It truly is bizarre to watch. It reminds me of the ethically questionable business strategy of buying a premium brand, slashing prediction quality and costs, and then raking in profits before people catch on. That strategy is viable because of cost-cutting though, while many of these franchises are setting records for production costs despite their mediocre quality.

All of these strategies make sense given the financial environment we live in, with a money supply that constantly increases via debt creation. There’s something like an arms race for attention. The combination of this arms race and unlimited financing means we have production costs for for one hour of entertainment in the tens of even hundreds of millions.

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.

>From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.

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.

How well is the Star Wars franchise doing these days?

You wouldn't believe it, but fantastical.

I think they also buy these IPs for the cultural impact. With these massive brands like Star Wars/Marvel/Game of Thrones, people get a strong sense of FOMO because they know everyone else will be talking about the new show or movie and they don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen it. These names are so big that they influence pop culture, and that's why media companies are paying huge sums for them.

That only works for so long. It's burning money for warmth instead of spending a bit of time to buy firewood.