What would be your top 3 biggest entertainment blunders in the last 15 years that had they done it better it would've made a lot more money?
Obviously without saying, the virus that is DEI/obsession with representation has ruined a lot of stuff, but here are my top 3.
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Not having Luke training Jedi students as one of the opening scenes of episode (could have easily had Han/Luke/Leia and maybe Lando reunite at the beginning, also you could've had Rey be one of his top students and the other Jedi provide an outlet for future stories)
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Not doing an inspirational Superman movie with Henry Cavill (speaks for itself)
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Marvel deciding to follow the All-New All Different crap instead of years of better source material for their movies. Why not do a Kirby inspired F4 or the X-Men, Silver Sable, Black Cat, actual Defenders, etc. But of course it makes more sense to push characters who are self inserts whose comic books keep getting cancelled like how they are really pushing Ms. Marvel to be the face of the company. (I know the comic book industry has had issues in the past, but to constantly push crappy female characters or race swapped characters that nobody asked for as well as telling actual comic book fans to piss off is beyond insanity)
Honorable mention: letting some moron showrunner be in charge of Wheel of Time when he cares more about girl power/lgbt representation.
Not sure it cost them money but not having Jon Snow fight the Night King was dumb or at least him and Ayra fight him together.
Lucasfilm not continuing the EU in it's own continuity instead of telling a group of very loyal fans to piss off.
What are yours?
For anime:
Not having a good adaptation for Berserk was a travesty. 2016 Berserk was an abomination. To date, the only good adaptation imo was from 1997, and its got a massive cliffhanger for an ending. Everyone would've loved it, it would've printed money if they only knew what they were doing and didn't screw it up so horrendously on every level.
The first season of this anime blew up like it was nobody's business and an anime like this would've sent the otaku industry into overdrive. Could also replace this with "giving One Punch Man S2 to JC Staff" which was also pretty bad.
IMO this might be the most egregious one on this list because it fucked the possibility of an entire subgenre's revival. Mecha works have been in the toilet for over the last decade if you like anything besides Gundam. Darling in the Franxx singlehandedly revived interest in the genre on a massive scale across the entire fandom, and then screwed it all up. I wonder what kinds of great mecha we could've gotten as a result if it only stuck the landing. Instead it was like a rain cloud in the desert that got everyone to run to it, only to have everyone die of thirst while it dissipated.
For games:
They have royally fucked all their properties into the ground, even when the communities still have interest for the games, its like the company works against them to ensure that the games are destroyed and the communities made irrelevant. They've turned Diablo into something soulless. WoW has been bleeding people forever. Overwatch is a literal joke. Warcraft 3 I don't even need to explain. Starcraft 1 they screwed over the entire Korean side of things and really harmed the game there (which is a big deal). Starcraft 2 might be the strongest example of this since they basically rode high to start, and gradually with each change they did, they just made things worse, and they screwed over the community until it literally languished in the dirt.
Literally all they have to do is go back to their roots and just make a good FF game that follows the series conventions and everyone will probably go crazy about it, but instead they want to experiment and jerk the consumer around, and their goodwill is slowly evaporating. They can still make good DQ games so everyone knows they are capable of it, but they basically choose not to do so.
They've spent too much time milking Persona 5 that hype around a Persona 6 would likely be stale by the time it arrives. On top of this, they've lost massive names and talent over the last few years that would make the quality of such a game likely not worth it in the first place. By the time it supposedly arrives, it might be too late on the Switch platform for it to really blow up (and I certainly can't see it blowing up on the Soystation 5 but who knows).
I'm going to disagree with you on everyone would have loved it. I think it was a pure lose-lose no matter how they did and that's why they only did Golden Age every time. Because its the only one without large amounts of nudity and obscene horrific violence. Its only saved for the very end where its climactic. Its the same reason why Wyald is always cut from the adaptions as well.
Berserk is packed full of child torture/mutilation/death, violent rape/nudity, and lots of other extreme stuff. The kind that would get them a lot of terrible attention and pressure put on them to change it. But cutting any of it would kill a lot of callbacks and important motivations, as well as infuriate fans. Look at what happened when they cut Lost Children from one of them, despite that being basically impossible to animate without getting controversy.
Its just not a worthy risk, especially with something as sacred and held in high regard as Berserk where fucking it up will basically end your career. Especially now with Miura being dead.
Its a seinen anime, it would've been fine.
Worst case, they could've made it an OVA like Hellsing Ultimate, which is beloved and had plenty of extreme content, but even the 97 TV anime showed things like the rapes and child murder and torture.
Plus, rape/nudity and extreme content is very popular in anime. Redo of Healer was one of the most viewed anime in the year it came out by a country mile.
When I say everyone, I mean "everyone in the target market/demographics", I'm not including retards who had no interest in Berserk in the first place.
stop, i can only get so erect
Redo of Healer was exactly what I thought of when writing that.
