The success of Agatha All Along proves that great storytelling can trump big budgets in Marvel Studios projects.

  • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
    231·
    6 days ago

    … Because the basic journalistic concept of citing your sources is apparently too difficult for Nicole here to pull off:

    https://www.cbr.com/agatha-all-along-least-expensive-mcu-series-record/

    As best as I can tell, this is basically an accurate encapsulation of the ‘source’ of the actual budget of AAA.

    Echo was actually, properly, verifiably reported to have a budget of $40 million, for the whole show, and then the Hollywood Reporter just said AAA was “significantly less expensive” than AAA.

    According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Agatha is the studio’s least expensive live-action series to date, significantly so.” While THR didn’t disclose the production budget for Agatha All Along, the use of “significantly so” strongly implies that the latest Disney+ series cost a lot less than the $40 million Marvel spent on Echo.

    So… we just have to trust The Hollywood Reporter, who cites no one, nothing, doesn’t even hint at an anonymous but qualified source.

    … Further, Nicole does not even attempt to define what ‘success’ is. Is it viewed minutes? Is it rating scores?

    No, nothing quantifiable is cited.

    She likes it because it is story centric, has great effects and characters. … And that’s pretty much it. Two or three sentences using those adjectives / descriptors, 0 explanation.

    … Then the rest, the large majority of the article is not even about AAA, it is about planned/possible future Disney+/MCU shows, and how maybe they can or will or should have lower budgets.

    This is the fluffiest fluff piece, whose premise is basically based on hearsay, that I’ve read in a long time.

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
        51·
        6 days ago

        I mean… ok?

        Are we just supposed to assume that is what this article is talking about? That is not mentioned anywhere explicitly in the article.

        Also, the actual continuation rate, to my knowledge, has never been released… anywhere, ever, for AAA, possibly any MCU show.

        A few weeks ago, I attempted to actually determine what it was, here’s me quoting myself from another thread:

        As far as week to week continuation goes, Agatha All Along dropped about 1/3 of viewed minutes from 304 million viewed minutes from Sep 20 - Sept 26, to 204 million viewed minutes during Sept 27 to Oct 3.

        So… apparently a 30 ish % weekly drop off is the best of any Marvel show.

        Granted, I don’t have access to more recent, or more thorough data for the whole season or the the industry in general…

        … but you can see from my old snapshots that the first season of Tusla King Season 1 had better continuation than AAA, shortly after AAA and Tulsa King Season 2 premiered.

        EDIT: Yeah I checked…

        https://variety.com/h/most-watched-streaming-originals-movies-tv-shows/

        This is where I got that data above, 3 weeks ago.

        It updates weekly, and its just a small snippet of what you can pay a large chunk of money to get the full data… but I don’t have an extra monthly rent’s worth of money a month to pay for where Variety gets it from.

        Anyway, you may notice that AAA … doesn’t even show up in the top 10 anymore.

        EDIT 2:

        … which would suggest the total viewed minutes this week is under 266 million minutes.

        AAA was already under 210 million viewed minutes 3 weeks ago.

        … In summary, they won’t release any actual numbers, with any context, to prove how successful or not a show is… and now they’ve just switched to a new metric, which also has never been released, and said ‘now this is the important number!’.