the homeless person "because it's just a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat, it's not like I'm holding the cashier up at gun point, and I'm feeding the hungry so it's a good thing." And to the movie's credit it does seem to treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Soon after the wish, the boy also ends up in the hospital and Jack Black shows him his best friend "hitting it off with the girl he likes" to hurt him and tempt him to make his third wish. This is not a bad depiction of the negative results of "sinning for good," the boy thought he was doing a good thing but then he feels bad about it afterwards. It's not guilt, but it is a negative emotion, and it is hard for him to not give into temptation again, and does have an element of "Satan is NOT your friend" to it.

There is even more temptation and rejection, and seeing the trouble this has caused the boy fully rejects Jack Black and says he's never going to make that 3rd wish. That is until his parents fighting comes to a head and he makes his third wish that his parents wouldn't get a divorce, to which Jack Black tells him to "bump it up since there are a lot of unhappy people who are still married," and he makes is pack with Jack Black that for the price of his soul he wants his parents to be happy. Now this is where the movie starts to go in the bad direction. The boy using his 3rd wish to make his parents happy is treated as a good act, a selfless deed. No, don't do that. That is not something to be shown as a good thing, that is bad. It's not "the tragic corruption of a good kid who gives into temptation and evil," it's "I can do good while doing bad," and that is the "don't take Satan seriously" messaging I was worried about going in. Also, the way Jack Black talks up "don't you want to make your parents happy," doesn't come off as "Satan over delivering to lure you into a false sense of security and get you addicted to the rush," it's very much framed as "Satan is looking out for you" since the boy is "already defeated and accepted his fait of eternal damnation;" at that point Satan is just going to take you and this movie is trying to get you to like Jack Black Satan.

What happens next is not good, Jack Black tells the boy he's not going to immediately die and go to Hell, "that's going to happen when his time comes in 70 to 80 years, but in the mean time, just be bad since you're already damned," and then there's a little montage of the boy being bad to the people who wronged him in the past (the crossing guard, a bully, and his teacher), which ultimately backfires as a car nearly hits him as he's ignoring the crossing guard, the bully punches him in the face and doesn't respect him, and the girl he likes says she no longer wants to be with him after what happened in class because he's a jerk now. He does receive some consequences for his bad actions, and seems like he takes a philosophy of "just because I'm screwed for eternity doesn't mean I have to be bad in the here and now," but it is missing the whole "repent for your actions" part which is bad.

Here's where the movie really loses it. It's revealed that Jack Black isn't Satan, he's a lesser demon that's trying to work up to full demon, and he gets reprimanded by Satan because he lied about being Satan and binding the boy to a contract without disclosing the terms, and that all the wishes were selfless which demonstrates that he's not corruptible, which makes the deal null and void. I'll admit that I'm not super knowledgeable about how deals with the devil work and what demons can and can't do in service of Satan, but from what I do know that's not how it works. As I said earlier, Satan deceives, so I'm not buying "you didn't tell him the rules and pretended to be someone you're not" as a "legitimate loophole," that just seems like something Satan would do. Also, "the boy is pure, I can't corrupt him" is also not valid; we are all sinners and as RedeemedZoomer says "we all deserve Hell, and it is only by the love of Jesus are we saved from eternal damnation." There's no way the boy is perfect and through his acts alone he escapes the fires of Hell, and to imply that he is is blasphemous. Also, even if his intentions were pure, he still sold his soul for 3 wishes and 2 of the times did that with full knowledge of what he was doing. That's not "a technicality," that's the mental gymnastics to justify sin, which Satan really likes since it draws you away from God. Also, Jack Black is fired after this, and it's framed as "we should feel bad for him." Even though Jack Black is revealed to not be "the ultimate evil of Satan" and instead is "one of Satan's lesser evil minions," he's still an agent of evil who tried to corrupt a good boy. Like, no, we don't feel bad for demons.

