The phrase that has stayed with me is not “underperformed,” although that cold euphemism carries its own familiar chill. It is not “ancillary revenue,” “portfolio game,” “core properties,” “consumer engagement” or even the now-inescapable “flywheel.” The phrase I cannot stop thinking about is Disney chief financial officer Hugh Johnston’s description of a film’s theatrical release as “just one data point.” In isolation, it is an ordinary piece of investor language. It describes the sensible corporate reality that a Disney film can generate money through cinemas, streaming, merchandise, games, attractions, hotels and licensing. Inside the larger transformation of culture, however, it sounds like a declaration from a civilisation gradually losing contact with the reasons human beings make art at all. A film is no longer primarily a film. Its encounter with an audience is no longer the event around which everything else gathers. It is one signal among many, entering a dashboard, joining a model, feeding a system. The story becomes a data point. The audience becomes another. Somewhere between them, the human experience that art was supposed to contain begins to disappear.
Johnston was discussing the disappointing theatrical performances of The Mandalorian and Grogu and Disney’s live-action Moana. Disney chief executive Josh D’Amaro acknowledged that both films had failed to meet the company’s box-office expectations, then immediately explained how each had nonetheless stimulated other parts of the business. The Mandalorian and Grogu had encouraged retail sales, visits to an updated Millennium Falcon attraction and engagement with games. Moana, although struggling in cinemas, was expected to perform strongly on Disney+. The films, D’Amaro said, contributed to value creation beyond their theatrical releases. Johnston described filmmaking as a portfolio game whose volatility Disney’s diversified businesses could absorb, before presenting the theatrical window as one data point within the cumulative commercial life of intellectual property. (Dark Horizons)
I understand the business case. It does not need to be explained to me as though the objection arises from an inability to comprehend that companies require revenue. Disney is not a charitable gallery. Films are extremely expensive, thousands of people depend upon their production, and a company of Disney’s scale inevitably considers how its divisions support one another. There will be artists and small creators who gain exposure through digital systems. There will be families who enjoy the attractions, children who love the toys and filmmakers who use new technologies to make extraordinary things. None of this removes the deeper problem. The problem is that every defence of the present system seems to move us further from humanity while assuring us that the system remains healthy. Each apparent benefit is measured through circulation, reach, scale, retention or monetisation. Even the language of creativity is increasingly used to describe how effectively human expression can be integrated into a digital commercial mechanism.
My disillusionment does not come from believing that art once existed in some immaculate realm untouched by money. It never did. Painters needed patrons. Theatre companies needed paying audiences. Novelists needed publishers. Filmmakers needed studios, equipment, cinemas and enormous amounts of capital. Art and commerce have always lived together, often uneasily. What feels different now is that commerce no longer merely finances, distributes or exploits the work after it has been made. The computational logic of the system increasingly enters before the first creative decision and remains present through every stage of production, release, reception and continuation. It determines which familiar object will be revived, which audience segment will be addressed, which moment will become a clip, which character will remain marketable, which emotional beat will survive testing and which project will be declared too uncertain to exist. We have moved beyond the old conflict between artist and financier. The artist now works inside an invisible architecture of predictions.
The comparison I keep returning to comes from Star Wars itself. Near the end of the original film, Luke Skywalker switches off his targeting computer. The machine is doing what it was designed to do: reducing an impossible act to information, alignment and calculation. Yet Luke understands that the decisive moment requires something the machine cannot give him. He must trust instinct, experience, connection and the mysterious living current he has only begun to perceive. He must accept uncertainty. He must act without the reassurance of a screen telling him that the calculation is correct. It is one of the most enduring images in popular cinema because it expresses something fundamental about human creation and human courage. At a certain point, the targeting computer must be switched off.
The irony is almost too precise. The corporation responsible for Star Wars now speaks about storytelling in the language of an immense targeting system. Properties are selected through accumulated recognition. Audiences are mapped through behaviour. Releases are coordinated across divisions. Responses are tracked, converted into metrics and used to adjust the next wave of material. Success no longer requires a film to strike its target as a film, provided the projectile activates enough surrounding systems. The targeting computer has become the philosophy of the entire enterprise. We are told that this is wisdom because the screen contains more information than any individual human being could possibly hold. Perhaps it does. Yet the entire spiritual point of Luke’s decision is that information and wisdom are not the same thing.
