Here’s an interesting case study about how Hollywood, and in particular Academy voters, make their choices come Awards season.  It’s 1982 at the 54th Academy Awards.  It was a year that perfectly summed up the transition between old Hollywood and the new.  The movie On Golden Pond won two of the elder icons of the industry their final Oscar wins for Best Actor and Actress; the only one ever for Henry Fonda and the fourth for Kathrine Hepburn.  At the same time, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated new directors, Steven Spielberg, was enjoying his resurgence with the big hit Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), itself a nominee for Best Picture.  But if there was any film that looked like a certainty for the top award at that year’s ceremony, it was the epic historical drama Reds (1981).  Warren Beatty was a firmly established leading man by the time he Directed and Produced this movie biopic about American Communist John Reed and his chronicling of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but his rise was certainly a by product of the shifting tide in Hollywood.  He was a representative of that transition in the industry, having started under the old Hollywood system and becoming a central figure of the new Hollywood that came up afterwards.  Reds was only his second film as a director after Heaven Can Wait (1978), and it was ambitious to say the least.  A sprawling 3 hour and 17 minute epic with an all star cast that included Beatty as well as Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson.  It was the kind of historical drama that Hollywood often fawns over, and it went into the Oscar season as a heavy favorite.  The movie picked up many Awards on Oscar night, including one for Warren Beatty for Best Director, though he lost out on Actor and Screenplay.  But, Best Director almost always indicates that Best Picture is in the bag as well.  But to everyone’s surprise, and perhaps most of all to Warren Beatty’s, Reds ended up losing Best Picture that year.  And the victor was one that few saw coming; a little British movie about Olympic track runners called Chariots of Fire (1981).

The loss of Best Picture for Reds may have made sense if a movie like On Golden Pond or even Raiders of the Lost Ark had gotten it instead, but Chariots of Fire?  When stacked up against these juggernaut films, Chariots seems trivial, and yet it managed to pull off the upset.  It’s not quite the most egregious upset in Oscar history; no Crash (2005) or Green Book (2018) here.  Chariots was a generally well liked movie by both critics and audiences alike, and that may have been key to it’s last minute victory.  There are a lot of political factors that go into play leading up to Oscar night.  There are Academy voters that certainly put a lot of thought into their selections, but there are also Academy voters that rarely see any of the nominated movies, and their choices are purely made on just vibes alone.  Sometimes, an Academy voters pick for Best Picture may have been the only nominated movie that they had seen that year.  It’s not necessarily about Academy voters being lazy; a lot of them are still actively working in the industry so it’s difficult to find the time to actually watch all the nominated movies.  So, to still be a participating Academy voter, a lot of them purely go by what their gut tells them, and this can sometimes go against what the prevailing winds say about who’s out in front in the race for Oscar.  There’s also the factor of the ranked choice voting system that is used to tally votes in the Best Picture race.  This is where things can get complicated, because Oscar favorites can rise and fall based on the consensus of how well they are liked by the voters.  However, the 1982 Oscars didn’t have that voting system in place.  Back then, it was a purely decided by popular vote, which made the upset all the more impressive.  But, why Chariots of Fire.  It was not a particularly huge success at the box office, and while it was liked by audiences it wasn’t exactly loved either.  Really, the only remarkable thing about it was the Vangelis musical score, with it’s groundbreaking use of electronic synth rhythms, which of course won an Oscar itself.  What helped to carry Chariots of Fire across the Oscar finish line more than anything was that it was a feel good movie, and that has indeed been a winning formula in most Oscar seasons.