The movie ends with Jack Black going to the boy and telling him the truth about how he's "not Satan and just a demon, a fired one at that who now has nowhere to go," and that the deal is null and void, and that he still had one wish left since his parents were already making up before he made the wish, so he gave him a wish from his letter, and that he's going to miss him because he started to like him. Again, this is bad. This is meant to make you sympathize with a literal demon. This is also the "in hindsight" thing I was talking about in the beginning. For the first wish Jack Black gives the boy super tickets to a big concert "because 'giving you a chance' wasn't big enough." Since this was "before Jack Black got to know the boy" there is an argument that the over delivering was "part of the scheme to corrupt the boy," but with the added context of "I just liked the boy" it's really hard to not see it as also being "I'm a nice demon." The boy also asks Jack Black what he's going to do now, and it's directed in an emotional way of "I'm worried about your safety, don't say goodbye friend, will I ever see you again." Again, that's bad, demons are not your friends and should not be depicted as such, and the only response one should have is "I hope to never see you again," and this is trying to make you feel bad for a literal demon. Then the third wish, Jack Black had no reason to grant that since "the deal was no good," meaning he did that "because he's a nice guy," which again is bad, it's making evil look good. And the wish is that he would have his dead brother back (because the trauma of that was like what caused his parents to fight, and the reconciliation was them realizing they couldn't blame themselves or each other for the accident), and when the boy goes to the Christmas tree his brother is alive and healthy, which is meant to be a touching moment, but again it was done with dark powers by a being of evil. This happy ending is meant to make you not fear Satan and his minions, it's meant to make you think "Satan is powerful too, and he'll also look out for you," which is Satanic. And then it ends with Jack Black being the angel at the top of the Christmas tree, where the mom just before said something about "I like the angel tree topper, it's like a guardian angel looking over us." No, just no, Hell spawns are NOT guardian angels and to make them appear so is blasphemous, and there's no question that this is saying "evil beings are not that bad." 

So that was Dear Santa. It wasn't all bad, there were some things that were "a good depiction of how we can be tempted by evil and fall to sin," but it really misses the mark with "the realities of evil" in the end. It also uses God's name pretty flippantly (a lot of people say "oh my G-d" as an exclamation pretty regularly, including Jack Black who is a demon who said "it's just an expression" which it certainly isn't and is wrong). The good doesn't outweigh the bad, and based on where the movie ends the good could be argued as just being a deception to get you to lower your guard for when the bad comes. I recommend against it; on top of the blasphemies and potentially pro-Satanic message, it's also just not very good. It's not the worst use of Satan in fiction (adult animation tends to make Satan "completely harmless," this at least had some "he's dangerous" elements), but "not the worst" does not mean "good" and this was pretty bad. Well, this has been Catholiccontriversy, signing off, and may God bless you.

If Sony Pictures was Honest About Streaming (Geeks Welcome Fan Script)

I thought of another script, this time it's Sony dunking on all the major streaming services. Ian, feel free to use any jokes in a future video (just give me some credits). I also don't know how accurate everything is, it's mostly just to make fun of current streaming nonsense.

Open on a well composed, rather cocky and jovial man.

Hi, I'm Tony Vinciquerra, head of Sony Pictures, the same company that makes the Spiderverse and Hotel Transylvania movies, and TV shows like Seinfeld and Married with Children, and golden age short subjects like The Three Stooges, in fact we have quite a large catalog of media that people enjoy. So much so that many people ask me why Sony doesn't have a dedicated streaming service like everyone else. I mean, it's all the rage to lock your own content behind a proprietary streaming service because people love your library so much. But it seems like everyone's forgetting that we were actually one of the first companies to try that kind of business model with Crackle back in the day, and I'm going to be honest with you, there's no money in streaming and it's far more profitable to just sell your stuff to the idiots who are doing streaming.

See back in the days of the PSP we bought a user generated video platform called grouper because we could see this was going to be big, then we got rid of all the low quality user generated stuff and used the infrastructure to launch a streaming site for our own movies and TV shows while changing the name to crackle, because that made sense. Who cares about low quality cat videos, people want real production value, this user generated content thing isn't going to last.

But you know, people wanted to watch all the old Godzilla movies we had in our library, and married with children, and astro boy, and voltron, and it was better they watch them on our platform where we got ad revenue instead of pirating on youtube. But this did offer a new avenue of content possibilities. This was the internet, there aren't any censors, and a lot of people had these great ideas for short series that would be perfect for this new frontier. We gave David Faustintino a million dollars to make this web series called Star-Ving, where it shows a fictionalized depiction of his failed career after Married with Children, and it did pretty well for a 13 episode web series with lengths of 5-15 minutes. Years later we gave Jerry Seinfeld a couple million dollars to make another short web series where he hangs out with fellow comedians in a car, creatively titled "Comedians in Cars." We also tried our hand at making some low budget movies like Joe Dirt 2 and Woke Up Dead. For all these projects we had to keep the budget down low because it was pretty obvious we were going to struggle to make our money back. I mean, who would put tens of millions of dollars behind a cinema quality production that's going strait to streaming, [zoom cut with translucent Disney logo] that'd be stupid.