Its also downright tame compared just to background elements in Berserk. A violent rape is downright nothing compared to an army created from throwing pregnant women into a demonic soup so their babies can rip out of them. Redo was also barely watched for the "story." That's why the majority of its audience was female, it was entirely for porn because its nothing but "violent rape" over and over. Which is why the controversy to it didn't last long.
I read some of the manga years ago. The more "erotic" elements were massively turned up for the anime, clearly knowing the audience, while the more "brutal and extreme" parts were tuned down. At least for the bits I got through (I never got far passed meeting the bird girl).
Whereas anything from Lost Children or the Rape Horse or the Qilpoth section has nothing erotic to it nor any ability to "tune it down" to be less brutal, but is absolutely required for the story to progress.
Maybe I'm wrong, but its a consideration I can see being part of the reason why. Especially with a series as massive as Berserk, wherein trying to do more would be a decade+ commitment to get through all the 42 volumes. Considering the last two adaptations basically made no money, it would be near impossible to convince an investor to fund such a thing on pure passion.
I think you're underestimating the female audience for Berserk. You know about IP-themed cafes in Japan, right (e.g. the Sailor Moon cafe, the pokemon cafe, etc.) ? Apparently the female to male ratio in the Berserk cafe is one of the highest, iirc there are more females there than males, but its at least a roughly even split. I presume some of them are probably fujos who ship Griffith and Guts in some yaoi shit though.
Also, the Redo of Healer audience was only slightly more female than male on streaming platforms in Japan (only metric that we know of). Elsewhere, its basically unknown, but what we do know is that its damn popular.
On 9anime alone it accumulated tens of million views iirc, and that's just a pirated streaming site.
As for the edgier brutal elements, Hellsing Ultimate literally had an (admittedly brief) scene where babies literally are being cannibalized by vampires while a city full of civilians gets slaughtered. Granted, Hellsing was an OVA but still. Even if they can't show all of it in a TV series, they can at least show most of it to where people can understand what's going on.
And yet Made in Abyss exists, which is about as pedo as you can get, but somebody still agreed to animate that.
Which is synonymous with and more well known for its nude lolis and perversion than anything about the series, to the point where it actively keeps it from being more popular because few will admit to being a fan.
That's not a bad thing. I've never watched it for precisely the same reason.
Regarding NGNL, I've always wondered if the source material sucks or flames out or something after the first season's worth of material. I've had the novels for a while but have yet to get around to reading them. Really hard to conceive of why they haven't continued it.
I remember when the movie came out back in like 2017 (how the fuck was that 6.5 years ago....) and momentarily revived the hype around the series. I was sure they'd follow it up with a season 2 within a year or two but no dice.
I've read the next story archs in the Light Novel, that could cover 2 13-ep seasons... It's solid. The fights against the other nation-states, the elaborate measures and plots, it's all done well enough to be a very well received anime.
One interesting thing is the Light Novel artwork has both Sora and Shiro as very different than the anime/manga. Those portray them as beautiful. But in the LN artwork, barring one or two one-off images, they've both got sunken zombie-like eyes, gaunt figures (that gets better as the series goes on), and both are always portraying not just the cockiness of the anime, but active disdain and disgust in almost every appearance. It made you empathize with Imanity, with Steph, that they're definitely not the images of leadership.
Kurami best girl.
Well that's good to hear. Maybe it will happen one day. The series hasn't really faded into obscurity yet despite no pulse on the anime front since the movie. The biggest obstacle to another season is probably the author being slow. They'd definitely want a couple books coming out close to a second season if possible so they could ride the wave for more book sales.
Sounds like standard anime tactics. Good looks are more of a draw. I was just thinking about this the other day with Kusuriya no Hitorigoto. The novel goes out of its way to describe Maomao as being relatively plain, and I think the LN illustrations do an okay job of portraying that, but the manga goes ahead and makes her breathtakingly gorgeous. On one hand I like faithful portrayals but it's hard to complain about the pretty depictions.
Great taste.
Supposedly there was a plagiarism/tracing controversy around the manga, but that's all I know about.
blizzard really perfectly embodied the phrase: "oh how the mighty have fallen"
at least it wasn't Index S3 levels of bad, where anime-onlies by episode 5 had no idea what the fuck is going on and who 80% of the characters are
And had someone with the bright idea to translate "honored elder sister" as "sissy". Which is used, like, every three sentences.
oh, that's been around since Railgun S1 official "translation", pretty much entirely changed the way Kuroko treats Misaka compared to original lmao
What did they do with the Beserk adaptation? One of the mangas I plan to read
Terrible, terrible CGI-only adaptation with garbage quality, choppy animation and ear-screechingly bad audio work too, the aesthetic/artstyle is totally ruined for a masterwork like Berserk. There's too much wrong with it besides that but those are the two obvious areas, it would take a full-on dissection to explain everything wrong with it.
If you want to watch an adaptation of it, Berserk 1997 is the way to go imo but its still a "read the manga" ending.
They've adapted the same one arc three separate times, with I think only one of them even going like a single volume passed it (while skipping an entire other arc to get there). With each version cutting or changing huge bits that would fuck them over later.
But once you read it, you'll see why no one wants to touch it.