[Weekly Update] Two Trailers, One Great, One Awful.

Reminder that if you are pledging Patreon support via the iOS app, you'll soon see an increase in fees due to Apple's App Store policy. This fee does not apply to supporters who pledge through the Patreon website directly.

Next week, we'll change our billing method to subscription model as enforced by Patreon. We'll keep reminding everyone of the situation for a few more weeks due to how anti-user the whole thing is. Sorry for repeating myself.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Our next video would have been nearing completion if not for a certain camera store forgetting my repair order. It has been 2 months and I'm still waiting for them to fix my little ole garbage so that I can take some B-roll footage of it. Anyway, rant aside, what I mean is the video is close to finish. I'll be sharing the preview hopefully next week in our Discord server.

I've started working on a comprehensive look at Journey to the West adaptations, currently planned as a 2 parter series. I say comprehensive, but that's just by this channel's standard. There is no way for me to cover every single adaptation due to the sheer volume of it. I'll only cover the most culturally impactful and popular ones. So, if you have a particular Journey to the West adaptation you think deserves to be discussed, comment below!

I've also started gathering films for our Yakuza retrospective. I realized the game series may be more based on TV series of the 70s and 80s than it is adaptations of classic films. These TV shows, however, are pretty hard to find. If the game proves too divorced from the film genre, then I might just drop the game aspect entirely.

We are also now working on our year end recap video, bringing you the best Chinese films of 2024. The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon is technically a 2023 film, but it was released too late into the year for last year's recap, so we are including it this year. Twilight of the Warriors is the film I'm picking for Hong Kong this year, though an honorable mention goes to The Movie Emperor. And for Mainland China, I think I'll pick Johnny Keep Walking, a comedy film about Chinese work culture.

We have a lot of plans remaining for 2024. I'm excited to show you more.

MEDIA TALK

Have you seen the Minecraft movie trailer?

I hate that that's the first thing I asked. Anyway, if you haven't, just ignore it and go watch the Uzumaki animated series trailer. It looks absolutely fantastic and it's the most faithful adaptation to Junji Ito's style I've ever seen, miles better than the Netflix series.

Actually, don't watch it if you get scared easily. It's too good of a trailer. The body horror is super effective even in snippets.

Anyway, let's talk about these two trailers.

I think, in my limited speculation, these two trailers represent the polar opposite business model within the film and TV industry at the moment.

It's no secret WB is on a roll for questionable decisions. From the days of fast-tracking and mismanagement of the Justice League movie, to shelving the Batman Beyond animation, to refusing to release Batgirl film... If we count them all, we'll be here all day.

What Batman Beyond and Batgirl have in common is that neither IPs are considered widely appealing. They likely only attract the attention of comic book geeks. For a studio as large as WB, the projects is likely deemed too niche, and thus shelved without fanfare.

Whereas Justice League is such a massive name, the C-suit people seemed to think it is a sure fire success. Hoping to get their cash bonuses before company merger, the executives fast-tracked this film, resulting in a chaotic production process and an extremely undercooked film. It made back twice its production budget, but is failed to cover the additional cost of promotion.

Seemingly failing to learn, or perhaps the cash bonus was worth it, WB is doing the same thing with Minecraft. Just from the trailer, you can see the low moral: Everything is done to the bare minimum. Jack Black is literally just Jack Black with a blue shirt. The characters are composited into the scene with flat lighting and no aesthetic cohesion. All of the animals look like they were first drafts modelled after AI images. And the world is static with only surface level resemblance to Minecraft.

Think back to the world of Detective Pikachu. The trailer depicts a world brimming with life. And now think about Minecraft... Yeah.

If I have to guess, this seemed to be a classic case of a film made by committee, without a cohesive vision from a singular filmmaker. It's executives making a film using the labor of VFX artists, one of the only people in the industry to have yet to unionize (still). In the pursue of cranking out a product, the business people have removed the artist from the art.

This is where the trailer for Uzumaki comes in.

In the past, we have multiple animated projects based on the works of Junji Ito. Both Junji Ito Collection and Junji Ito Maniac suffer from the exact same problem: There's not enough time to create animations that captures the details of It's work. Frequently, horror imageries are relegated to a single static image, all in an effort to save some production time.

But then comes Uzumaki, a series announced back in 2019, and delayed multiple times due to the pandemic and production needing more time to perfect everything. The result speaks for itself, as the trailer basically shows you all of the horror sequences proudly. It's a big spoiler, but I guess only Ito fans are watching the trailer anyway. Unless something catastrophic happens, this series will likely stand the test of time, and be referenced back to and be viewed for years to come.

It's the opposite to WB's disposable product business.

Being a YouTuber, this is a topic that's very relatable to me. Most sponsors only really care about the first 30 days of the video's release. And payment is based on how many views you can rack up in the short term. This is yet another force that incentivize content creators to make the same "sure fire hit" as WB does. Taking time with your video offers very little return in this business model.

This is also why children's trend chasing videos are so lucrative on YouTube. By making your videos the topic of discussion in school yards, by quickly replacing your older videos with new ones, you create a pressure for audience to tune in as soon as possible, thus maximizing the views in the first 30 days.

It's a game I deeply despise, but can only partially ignore.

Thanks for supporting me so that we can survive without playing that game.

Anyway, depending on how long the camera store will take, we may have a video soon or in two weeks. Either way, I hope you are having a great September. I'll see you soon in our next update.