Speaking of the PSP, a great thing about crackle was that you were able to watch it on your PSP, we even kind of built crackle with the PSP in mind. Of course we also made crackle available on the PS3, that new Roku device, early smart phones, and of course computers. What did you think we were going to limit our potential customers to just the Sony ecosystem? [Zoom cut with a translucent quibi logo], what idiot would think that was a good idea?

Over the years with Crackle we kind of let a lot of the originals fall out of the rotation and off the face of the earth. We already made our money back on them, it wasn't that big an investment, and nobody but those weirdos on the Lost Media Wiki cared about Star-Ving and the other crackle original minisodes. It had ran it's course and had fallen into obscurity so it wasn't a big deal that these went lost for the longest while since nobody cared about it anymore. If people actually wanted to watch it we would have made it available somewhere. [Zoom cut with translucent HBO logo] because it'd be stupid to make something unwatchable that people actually want to watch.

Fun fact Star-Ving was lost for a while until Pokematic, the writer of this script, made an article on the lost media wiki.

But then there was stuff like Joe Dirt 2 that people were actually interested in watching. So what'd we do? We made it available on DVD and Blu-Ray and licensed it out to cable TV channels and other streamers like Hulu and Netflix. [Zoom cut] what did you think we'd make something exclusive to our unsuccessful streaming platform and then make it disappear forever instead of trying to make money off of it somewhere else more successful? [Zoom cut even closer with a translucent WB logo] No one's that dumb.

But anyway we got out of the streaming business a long time ago because it was just too much work. Even though we have culturally significant classic works like the 3 stooges and seinfeld, it's so much easier to just license that out to existing streaming services instead of trying to build our own. [Zoom cut with a transparent peacock logo on it] I mean, who'd make an entire streaming service and hope that by making their flagship series exclusive to said service it would bring customers over? People just aren't going to watch it now and it's going to fall out of the public consciousness. That's a stupid idea.

It's also so much easier because we don't have to worry about exclusivity and brand cheapening. We made a TV cartoon of our flagship movie franchise Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, it's original run was on Cartoon Network but then Paramount Plus had it for streaming. It didn't matter to us because the check cleared both times, and they didn't care because they were just licensing it from us. It's not like the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs series was some cartoon network production that then started airing on the nickelodeon streaming service. [Zoom cut with a translucent south park logo] how ridiculous would it be if you weren't able to host your own flagship series because of some exclusivity deal with another streaming network? That would be peak insanity right there.

To be fair, streaming is very popular. No one under the age of 40 has cable anymore, [as a name is listed add the logo] it's just netflix, and hulu, and disney plus, and max, and peacock, and amazon prime, and apple tv plus, and tubi, and pluto, and freevie, and roku channel, and paramount plus, and crackle under new ownership, and how is this easier than cable? Oh what do I care, they're all paying me to either license my stuff or make new stuff for them. Disney wanted to have the Toby Parker and Andrew Parker spiderman movies on Disney Plus because of the No Way Home plot line, and Amazon wanted their own Hotel Transylvania movie, and I don't care if either are successful because I'm getting paid either way.

[Alternate joke about it being cable 2.0]

No it's not, it's the a la cart cable service everyone has been asking for for years. If this was cable you'd have to subscribe to paramount plus and Netflix to get Disney plus, now you can just subscribe to what you want. If there's a single show you want to watch on peacock, then subscribe for a month, watch it all in that month, and then cancel. If it's getting drip fed out, then just wait for it to finish and binge it all at once. [Zoom cut] what loser would constantly pay for something they aren't always using. Prove to mister I like money Netflix you're not an idiot who will keep paying regardless of how slow they make stuff. [Zoom cut back] what it's not profitable to have people subscribe for 1 month out of the year and have a constantly rotating set of subscriptions. [Zoom cut with a dramatic pause] hahahahha now do you see why I got out of the streaming business?

The streaming wars, the only winners are those that don't compete.

Rambling about The Business of Streaming Services

Hello and welcome to "pokematic rambles in what would be a podcast if I could get my thoughts together." I am your host, pokematic. So streaming services, every media company seems to have one now adays, and it's very much "self select cable but cheaper." Is it sustainable? Is it a ripoff? Are there too many providers? Is it cable 2.0? What even is the proper business model? How does this fit into the world of television? I'm going to try to answer some of these with my own opinion.

