Disney and Pokémon won’t take my money: How digital stores killed the digital stars
Pokémon: Emerald running in my old old Gameboy Advanced, Pokémon: Diamond in my less old (but more decrepit) DS, Pokémon: Ultra Moon in my old New 3DS XL, and Pokémon: Scarlet in my not-that-old-but-feeling-older-every-day Switch.
By the time you’re reading this, Willow will be gone, but before I can morn the 2022 sequel to the oft-forgotten 1988 film, I need to talk about the single most valuable media franchise in the world.
Star Wars is about $16 million less valuable than Hello Kitty, and Hello Kitty is about $16 million less valuable than the most treasured media property in the world: Pokémon.
Though the Pokémon Company has accrued bombad buckets of cash, the company won’t take my money.
I myself am a big fan of Pokémon. I collected the cards for years, watched the anime on and off through childhood, and I’ve played every Pokémon video game released. Except one.
The only set of mainline Pokémon video games I haven’t played are Pokémon White 2 and Pokémon Black 2. (The brand likes releasing two versions of ostensibly the same game at once to sell more copies.) These game came out in fall of 2012 for the Nintendo DS, which I own, at a price point of about $35, which I have in my bank account.
By January of 2013, the games had sold 7.5 million copies together, meaning that — counting them as one product — they probably would have at least come close to numbering in the top 10 best selling games of that year. (Almost certainly in the top 20.)
Now, if I wanted the 10th bestselling book of 2012 (The Fifty Shades of Gray Trilogy boxset) of the 10th highest-grossing movie of 2012 (Men in Black 3), I could order a new copy online right now, either physical or digital, probably for no more than $20. Better yet, I could probably spend a day looking for them in a used stores in town and get all three Fifty Shades books and Men in Black 3 for $10 and the price of gas. And even better still, I could go to the library and find them both, free to borrow.
Pokémon is the most successful media franchise in the world. Yet there’s no way for me to give Nintendo and the Pokémon Company money for the game I want.
In fact, the best way to play the game in a legal fashion is to spend ~$100 on a used copy.
Unfortunately, this is business as usual in the world of video games. Games preservation has never been as good as it should be and Nintendo/Pokémon in particular are rarely interested in making their popular older products — items released 10 or more years ago — readily available on newer devices.
Nintendo proved this in March when the company effectively delisted about 1,000 games by taking down the 3DS/WiiU eshops where a number of games were exclusively available. Some of those games were less than five years old, many are difficult to find physical copies of, and some of those games were only available on that now defunct service.
Painful though that loss was, I’ve got to say though, making it impossible to watch a T.V. show just six months after releasing it takes the de-listing cake for me.
Me watching Willow on May 23, 2023, six months after it was released on Disney-Plus. Taking a picture, since it’ll last longer.
On May 18, Deadline reported that the Willow show, along with dozens of other shows, will be removed from Disney-Plus and Hulu on May 26, 2023 in order to save money. Willow, for those unfamiliar, is the 35-years-later sequel to the Lucasfilm movie of the same name.
I heard about this removal a day or two after the report came out and I’ve been trying to binge the relatively new, eight-episode television show before it disappears.
I’ve so far found it enjoyable. Like the 1988 film, it’s a whimsical, tropey, fantasy adventure. I think the cast is a lot of fun, I love the sets and locations. I’m just halfway through as of writing and I don’t know that it elevates or recontextualizes the original in a particularly deep way, but I’ve been having a lot of fun!
Even if it’s not life-changing, there are people in my life I’d recommend it to! I could see myself rewatching it down the line if it wasn’t about to walk out of my life forever.
From a certain point of view, none of this is new.
Disney is known for “The Disney Vault,” a notion that creates artificial scarcity for products. It could be argued that removing Willow — a series made specifically for Disney-Plus and released just six months ago — is no different than putting a movie into the Disney Vault.
It could be further argued that Lucasfilm, even before Disney’s 2012 purchasing of the company for $4 billion, was famous for restricting content. After all, it’s still pretty much impossible to legally watch the cut of the original three Star Wars films that first appeared in theaters on anything newer than a VHS tape.
But the promise of digital media is (or was) that media is easier to access than ever. Yet media is at its most disposable at this moment. That said, I don’t mean “disposable” has to be quite as negative as the connotation of the word might imply.
Working On A Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown is the best book I read last year and the copy I own was a gift from a friend. I value this book very, very much.
Yet, because of the age we live in, when I leant the book to another friend and the cover got bent, that friend offered to buy me a new copy. I value the physical book and the text itself — one could say that the fact it was a gift offers it an ethereal value as well — but the item itself is disposable in so far as a functionally identical item could be found if need called for it. (“Replaceable” is perhaps a better term for the object itself.)
Before printing presses, the number of books I currently have in my little personal library would have constitute a treasure trove. In the ‘60s, me complaining about not being able to watch a film or show at home would have sounded absurd. (British television in the 60s was famous for “junking” episodes of television — classic shows like Doctor Who have lost episodes because archive tapes were recorded over to save space and resources.) In the ‘90s, the idea of digitally preserving video games would have been an impossible task.
We live in an age where steaming services and digital storefronts should largely be able to remove the idea of disposability. It would be great to know a digital version of a given piece of popular entertainment or important information would be generally available, yet I feel the need to pay for plastic and polycarbonate versions of the things I love for fear they might evaporate without warning, even when the media I love comes from some of the most prolific media makers in the world. (This often, of course, results in me giving more money to the people who make the decision to make that media disappear.)
I’ve got the Clone Wars movie and season one through six, but season seven is trapped in Disney-Plus limbo.
There’s a question you might be asking now based on what I’ve written. Why would an entertainment company pay million of dollars to make a product exclusive to its streaming service only to remove it six months later?
I have an alternate question that probably has a similar answer. Why would an entertainment company pay millions of dollars to make a product exclusive to its streaming service only to never release it at all?
I pose that questions because that’s what happened earlier this year with Warner-Discovery and HBO Max.
To make a weird story short: dozens of shows, including items original to the service, were pulled from HBO Max late last year. On top of that, movies — specifically, movies that were recorded, edited, and nearly (or completely) ready to release — were put on a shelf to never be released. These weren’t necessarily small films without an inbuilt fan base, this included a Batgirl movie and a Scooby-Doo movie.
You might imagine it would cost more to not release a movie or show, but if that’s why you’re thinking then you haven’t considered five very important words: tax write offs and residuals.
The way many releases and streaming services work means that if a show isn’t on a particular platform, that platform doesn’t have to worry about paying the people who made it every time you want to access it.
It feels worth mentioning that as I write this, we are in the midst of a writers’ strike in which screenwriters are demanding pay increases and that streaming services adjust how residuals are implemented as that style of viewing becomes the go-to way to watch.
Of course, if you ask Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav why writers should probably be paid more, his belief is that “a love for the business and the love for working” will lead to the end of the strike. (I’ll add that Zaslav was apparently paid about $40 million last year.)
The entertainment business has always been a business. The people making money at the top have always had an eye on the bottom line while those at the bottom labor over the art itself.
I just wish throwing art into the garbage wasn’t somehow more cost effective than selling it.