In the Era of Streaming Nothing You Love Is Safe
On May 26, Disney+ is removing season one of Willow from their streaming platforms, along with a whole host of other shows and movies. In the era of streaming nothing you love is safe.
The Willow TV show, for those who don’t know, is a series spun off of the movie of the same name from the 80s, starring Val Kilmer, Janne Whalley, and Warwick Davis. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen it. As far as I can tell it is the kind of weird, campy fantasy movie with a heart of gold that the 80s were well known for. And I have a mixed history with shows and movies that I love getting reboots, so I understand that if you did love the movie Willow, the TV show might not be for you. But I loved it. I can’t begin to tell you if it’s good or not - that’s above my paygrade. But I can tell you that it is great.
Willow the TV show follows the next generation in the Willow universe - the children of the original heroes, the special baby they were trying to save (per IMDB), and their friends are ready to head off on their own adventure. It’s got queer romance, it’s got sword fights, it's got a training montage, it’s got bonds of sisterhood forged in fire. It's charming, it has a great soundtrack, and a pretty fun hero's journey type story. The first episode premiered on November 30, 2022. Disney+ gave it six months to do whatever it needed to do, and apparently it didn’t.
I am not a business person (even though I work in sales - don’t ask) so I’m not going to try to make any budgetary argument about this. I don’t know how many streams it takes to make something worthwhile. I don’t know how much it costs them to keep hosting shows, and I don’t know what it cost them to make the show in the first place. And even if I did know how to do all that math, streaming services don’t release their data with any degree of consistency so I wouldn’t have all the variables in the first place.
This isn’t really about this specific situation with Willow, though. Maybe that was a good business decision, maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes TV shows get canceled. Sometimes movie franchises don’t finish. Sometimes there is incredible fan energy behind reviving something that had once been canceled until you kill off your romantic lead and effectively destroy any chance that anyone may be interested in it ever again. Sometimes negotiations breakdown because studios refuse to pay women as much as they pay men and so ten years of romantic tension go up in smoke because when you don’t get paid enough you’ve gotta walk. The intersection of art and capitalism has always been fraught, and has always been more comprehensible in some instances than others.
At its heart, however, storytelling is a fundamentally human endeavor in crisis. The Writers Guild of America is currently on strike because many of their writers can’t afford to live on the “salaries” they are paid to create the shows and movies that we all fall in love with. Librarians and teachers are subject to the whims of the most bigoted among us and can be fired or jailed if someone doesn’t like the books they find on the shelves. News outlets once renowned for some of the most interesting, evocative and impactful reporting closed down most of their news and editorial divisions in favor of AI generated, sponsored content.
Because I work on the business side of publishing, I’m privy to the inherent contradictions in art and capitalism everyday. The goal of my company is to make money, and while we’d like to believe that good books and good business practices make more money than the alternative, that isn’t always the case. Just about every publishing company is filled to the brim with people who want to create and sell rich, diverse, compelling stories, to support and build new creators, to make sure that those creators are paid fairly, and that the stories we put out into the world help us understand ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. And almost all of us have had our salaries paid by selling a book that we fundamentally disagree with.
The goal of a business is to make money and increasingly for that money to go to those at the top rather than those who produce the work. We’ve seen this in every industry, where corporations cry deficits and poor sales and then turn around and provide giant bonuses and stock buybacks to those in power. While writers and baristas and check out clerks and assistants struggle to make rent and buy groceries, executives lament business challenges from million dollar homes because they couldn’t turn them into billion dollar homes. Jeff Bezos has a 420 foot superyacht that cost $500 million dollars, while workers in his warehouses aren’t allowed to use the bathroom and the algorithm on his site is killing the midlist novel.
And I don’t think the answer is to tell businesses that they can’t make financial decisions - in spite of my limited understanding of the internet, it is not apparently endless. Sometimes it makes sense for shows to get canceled. But every day we’re presented with less and less evidence that businesses are acting in good faith. We’ve designed an economic system that turns our stories into commodities, and a political system that turns our stories into weapons, both filled to the brim with people who are committed to using those systems to make money at our expense, and to punish people who try to build something new.
I don’t have a good answer for this, except the answer I always have. We need a world that values our existence, our experience, and our work. We need a government that solves problems, rather than creates them. We need to tell stories and make ourselves heard.
And we all need to go watch Willow on Disney+ before May 26.