First, some history. Many people would star with netflix introducing streaming or the launch of hulu in 2007, maybe the rampant TV piracy on youtube in 2004, but I'm going to start earlier than that, a lot earlier. The turn of the 20th century saw the introduction of projected motion pictures, where people would go to movie houses to watch a feature film, news reel, short subject, and/or animation. These would then be played on a loop where people would come in whenever and leave after watching the loop. Here we saw the rise of media production companies like Columbia and Warner Brothers, where they would make the movies, shorts, and animations for the movie houses, where they would send the film reels to the movie houses on a weekly basis. Since movie houses would only need 4 films a week studios had urgency to make content, but a lot could be made "in parallel" since one week they could send a Tarzan serial while the monster movie was in production, and then work on slapstick comedy movie while the monster movie was in rotation, and after enough was produced they could send some old movies back to the movie houses for the people that missed it the first time or just want to see it again.

The 1950 then saw the advent of television, a "personal motion picture" event. In general television replaced the need for movie houses to show short subjects, animations, and news reels, leaving just the feature films. Since directors were experimenting with continuous narrative movies, where people would just come in at the beginning and leave at the end instead of coming in part way through, movie houses still had their business, but back to television. The question of "what do we show on this new thing called television" was the primary question. This was back when there were only 2-3 major stations with maybe a local independent station, and only broadcasted 12-16 hours a day, but there still had to be things for people to watch. Since people could watch every day of the week for possibly more than 2.5 hours straight, they couldn't just loop the same 4 things all week. Lucky for the broadcasters, there was half a century of theatrical shorts and animations that could be played on this television. This could easily fill 10 of the broadcast hours, but people eventually would get bored of these and new content would be necessary. This is when we started getting television shows such as I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show, along with soap operas and variety shows. When television started broadcasting 24 hours a day and more networks started popping up, the older television shows could be shown again. I don't know the exact ratios, but it would probably be 5-10% new content and 90-95% acquired content.

While broadcast television was all well and good, there were plenty of limitations with range and reception, which saw the invention of cable television. Cable started with transmitting the main broadcast networks with consistent reception for a fee, and while that is good there needed to be something else, a benefit for paying for this service. This is when we saw the invention of cable television channels, channels that can only be received from a cable subscription. This really started to take off in the 70s and 80s, and like with early television the question of "what do we put on these channels" came up. Once again, the creators went to what already existed. 50 years of theatrical content and 20-30 years of television history, with a lot that wasn't being reaired on the broadcast channels since they had a backlog of their own content, that's plenty to show, and there could be dedicated networks to different things. Want children's programs, there was Nickelodeon. Want music videos, there was MTV. While people definitely enjoyed watching old sitcoms and saturday morning cartoons, they needed their own shows to stay relevant, and so they made their own original programming as they grew larger, but probably also kept 5-10% original and 90-95% rerun.

Now we get to the part of history that I witnessed first hand, the rise of streaming. In 2007 netflix introduced on demand streaming and hulu launched, and those were basically the 2 games in town. Netflix had a giant library of content commercial free for $8 a month, including previous seasons of major shows like Futurama and South Park, and hulu had a smaller ad-supported library with next day streaming of major shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons for free. Since I didn't have a credit or debit card I was kind of limited to hulu, but there was plenty on it that I wanted (Inspector Gadget, Super Mario Super Show, Sitting Ducks, and loads of anime). Back then it was 100% acquired content (since hulu was owned by the networks that did next day streaming "acquired" is a bit of a loose term, but it wasn't "first run on hulu).

One of the problems hulu and netflix had were they would lose the license for various shows, so if a popular show left the platform viewers didn't really have an option. 2013 Neflix decided to do something about that, something TV channels had done before in the past, make their own original content they owned outright. Viewers didn't have to worry about House of Cards (the first Netflix original program) leaving netflix because this was a netflix show. This seemed like a pretty smart business move; instead of investing in licensed content that could one day leave the platform, invest in your own content that could stay forever. This seemed like an especially good idea since Disney started pulling their content off netflix and hulu in order to launch it's own streaming service. Disney's pitch for Disney Plus was "all of Disney's library in one place" (though that's not entirely true, Songs of the South, Teamo Supremo, Lloyd in Space, and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command just to name a few at the time of writing). They were also going to make some original movies and series. Once this proved to be successful (at least by some definitions), the other major media companies followed suit with NBC-Universal with Peacock, Viacom with Paramount Plus, Warner Brothers with HBO Max, Discovery with Discovery Plus, and others that have come and gone or I just don't really think about. It's also probably about time netflix and hulu started making their own content since many cable channels transitioned to mostly original or completely original programming at this point in their lives.

