Jennifer Salke is probably sulking now as the CEO of amazon is demanding answers for her insatiable spending habits. If Disney and Salke could get in a spending fight, I seriously wonder who would win.
As we know, Hollywood has been having a bad year. This has been the summer of the flopbuster with only Barbie and Oppenheimer being the major successes (I’m not counting the Super Mario Bros movie that came out since that didn’t come out this summer). Besides Disney, Amazon has been having a tough time in streaming, creating shows that no one watched because they were so abysmal, the most famous flop being Rings of Power, a show that cost them a billion dollars and had a 37% completion rate.
Thanks to the Amazon CEO, several shows (though sadly excluding Rings of Power Season 2) have been canceled because they are simply burning money. The first was Peripheral, which had a budget of $175 million; the second was A League of Their Own which had a budget of $250 million. On top of that, Salke has been revealed by insiders to have bought a ton of movies and T.V. shows that did poorly in the box office just because they have famous actors in them (that explains why movies are so hard to find for family movie night on Amazon). It seems that her mantra of “Amazon is a place for talent” is failing hilariously as she is slowly running out of money to buy things at the candy store.
So what does this mean for the viewer? For one thing, hopefully we’ll get more honest viewership ratings. Obviously, Amazon has proven to be the type of company to cover those up, even from the employees making the shows. The fact that the Amzon CEO is getting pissed should tell you something is seriously wrong and not all is what it seems.
Secondly, this should be a signal to Amazon to fire Salke effective immediatly and find a someone better. If they can’t find someone who is concerned primarily with pleasing the audience – not this imaginary “modern audience” – and doesn’t just follow their feelings, then their platform is going to continue to plummet.
Thirdly, this should teach Amazon to hire better writers, producers, and directors. While Salke is the main problem, the crappy writers, directors, and producers also play a huge part of why these shows are tanking. If you have too many writers in the room, your story isn’t going to be coherent. You can tel the difference between one writers work and another’s work just by its voice and general aesthetic. For example, you would never think the work of C.S. Lewis was written by J.R.R Tolkien since they sound so different. It takes a very talented writer to be able to write a story that mimics abother writers voice. Since no one in Hollywood is that talented, it’ll be better for them to stick with one person in the writing room instead of having twenty that can’t agree with each other on what’s supposed to happen next.
Lastly, this should tell Amazon to stop race-baiting the audience and insulting them. I would say that is one of the biggest problems of the Salke era is the amount of fan-baiting that has happened. While it is effective in getting people to know about your show because of the buzz it creates, the buzz is often negative and in more cases than one drives away the viewers. If Amazon is able to fix these problems, then it might be able to regain some of the money they’ve lost.
The Tanuki Corner 
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