I should name this. Yield-rate/next-peak tradeoff under fixed minimum quality. If you try to increase yield rate, next peak will be lower, and vice versa. Or more precisely, the next “all time high” (ATH) will be a smaller improvement over last. Diminishing marginal altitude.
Conversation
Even money doesn’t break this tradeoff, which is a rare failure of money to solve problems outside of death. Money allows you to add a new dimension (depth/difficulty) but not break basic yield-rate/next-peak tradeoff. The *only* way is to lower quality bar and open up direction.
1
4
MCU is a great example in high-money end. MCU lost top property (Spider-Man) to Sony due to bad contracts. So they dropped bar and made things work with second-string properties. When that had stall problems (Hulk 2, Thor 2), they dropped bar again (Guardians of Galaxy)! Gutsy.
2
2
14
By contrast, Sony failed to capitalize on the momentum of the first 2 Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies and had to deal with MCU eventually. They only belatedly figured out the p,ay book sort of, with Venom stand-alone.
1
4
DC otoh, had no such corporate conflicts to navigate. The Nolan Batman trilogy was better than the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. The DCEU should have been *easier* to build. But Superman fumbled etc. They even screwed up a naive copying of the bar-lowering trick (Suicide Squad)
1
6
Wonder Woman kinda bailed them out partly, but couldn’t salvage the justice league level of the franchise. I haven’t yet watched Harley Quinn.
2
2
Point of this is to underline the lesson that money doesn’t solve a guts problem. You and I don’t have billions to throw at our crappy little blog-scale extended universes, or the talent of a Kevin Feige, or the blessing-in-disguise of being barred from using our top IP. But...
1
9
We still face the exact same yield-rate/next-peak challenge, stall problems, and the courage challenge of counter-intuitively lowering bar and diving to get out of a stall.
2
9
There’s also a “beginner mind” and sunk-cost-fallacy side to this analysis that I’ll let you work out for yourself.
2
6
Replying to
Do you have opinions about the relative importance of the context for “release” to these dynamics? e.g. What are the substantive differences between dropping your bar for prototyping v. releasing, or reframing releases as “beta” and so on?
1
Replying to
Seems relevant to maintaining existing customers if by innovation or framing you can access "more forgiving" contexts.
1