The targeting computer can determine where people paused, clicked, skipped, purchased, returned or stopped watching. It can discover patterns across millions of actions. It can tell executives which characters generate merchandise sales, which scenes are replayed, which programmes reduce subscription cancellations and which fragments travel most efficiently across social platforms. What it cannot know is why an image enters a person’s private memory and remains there for thirty years. It cannot know why a child identifies with a frightened secondary character rather than the market-tested hero. It cannot understand the invisible transfer between an artist’s experience and a stranger’s life. It can record the behaviour surrounding emotion, but it cannot inhabit the emotion itself. When decisions are increasingly surrendered to systems because those systems appear more objective, the limits of measurement become the limits of what our culture is permitted to imagine.
This is why “just one data point” feels so inhuman. It does not merely downgrade the commercial importance of cinemas. It reveals a way of seeing. In this way of seeing, every distinct human activity can be flattened into a comparable signal. Sitting in a dark cinema beside strangers, watching a film alone on a phone, buying a toy, walking through a themed attraction, playing a licensed game and scrolling through a fan-made clip are all forms of engagement. They can be placed beside one another because the corporation is interested primarily in whether they sustain the person’s relationship with the property. The qualitative differences between these experiences become secondary. What counts is continued movement through the system.
A person who loves a story is therefore translated into a cluster of actions. Love becomes repeat viewing. Curiosity becomes a click. Loyalty becomes retention. Excitement becomes purchase intent. Conversation becomes social activity. Memory becomes the continuing viability of intellectual property. These measurements may be useful, but usefulness is not innocence. When the system can perceive us only through what it can record, it begins reshaping culture around the parts of us that are most easily recorded. The immeasurable person gradually disappears behind the measurable user.
This disappearance is visible in the language. We are no longer consistently described as viewers, readers, listeners or audiences. We are users, consumers, subscribers, followers and engagement. Artworks become content. Films become assets. Characters become intellectual property. Enthusiasm becomes fandom activation. Creative communities become pipelines. The words are not accidental decorations placed around an unchanged reality. They indicate what the institutions are capable of seeing. A “film” suggests a shaped work with a beginning, an ending, a history, a form and an intended encounter. “Content” suggests material poured into an available space. An “audience” suggests human beings assembled before a work. “Engagement” suggests measurable contact with a system. Once the vocabulary changes, decisions begin to change with it.
The word “content” may be the clearest evidence of this flattening. A two-hour film, a documentary, a thirty-second advertisement, a behind-the-scenes interview, a reaction video and a vertical clip can all be categorised as content because each fills a container and occupies attention. The category tells us nothing about what the thing is, why it exists or what human need caused someone to make it. It defines the work according to the distribution system receiving it. Water, grain and industrial waste can all become contents of a vessel. Their differences are irrelevant to the vessel itself. This is increasingly how the dominant platforms perceive culture: as an uninterrupted supply of material capable of preventing the user from leaving.
The recent agreement between Disney and TikTok intensifies this unease. Under the deal, participating creators will be able to use approved assets from Disney’s enormous library, while selected fan-created short-form videos will appear both on TikTok and inside Disney+. TikTok presents the arrangement as a means of elevating fan creativity, expanding access and bringing creators closer to Disney’s characters and stories. (TikTok Newsroom) Individual participants may sincerely enjoy the opportunity and gain visibility from it. The structure nevertheless shows how comprehensively corporate systems are learning to absorb the human activity that once existed outside them.
Fan culture was traditionally uncontrolled, messy and emotionally excessive. People drew, wrote, performed, debated, collected and reinterpreted because a work had taken hold of them. Much of this activity occurred without permission, strategic purpose or direct economic reward. It belonged to the strange afterlife of art, where audiences ceased being passive recipients and made the work part of their own identities. Corporations could encourage or tolerate this activity, but they did not entirely own its form, destination or meaning.
The newer model invites fan expression inside an authorised channel, supplies the assets, establishes the terms, measures the result and redirects selected creations back into the official platform. The fan’s affection becomes creative labour. The labour becomes promotion. The promotion becomes additional platform material. The platform activity becomes information. That information can then influence future production, marketing and distribution. A human response to art completes a loop by returning as fuel for the corporation that initiated it.