Reds was an ambitiously assembled film with grand vision and a lot of passion.  There’s no denying that Warren Beatty did an amazing job directing the film and he certainly deserved that Oscar.  But, it’s a 3 hour epic with a tragic ending, the death of it’s main hero after a steep decline in both his health and well-being.  While Academy voters may be impressed with the technical aspects of the movie, they just don’t seem to want to sit through 3 hours if the endpoint is a tragedy.  Like regular audiences, Academy members like rousing stories of over-coming adversity, and that’s what Chariots of Fire represented.  It was not just a movie about overcoming prejudice, but also a sports flick about underdogs competing in the Olympics.  What it did, and what Reds failed to do, was leave the audience uplifted as the credits rolled.  Of course there was also the political environment at the time, with Warren Beatty’s unapologetic favorable portrayal of a Communist leader in American history perhaps not going over too well with Academy voters during the ultra conservative Reagan years.  Chariots of Fire, by being a safer, less political film made it a less controversial choice.  While this held true in the year 1982, it’s also been evident in many other years throughout Oscar history.  The Academy Awards are often more defined as a snapshot of each year on it’s road throughout history rather than a indicator of the direction of the industry as a whole.  Each year the studios submit what they think is their best shot at the Oscars and then those movies are up to a vote.  There are quite a few movies that indeed have withstood the test of time, and their Oscar wins are just another jewel in their crowns.  But there are plenty of Oscar wins that only make sense in the context of their respective years and have aged very poorly over time.  And the common thing that a lot of those Oscar wins that have aged poorly is that they were the safe choice.

Perhaps the most famous example of the Oscars missing the mark is the year when How Green Was My Valley (1941) beat out Citizen Kane (1941) for Best Picture.  One of the movies was a beautifully made drama from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors, and the other would go on to be considered the Greatest American Movie of all time.  How Green Was My Valley had all the things that the Academy valued; John Ford behind the camera, lavish production values and heartfelt performances from established actors.  Orson Welles came into Hollywood as a bit of an outsider and he was using his film Citizen Kane to break down many long held traditions in filmmaking, as well as taking aim at some powerful targets.  It’s very well known that Welles based his Charles Foster Kane character after William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate and one of the most powerful men in the whole of America as well as in Hollywood.  On that Oscar night, a loss for Citizen Kane in the Best Picture category may not have been seen as that shocking given that Welles made a pretty powerful enemy with his unflattering parody of the vindictive Hearst.  But, through the arc of time, Citizen Kane‘s profile has only improved while How Green Was My Valley has been almost completely forgotten.  Safe choices don’t always pan out beyond their moment in time.  Over the years, the greatest movies manage to find their audience and it’s often because they were movies that took chances and moved the needle in Hollywood towards a different direction.  There are plenty of other times when movies with darker themes missed out on the Oscars and have gone on to become heralded as masterpieces; Vertigo (1958), Do the Right Thing (1989), and The Matrix (1999) to name a few.  They all had the disadvantage of being a little harsh for their time, but even if Academy voters turn a blind eye to them, the audiences will ultimately have the final say determining their place in history.

But even darker themed movies can somehow push through to win Best Picture at the Oscars.  It seems that the best way to do it is to be so good that your movie cannot be ignored, even if it is a bit of a downer.  One of the best examples of this is The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  The Jonathan Demme masterpiece managed to defy all expectations and sweep through the Oscars despite it’s dark and often grisly subject matter.  The Academy overlooked all that, even though there were more traditional and safer alternatives that year at the Oscars, like The Prince of Tides (1991), JFK (1991) and Beauty and the Beast (1991).  But Lambs managed to beat them all because it was just that good, and time has only proven the Academy right in their decision as the movie is still viewed as a masterpiece 35 years later.  And it’s a story involving cannibalism and torture where even after the case is solved, a mad serial killer is still on the loose by the end.  Sometimes these movies do luck out by running the table in a year with little competition, but great movies can still win at the Oscars even with uncompromising elements to their stories.  Sometimes a movie can win the Oscar with darker themes at it’s center if they do offer that little glimpse of hope at the end.  Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is one of harshest movies ever put on screen with it’s unvarnished look at the horrors of the Holocaust, and yet it offers hope in the end through the inspiring story of how so many Jews’ lives were spared thanks to the efforts of the movie’s main subject, businessman Oskar Schindler.  Spielberg’s movie is a gut punch, but you don’t leave the movie feeling awful in the end.  Even a movie that ends on a downer, like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) where it’s main character stresses over how he’s responsible for a nuclear arms race, still had enough moments of triumph beforehand that make the journey to that dark moment still feel worthwhile.  There are certainly these exceptions that prove it’s possible to win over the Academy even when your movie is not a pleasant watch all the way through and it seems that the only way it works is if the movie is exceptionally good.

