The “creators” wouldn’t have been able to create anything without the financial backing of the studios. You have a few like Lucas and Spielberg who owned their own production companies.

You're right, those uppity "creators" should be thankful.

Joking aside- This will become less true as technology makes film-making and distribution more accessible. Studios know this, so they've switched focus to tightly controlling distribution. Hurray for cultural gate-keepers.

How are they controlling the “distribution”? There are so many streaming services and cable channels hungry for exclusive content that if you make something halfway decent someone will buy it from you. On top of that, you can sell directly to consumers on iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Redbox VOD, etc.

> How are they controlling the “distribution”?

What do you mean? The very article we've been discussing is about Disney's attempt to control distribution.

I agree that for now there's a healthy ecosystem of distribution channels for newer, lower budget content - I said as much. What's happening is that the studios are countering that by tightly controlling valuable legacy content. The kind of stuff we see as part of the cultural zeitgeist of the last several decades (again, see the article for examples).

Disney is controlling access to their content not content you create yourself. Disney isn’t stopping any of the content distributors I named from distributing anyone else’s content.