Then you blame people who understand what was lost for complaining and call them racist.
Few people have problems with changes for the better. But the changes are usually for worse. In the Witcher season 1 most changes were well received (introducing Yennefer backstory for example). But removing the Ciri & Geralt scene which was the pinnacle of the 2 short stories collecting just so that they can put 30 minutes of Ciri walking with that black elf that has no influence on anything else in the story was just dumb. Pacing was awful, and they had to cut the good stuff.
The story got objectively worse, but people who didn't read the books won't complain cause they don't know what they missed.
2. There’s only 68 million Gen Z compared to 72 million Millenials.
3. You keep a franchise alive and healthy by protecting the core IP and making the fans happy not by alienating them and making terrible renditions of the story. If you do that then all you have left is a name that is increasingly associated with bad writing and acting and eventually it becomes a joke that no one will turn out for.
And one way to make them spend that money is to target their kids, which is much more easier to do so ...
Today I saw physical adverts for House of the Dragon on the train ride home. The only thing I thought about was how shit the last season of Game of Thrones was and how I will never read any media about that world again. Even though I would have watched a new show set in a completely different world with the production quality I saw in the posters.
Currently Big Corp is spending billions on acquiring IPs which rather quickly end up having negative value. This is, to put it mildly, not good business sense.
I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.
There are probably more than 10x as many people who remember liking the lotr movies as a kid than who are close enough friends with a member of that fanatical core of Tolkien fans to have the show personally recommended to them and probably many times again as many people who are just generally aware of the popularity of LotR. That's the real benefit of the IP. Having some really dedicated fans help hype it up for a few weeks/months before it comes out doesn't hurt, but their job is pretty much done by the time it actually releases.
Intentionally aggravating your most passionate fans is a moronic business plan — like a mobile game that intentionally pisses off the “whales” to pursue casuals.
Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?
If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.
* You're getting old and your not spending as much money. * Getting 5$ from 100.000.000 people is better than getting 50$ 1.000.000 people. Especially if you can do it at lower costs. * Getting in new audiences to keep the franchise alive and healthy * And last but not least the average consumer is not interested in it being "true" to some kind of book or whatever. It has to make sense, but not in a true to the original author kind of way.