This is presented as participation, and on one level it is. On another, it is the industrial capture of enthusiasm. The system no longer needs merely to sell a story to the audience. It can invite the audience to help sustain the story’s commercial visibility, then reward the most compatible forms of participation with access and recognition. Creativity is encouraged, but within an enclosure. The fan is brought closer to the machine and may experience that proximity as liberation.
Everything becomes swipeable within this enclosure. Images arrive without weight, remain for seconds and vanish under the thumb. A face, an explosion, a confession, a landscape, a joke, a death and an advertisement occupy the same rectangular space and submit to the same physical gesture. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe. The most intimate human expression and the most calculated corporate message become neighbouring units in a stream whose primary objective is continuation. The work does not ask to be entered, contemplated or remembered. It competes to delay the next movement of the hand.
There is an enormous difference between using digital tools and allowing digital systems to dictate the form of human attention. A camera is a tool. Editing software is a tool. Computer-generated imagery is a tool. None of these is inherently opposed to humanity. The problem begins when the logic of the interface becomes the logic of the art. Scenes are shortened because attention data indicates departure. Exposition is repeated because viewers may be looking at another screen. Faces and titles are framed for thumbnails. Narrative beats are arranged for clips. Music is built around extractable moments. Stories are discussed according to whether they can generate ongoing engagement rather than whether they possess coherence, necessity or meaning.
The digitised system does not need to order artists explicitly to abandon intuition. It creates conditions in which intuition becomes increasingly difficult to defend. A writer can say that a scene needs silence, discomfort or ambiguity. The dashboard can respond that viewers leave during silence, reject discomfort and prefer familiar explanations. A director can believe that a film should end without resolving every question. The system can identify future instalments, secondary characters and audience demand. An artist can feel that the work should remain strange. The institution can produce evidence that strangeness increases financial risk. In every dispute, intuition appears vague while data arrives wearing the authority of fact.
Yet art is built from forms of knowledge that cannot always justify themselves in advance. Intuition is not random guessing. It is compressed experience, sensitivity, memory, judgement and instinct operating before conscious explanation catches up. Grit is not an efficiency metric. It is the willingness to continue when proof is absent. Connectedness is not network activity. It is the felt recognition that another human being may receive what one is making. The visceral quality of creation arises because something is being risked: dignity, time, money, certainty, reputation or the possibility of failure. Remove the risk, and the work may remain polished while becoming spiritually inert.
The obsession with prediction therefore creates a paradox. Companies pursue data because they want to reduce failure, but the reduction of uncertainty also reduces the possibility of revelation. A new artistic language cannot be validated by the behaviour of an audience that has never encountered it. A character unlike existing characters will not arrive with proven demand. A story that changes public taste cannot be justified entirely through evidence drawn from present taste. The most consequential creative decisions often appear irrational until the work exists. Data can measure the path already travelled. Art sometimes has to step where there is no path.
The system prefers established properties because they provide a history of measurable behaviour. Recognition functions as insurance. A known character can be placed before the public with an existing archive of affection, controversy, imagery and commercial performance. Even disappointment may reactivate familiarity. The new instalment can fail to become beloved while still prompting people to revisit older films, buy products, visit attractions, renew subscriptions or argue online. This is precisely what the flywheel is designed to capture. A franchise release does not need to justify itself wholly through the experience it provides. It can be commercially useful because it disturbs the sediment of previous love.
What troubles me is the possibility that corporations are learning how to profit from affection without understanding how to create it. The accumulated love surrounding Star Wars, Disney animation and other major properties did not originate in dashboards. It came from artists making risky choices, often under difficult conditions, and from audiences encountering images that felt unprecedented. Those works produced the emotional capital now circulating through retail, streaming, parks and games. The contemporary system can measure this capital, deploy it and extend its commercial life. It cannot guarantee its renewal.
A flywheel preserves momentum once momentum has been created. It does not explain the first force. Corporate strategy increasingly behaves as though cultural affection were a permanent natural resource beneath an owned property. It is not. It is stored human feeling. It can be depleted. It can be weakened through repetition. It can be inherited by executives who know how to monetise its signals without understanding the mystery that produced it. The machine may continue turning for years after the originating emotional force has begun to fade.
