Summer 2024 Media Winners & Losers

Deadpool, Brats, NBA Rights, and... Cookies?

Here at Reason & Whimsy, we’re not immune to the benefits of the standard editorial calendar. And since Labor Day is behind us and Yearnings Season has started (call back!), we’ve decided to join the rest of the punditry in recapping “the Summer.”

So here’s our first annual look at the Media Winners & Losers of Summer 2024.

Winners

Intellectual Property

The top seven movies at the summer domestic box office were sequels (or in the case of Twisters, a Squeboot) and Love Island USA was the most talked about TV show.  But more importantly, the IP exploiters (not a perjorative) have stopped being embarrassed about their aspirations for middlebrow dominance. Marvel Studios’ head Kevin Feige defended sequels as “an absolute pillar of the industry.”

Even the content is getting less apologetic: Deadpool vs Wolverine is a threequel that makes fun of and purports to save a franchise (the MCU) while simultaneously memorializing another movie franchise (Fox’s X-Men movies) and serving as a two-hour inside joke between its stars and their other business (Ryan Reynolds’ many ventures). And then there was the souvenir popcorn bucket that was an intentionally dirty allusion to the unintentionally dirty souvenir popcorn bucket for pre-summer sequel Dune II.

Explicitly Non-Explicit Sex Jokes

See: the above popcorn bucket. But also, the rise and continued rise of the Hawk Tuah girl. I think she’s hilarious, but the impetus for her fifteen minutes was born out of a particularly 2020s media world in which our algorithmic feeds administer very strict content guidelines that are effortlessly bypassed with creative use of vocabulary.

Some things used to be too fellatory to talk about in mainstream media, but these are now totally ok as long as they’re hidden in plain sight. (FWIW I think this is a good thing)

Live Sports

ESPN, NBC, and Amazon will spend $76 billion on NBA media rights. The Olympics got blockbuster ratings by finally embracing its sprawling, in-the-moment potential. The WNBA has broadened the momentum from Spring’s Caitlinsanity to reach new levels of fan interest.

But sports importance to the media business is not new news. Tbh the only reason I included was as a set up to our…  

Losers

Warner Bros Discovery

They low-balled the NBA when they had exclusive negotiating rights, and then when they got outbid they sued the league, saying the company “will suffer irreparable harm” if it loses the rights because it will lead to “the loss of a unique and valuable asset, and loss of goodwill, key talent, subscribers, and incalculable fees and advertising revenues.” In other words, they’ve scored the ultimate corporate own goal. (WBD also suffered through a terrible summer at the movies, after leading in the Spring thanks to Godzilla x Kong and Popcorn Bucket 1.)

The Entire Capitalist Notion of Meritocracy

David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery and primary scorer of that NBA own goal, got a 25% pay raise to $50 million dollars last year. Amazingly, that was a lot less than the $247 million he got in 2021 before he disastrously merged Discovery with what was left of Time Warner.

Speaking of demeritocracy…

Elon Musk

Not because he had a particularly bad summer, just because he’s a loser.

(Adjacent non-media winners: lawyers’ who get to bill hours for performative lawsuits)

Conversations About Cookie Re-De-Deprecation

At this point, the literally never-ending saga of Chrome’s cookie deprecation is too drawn out to recap.

(For those readers not in advertising: imagine if you were a home builder, and your biggest contractor kept announcing that he was going to change what kind of nails he used, but then kept delaying the incorporation of said nails, but you still spent hundreds of hours discussing with all the other contractors what you were going to do about the new nails instead of worrying about the design of the house. Only instead of being a home builder, you’re a CMO.)

Trends

Trends are Brat. Should brat be capitalized? Does the capitalization make it an adjective? Anyway, trends are Brat. Not that I know what that means because brat, sorry, Brat is beyond understanding. It’s a vibe. Or a lifestyle. Or a delineation of a very specific spirit that supposedly marked this summer.

Trends usually begin within a specific community and gain cultural steam as more people embrace it. But Brat came into being as a fully-formed trend, delivered with a sense of inevitability by Charlie XCX. The Benjamin Button of trends, instantaneously relevant and ever-present, only to immediately begin decomposing via, appropriation, over-analysis, and misapplication.

What’s a trendspotter supposed to do when everyone immediately knows about a trend upon its genesis? Easy, #BeBrat.  

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This Week’s Whimsies

If this recap wasn’t recappy enough for you, here’s a recap of all of the “of the summer”s from this summer.  My favorite: THREE different professional publications called “the flip flop” the Shoe of the Summer.

If you’re thinking about starting a newsletter (who isn’t?), then this is a good breakdown between doing it through LinkedIn or an email service.

A very quick read about Umberto Eco’s notion of the Antilibrary, which addresses the importance of unread books.

There’s some powerful tidbits (and a bit more on Brat summer) in this slightly too-judgmental take on the “Mainstreaming of Loserdom,” aka staying home and doing nothing.

Why are the hiatuses between TV show seasons getting so long?