With this history recap, we are now at January 2023, every company has their own streaming service, Netflix is struggling to stay relevant, HBO Max was growing like crazy until it collapsed, paramount plus originals are airing on viacom cable channels, and people are predicting the streaming bubble to pop any day now. Here's my opinion on how we got here; the media companies put too much effort into original programs for their streaming services and not enough effort in their backlog. While streaming television is very similar to traditional television (people enjoy watching old stuff, but eventually they'll need something new), but there are some very major differences between how streaming is consumed vs how traditional television is consumed, most notably "on demand individual viewers that will likely watch an episode once and that's it." While there may be a new episode of Spongebob on Friday at 6 PM and Nickelodeon intended to air 3 episodes a day for the whole week, that only came out to 21 episodes in total. Then there's also the fact that all of these episodes were pre-selected, so when someone watched 3 episodes of Spongebob that day, everyone watched the same 3 episodes, and with everything being scheduled people watched the same episodes over and over again (I know that's how I am able to recite full episodes of Spongebob from memory, and how my mom can recite full episodes of the Brady Bunch from memory). Basically the choice was "watch this or nothing," so an original program got a lot more mileage since it wasn't a "one and done" deal since there wasn't really something else to watch; sure there were other channels, but it wasn't guaranteed that those would be showing something you wanted to watch (the age old "100 channels and nothing to watch").

So here's where I think the main "unsustainability of streaming" comes from. In the past if it cost $1,000,000 to make an episode of an original program, you could probably expect to get $2 worth of revenue from each viewer in the lifetime of them watching, so if at least 500,000 viewers consume the episode the episode breaks even, but this is including the repeat viewing on reruns and syndication revenue. On initial viewing, there might be $0.50 worth of revenue from the initial viewing, so if that episode was only shown once it would take 2,000,000 viewers for that episode to break even. Now here's the thing with streaming services, episodes are basically "only shown once;" sure, it's available all the time whenever the viewer wants, but I estimate that most users are just going to watch it once so that "lifetime revenue per viewer" is "just view once." Now here's where things get even crazier, with streaming services (especially ad-free ones), there aren't 8 minutes of advertisements that come out to $0.50 per viewer, streaming services are probably looking at $0.05-0.10 per view when distributed over the cost of the subscription, meaning it will take 10,000,000-20,000,000 viewers to break even with the episode. Now when you consider this is "per episode" and most series need at least 6 episodes per season, and people aren't guaranteed to keep watching, it's very easy to lose money on investing in original programs. This is basically why HBO Max imploded after Discovery bought Warner Brothers, Discovery said "we're losing money with all of this, might as well get the tax write off and make this an official loss." Sure, there's no real risk of Orange is the New Black leaving Netflix or Wandavision leaving Disney Plus because both companies own them in full, but it's going to take a lot more time for these shows to make money since they're basically "watch once and done," especially when that money is immediately put into a different original program, like what seems to be happening on a lot of these streaming services.

OK, so it's "completely unsustainable, streaming is going to die and we're going back to traditional TV," right? Well no, I believe that Hulu and probably Disney Plus isn't going anywhere, for one major reason, syndication. While Disney Plus promotes their originals and makes many, they only seem to make 1 or 2 originals a season and really promote their backlog, and while hulu has originals they are still very focused on syndicating other people's content, and this is why I think they're going to succeed. While 1 episode of Wandavision may cost Disney $3,000,000 to get on Disney Plus (mostly from making it), it costs Disney next to nothing to put an episode of Pepper Ann on Disney Plus (I know there are residuals, which was also part of HBO's problem, but there's no way it's anywhere near what it costs to make an episode of Wandavision), and from what I can tell Disney still very much is saying "come watch our pre-existing stuff that costs us nothing." Even on the low end of $0.05 per viewer per episode, if it only costs $5,000 to host that episode that only requires 100,000 views, and while there might not be THAT much of a draw to it than the original stuff, it's a lot easier to break even on that. If hulu spends $10,000,000 getting a series with 200 episodes, that's $5,000 per episode and with hulu being ad-supported it's probably more of the $0.10 per view, which only requires 50,000 viewers to break even. Hulu's home page will sometimes promote a new original, but it's pretty heavy "full series available, watch this syndicated program." If Warner Brothers didn't put all their money into originals and instead promoted all the backlog of shows they had, maybe they wouldn't have fallen apart. If Viacom would put more effort into promoting their completed catalogs instead of making so many originals, and maybe put some more older stuff like the theatrical shorts and cartoons they own (paramount was a turn of the 20th century movie house media company, and I know they're still good), maybe it would be more profitable.

