Familytherapyxxx 23 08 22 Renee Rose And Venus ●
On August 23, 2022, the global box office was dominated by a film that perfectly encapsulated the industry’s reliance on established Intellectual Property (IP): Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Although released earlier in the summer, late August saw the film still breaking records. On or around this date, Maverick overtook Titanic to become the seventh-highest-grossing film in domestic box office history. This success provided a crucial data point for the industry: it proved that the theatrical experience was not dead, but that audiences required an "event" level spectacle to return to cinemas.
Simultaneously, the industry was gearing up for a pivot toward "watercooler" television. The previous week had seen the release of HBO’s House of the Dragon, and by August 23, the discourse surrounding the Game of Thrones prequel was at a fever pitch. This highlighted a strategic shift; while film relied on nostalgia (Top Gun), television was leaning heavily on expansive universe-building to retain subscribers. familytherapyxxx 23 08 22 renee rose and venus
Family therapy is helpful when:
For most of the 20th century, entertainment was a campfire. Whether it was MASH*, Seinfeld, or American Idol, a significant percentage of the country (or the world) watched the same thing at the same time. Popular media was a binding agent. It gave us water-cooler moments, shared jokes, and a common vocabulary. On August 23, 2022, the global box office
That campfire has now been replaced by a million screens. On August 22, 2023, you could have watched:
All of these were “entertainment.” None of them overlapped. The shared text had dissolved. All of these were “entertainment
If algorithms are the new auteurs, then curators—human filters—have become unexpectedly valuable. Newsletters (like this one), Discord servers, reaction channels, and “watch with me” streams are thriving because they offer what the algorithm cannot: context, taste, and shared intention.
We are exhausted by infinite choice. We want someone to say, “Watch this. It matters.”
That is why, on that August day in 2023, the most interesting entertainment company wasn’t Disney or Netflix. It was Dropout (formerly CollegeHumor), a small, ad-free, subscription-based service built entirely on improvisers and tabletop gamers. No algorithms. No quarterly growth mandates. Just people making things for other people.