This may explain why so much expensive entertainment feels curiously weightless. Every surface is finished. Every image is legible. The characters arrive already surrounded by recognition. The musical cues announce the appropriate emotion. The action is larger, the rendering cleaner and the promotional presence nearly impossible to escape. Yet one often feels no human necessity beneath the production. The film exists because the system determined that the property should be activated again. Nobody appears to have needed to tell this particular story except the company’s calendar.
Need is one of the forgotten elements of art. The strongest works carry the sense that someone had to make them, even when the result is imperfect. A private image demanded a form. A question refused to leave. A character became too alive to abandon. A director saw something that could not be explained through a presentation. The work enters the world with traces of that compulsion still embedded in it. We recognise the pressure of another consciousness.
Corporate material increasingly offers the opposite sensation: the requirement preceded the inspiration. The release date existed, the property existed, the market position existed and the strategic function existed. Human beings of great ability were then hired to fulfil the requirement. They may introduce beauty, intelligence and feeling into it, but they are working downstream from a decision made through portfolio logic. The film is born as an answer to a business question and must struggle to become an artistic question afterward.
This is not an accusation against the artists. The contemporary entertainment industry remains full of writers, performers, designers, editors, animators, composers and technicians whose work contains extraordinary care. Many are attempting to preserve humanity inside structures that treat their labour as infinitely revisable material. My criticism is aimed at the governing philosophy. When the people with the greatest power over the art form become increasingly detached from its human purpose, individual sincerity can survive only as resistance within the system.
Executives are not required to speak like poets during financial calls. The problem is not that they discuss money. The problem is that the language of finance appears increasingly capable of describing the entire life of the work without encountering anything it cannot translate. A film can be underwhelming in cinemas but productive in retail. It can disappoint audiences but increase activity in games. It can fail as an event but succeed as a streaming asset. At no point must anyone ask whether the film deserved to exist, whether it revealed anything or whether the audience’s disappointment represented an artistic judgement rather than volatility within a portfolio.
Once theatrical performance becomes one data point, reception itself can be denied finality. The audience cannot truly reject the work because the corporation can locate another metric through which the investment remains strategically useful. Failure is metabolised by the flywheel. The system absorbs criticism as engagement, disappointment as conversation and curiosity as future streaming activity. A film becomes almost impossible to kill because its corpse can still advertise the property.
There is something deeply dispiriting in this. Failure once had a brutal but necessary function. It could force an institution to reconsider its assumptions. It could clear space for another approach, another creator or another kind of story. A failed film could not be explained away indefinitely if the audience refused it. In the diversified franchise system, failure is dispersed across so many channels that the central creative decision may never be confronted. The machine interprets every outcome in a language that confirms the need for more machine.
This is why I cannot find comfort in the argument that certain creators may succeed inside these systems. Some will. Some may make beautiful work, reach audiences they could never have reached independently and build careers through platforms that did not exist a generation ago. I do not resent them. My concern is the nature of the success being offered. The creator is increasingly required to become compatible with a system of constant visibility, rapid production, measurable reaction and personal branding. The person must become a channel. The private self becomes material. Creative development becomes public output. Silence becomes disappearance.
An organic artistic culture needs time beyond observation. It needs mistakes that are not immediately quantified, experiments that do not have to become content and stretches of apparent inactivity during which thought is changing shape. It needs local scenes, chance encounters, private obsessions, apprenticeship, boredom, argument and work that may remain unseen. Digitised culture has difficulty respecting any process that does not generate a visible signal. What cannot be posted, measured or monetised begins to seem unreal.
The human being is therefore pressured to resemble the machine: always available, always producing, always responsive, always legible. The platform never sleeps, so the creator must fear absence. The feed never concludes, so the story must resist conclusion. The data is continuously updated, so judgement can never rest. Culture becomes permanent motion without arrival. We are surrounded by more material than any previous generation and increasingly uncertain whether anything has truly reached us.
My disillusionment comes from recognising that this condition is no longer confined to entertainment. It describes a larger social transformation in which institutions trust abstract systems more than embodied human judgement. The screen reassures us because it converts confusion into numbers. The dashboard offers control. The model promises prediction. The algorithm sorts what would otherwise remain overwhelming. Each tool begins as assistance and gradually becomes an authority. Eventually, the human being must justify any decision that contradicts the system, while the system is not required to justify the narrowing of reality it produces.