Here's another problem with the original's business model, the cost is too much. Let's go back to early television, particularly animation since I'm pretty well versed in that. There were basically 2 types of cartoons that aired on TV back in the day, old theatrical short cartoons and original cartoons with VERY limited animation (think about Hanna-Barbara and how the walking cycles would loop and how only the lips would move). Bugs Bunny would have varied walk cycles, would do different moves, talk with his hands, and was expressive, then 30 minutes later Fred Flintstone would stand still while saying things, and recycle animation very obviously, and was generally stilted. Why, because the budget on those old theatrical shorts was much higher than that of the TV cartoons, but they still managed to make them entertaining through clever writing and good voice acting, and not to downplay those elements since 8 Crazy Nights has great animation but the writing and voice acting are not great in many people's eyes, but the quality there isn't necessarily directly proportional to the budget. Now this is only with my own personal experience, but a lot of the originals on these streaming platforms are of equal production value to that of conventional TV shows, or in the case of a lot of Disney Plus originals, higher than conventional TV shows. While The Mandeloreon, The Book of Bobba Fett, and Obi-Wan were a little more "story driven" than "effects driven," the effects were similar to that of the movies. The Peacock Original Bell Air seems to have a higher quality than the original Fresh Prince (Fresh Prince was a multi-camera sit-com that largely takes place in the Banks house, Bell Air is a single camera drama that seems to have many set-pieces from the single episode I've seen, so most likely more expensive). If these were done more cheaply, maybe it wouldn't be so unsustainable, but that's not the case.

Now my next point I don't know how important it is to the bottom line, but it could be a somewhat big thing, and that is syndication of the original programs. I've been saying "spend $1,000,000 to get the syndication rights to 100 episodes, which is good for the streaming service getting it since it doesn't take as many views to break even on it," but this also contributes to the original creator breaking even on the original investment. While Hulu may just need 100,000 views to make back the $1,000,000 investment on acquiring Regular Show, Cartoon Network made $1,000,000 off the whole of regular show with that purchase. I don't think syndication on hulu was part of Cartoon Network's business plan for Regular Show, but it none the less is. Since TBS was airing reruns of The Big Bang Theory while new episodes were airing on CBS, syndication was definitely part of it's plan. So now what about all these streaming originals? Where will they get syndicated to? As of right now, nowhere because that would defeat the purpose of having them. With streaming services, we have the same problem of why Disney Channel won't be airing Billy and Mandy, because Cartoon Network is a direct competitor to Disney Channel. We're also not able to have cross-network promotion like how Nickelodeon's Ren and Stimpy would sometimes air on MTV with them both being Viacom channels, because it's all a single streaming service (Disney Plus's Andor was on hulu for a little while, but with hulu essentially being a Disney owned streaming service at this point that's kind of like Ren and Stimpy on MTV, it wouldn't be on Peacock for example). I know a lot of paramount plus originals are airing on main cable channels, but that seems like it's more out of desperation to make money on them instead of "they ran their course on the streaming service, syndicate to the cable channels." It just doesn't seem like there's much of a life after first stream for a lot of these originals.

So this is my rambling on the business models of streaming services and why I think so many are struggling. I don't work for any of these big companies so I don't know any of this for sure, it's all speculation and I probably got a lot of the numbers wrong, but based on what's happened with some of these and news stories about "it's unsustainable, here's why all your favorite shows are being canceled by Netflix," and then seeing how free streaming like PlutoTV and Tubi are able to stay afloat despite licensing everything and not having any ties to a production studio (like Sony's crackle, they just stream various things owned by sony pictures), all I can really point to is the originals. Then I don't know about you, but I primarily watch the backlog content, so while I may enjoy some of the originals I'm going to stick around for the many hours of backlog content (I type this as I watch As Told By Ginger on Paramount Plus). Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.