Narrative Warfare: The Waning of the Hellmouth

Hollywood is not invincible anymore.

Neither, quite frankly, are their counterparts overseas.

The technology-driven decentralization trend has long eroded the business of entertainment in film and television, resisted only by institutional inertia and aging power players either unwilling or unable to adapt to what's shifting under their feet.

As we have seen with literature, written and sequential, film and TV--despite being more labor and capital intensive--are also location-independent business operations. You can do pre-production wherever, shoot wherever, edit and do post-production wherever, and release globally to everyone simultaneously. Financing, of course, is already international; it's just getting easier for plebs to do it.

Groups like Corridor Digital demonstrate that small teams can do what formerly took huge effects houses far more time, material, and manpower to accomplish these days. Bigger players in the Hellmouth are slowly realizing that they can, and must, diversify out from under the decaying instituion of the Hellmouth; the push by legacy actors into streaming shows it, but I'm going to point out that this is not a race only for giant megacorporations.

You, indie movie man, can play with them and win.

However, to win you have to sacrifice any notion of playing on the pitches that the Hellmouth established. No Oscars, no BAFTAs, no Palm d'Ors, no Sundance, and don't think you can rely on YouTube or Netflix or Amazon either. They may play ball with you for a while, but if you become a threat to their Establishment partners that they can't ingore they can and will screw you.

Fortunately, this too has workarounds in place. Processors, hosting, etc. are easier now than before; Nick Fuentes launched Cozy.tv recently and (wisely) is growing his streaming platform slowly so he can scale up as his revenue increases without needing to worry about external backers demanding control in return for support, so if that goofball can make it work you can.

Which means that you, Indie Movie Man, have an opportunity here.

Several, actually.

Do you have a talent with making nice with local authorities to faciliate production? Guess what? There's a business niche for that; the expat scene has several such businesses for their needs, and what you do is like that with a different emphasis, so check out how they operate and adapt to suite. Are you like Corridor? Consider make yourself or your team a freelance SFX house that other Indie Movie Men outsource to. Stunts and fights your thing? You already know how a lot of folks in that world operate; you'd adapt to working in the new decentralized paradigm easily. Same with actors; just add "learn more languages to fluency" to your professional development agenda.

Just like OldPub, the Hellmouth got away with their antics for a long as they did because they were gatekeepers at a bottleneck. That chokepoint is all but gone now, and nothing made that clearer than the rise of indie news media that coincided with easy digital cameras and unbiquitous Internet access, so this move in entertainment was inevitable. I'm just recognizing a trend for what it is.

And, like the revival of the Pulp Era spirit in indie authors, there shall soon be made obvious a similar revival of the earnest and sincere entertainment of yesteryear. The example of Axanar proves that all the ingrediants are already on the table; we need new material with the right appeal to make this truly jump off and have Normies take notice- and with it, stop putting up with Death Cult humiliation rituals wearing the skinsuits of old IPs.