We are all being invited to keep the targeting computer on. Trust the recommendation. Trust the metrics. Trust the tested property. Trust what has already worked. Trust the engagement curve. Trust the familiar face. Trust the machine because the machine has processed more information than any person could. Do not close your eyes. Do not feel the movement around you. Do not act until the screen confirms the target.
Art cannot survive completely under those terms because art is one of the places where humanity exceeds information. A work becomes alive through decisions that cannot always be proven, feelings that cannot be perfectly named and connections that cannot be engineered on command. Technique is essential. Discipline is essential. Commerce may be necessary. Technology can be magnificent. None of these substitutes for the moment when a human being reaches into uncertainty and makes a choice because something inward says it is true.
The return of human art, if it comes, will require more than nostalgic appeals to older media. Film stock alone will not save cinema. Practical effects alone will not restore feeling. Physical books, theatres, records and galleries can also become empty commodities. The distinction is not simply analogue against digital. It is human judgement against total systemisation. It is the willingness to leave some part of creation unoptimised, unpredicted and uncontrolled.
Studios must once again trust artists before the evidence is complete. Artists must be permitted to make things that cannot become universes. Stories must be allowed to end. Characters must be allowed to resist merchandising. Scenes must be allowed to unfold beyond the attention graph. Audiences must be treated as minds rather than retention problems. Failure must be allowed to remain failure rather than being converted into another proof of cross-platform value. Most of all, the film must be permitted to be more than the ignition switch for everything surrounding it.
Audiences also have a role. We can choose the unfamiliar before the algorithm has certified it. We can pay attention without simultaneously producing a public reaction. We can sit with difficulty rather than demanding immediate legibility. We can support individual artists and independent institutions. We can refuse the idea that every beloved thing requires endless continuation. We can recognise that affection sometimes protects a work best by allowing it to remain complete.
None of these acts will dismantle the flywheel. The largest systems will continue measuring, predicting and expanding. Yet a human culture has never depended entirely upon the permission of its largest institutions. It survives wherever one person makes something without certainty and another person gives it sustained attention. This exchange may occur in a cinema, a room, a theatre, a book, a game, a painting or a digital work. Its scale is irrelevant. Its defining feature is that neither person can be completely reduced to the information produced by the encounter.
“Just one data point” is therefore more than an unfortunate phrase. It is a compressed vision of the future. In that future, art remains abundant, franchises remain active, creators remain visible and audiences remain engaged. The dashboards glow with healthy signals. The platforms are never empty. The system knows what we watched, what we purchased, what we skipped and what we might accept next. Everything is connected except the people.
The threat is not that culture will vanish. It is that culture will continue everywhere after its human centre has been removed. We will receive endless images, stories and experiences designed through increasingly precise knowledge of our behaviour, yet feel progressively less encountered by them. They will know how to reach us without knowing us. They will stimulate recognition without creating memory. They will activate emotion without expressing one.
Luke’s targeting computer was accurate, sophisticated and useless at the decisive instant. The act that saved him required trust in something alive and unmeasurable. Popular art now stands before a similar choice, except the machine has grown vast enough to surround the entire act of creation. We can continue treating every film, every artist, every audience and every human response as another point in an endlessly improving model. We can allow the screen to tell us what culture is, what people want and which risks are permissible. Or someone, somewhere, can switch the targeting computer off.
I do not know whether the largest corporations still possess the courage to do that. Their language suggests that they increasingly regard uncertainty as a defect to be engineered away. Yet uncertainty is where human art begins. It is where instinct becomes form, where grit outlasts evidence and where one person reaches another without a dashboard mediating the exchange. There is no metric for the moment a work becomes necessary to someone. There is no graph for the quiet recognition that another consciousness has spoken honestly across the dark.
A film is not just one data point. A person is not engagement. A story is not a property moving through a flywheel. Art is what remains when the targeting system can no longer explain why the shot must be taken. It is the decision to trust what cannot be measured, made by one human being in the hope that another will feel it. Until the people controlling our culture remember this, the machinery may continue producing more of everything while giving us progressively less that feels alive.