But, it all depends on the mood of the Academy voters as well.  The voting body of the Academy is made up of mostly actors and also includes industry professionals as well as people of special distinction by the Academy. Just like any other election, campaigning is a crucial part of the process in voting for the Academy Awards.  This includes many different tactics like trade ads and special functions to draw awareness to a film, as well as Academy screenings throughout the season.  But, like I stated earlier, some Academy members don’t have the time to see everything, so they’ll sometimes vote based on vibes or defer to their friends and staff over what they think will be the right choice.  When the span of awareness is limited, what usually ends up happening is that the movie that has the most appeal to the broadest audience possible ends up winning in the end.  A great recent example was in 2022, when the “feel good” movie CODA (2021) picked up Best Picture over the more nihilistic The Power of the Dog (2021).  While objectively looking at both movies, The Power of the Dog was the more impressively assembled film, with great cinematography and standout performances delivering a monumental cinematic experience; but it was also bleak and unforgiving as well.  CODA on the other hand was very unassuming and low budget, but it had heart and warmth to it.  It’s not surprising that CODA appealed to an Academy that was in need of a pick-me-up after the harsh Covid lockdown year prior, though Power of the Dog’s Jane Campion still came away with a Directing Oscar.  When Academy voters are low on awareness of the movies to choose from, they often go with the movie that makes them the happiest.  It’s where the ranked choice voting works the most in favor of “Feel Good” movies.  It’s a voting body motivated by feelings more than by technical merits.  This can sometimes shed a light on some of the inherent biases found in the Academy too.  It was reported that a lot of Academy voters admitted to not having seen the movie 12 Years a Slave (2013), but they still voted for it as Best Picture because they felt it’s message was important.  They’re not wrong to feel that way, but they would’ve been better able to back up their claim of the movie’s importance if they had actually seen the movie and judged it on that.  Unfortunately, it’s that lack of insight that can sometimes cause the Academy to be out of lockstep with the rest of the audience when it comes to these movies.

So, looking at this year’s Academy Awards, does this “Feel Good” formula still apply.  As of this writing a couple weeks prior to the Academy Awards of 2026, the front-runner appears to be Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025).  It’s not too surprising, given that it’s not exactly a harsh movie to watch, often filled with enough levity to keep things entertaining throughout.  But, it’s also a movie that doesn’t pull it’s punches either, being shockingly prescient with today’s headlines involving authoritarian acts by the government and the everyday resistance that the citizens of this country are trying to enact to fight back against oppression.  It’s legacy over time will be interesting to watch, but for right now the movie is connecting at the right time by being a dark mirror of our current world.  But, even with it’s darker elements, it still has a story that comes across as a “feel good” one.  It’s a traditional good vs. evil storyline, where the bad guy loses and the good guys win, even if the larger backdrop of the movie’s setting still paints a bleak picture.  The micro, intimate main plot gives us that traditional story of triumph, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father figure character does reunite with his daughter by movie’s end.  One Battle After Another seems unique in this way amidst the field it’s up against in the Best Picture race.  It’s main competition, Sinners (2025), has a lot of incredible moments in it, but it’s also a movie where all but one of the main characters is either dead at the end or turned into a vampire.  Movies like Sentimental Value (2025) and Hamnet (2025) spend most of their run times dealing with characters processing their grief.  And then there’s also Marty Supreme (2025), which is a story of triumph for the worst kind of person in the world.  From the looks of it, the odds favor One Battle After Another because it does come the closest to matching that “feel good” formula, but this race is still undecided for now.  In the end, it helps to be the most entertaining of the nominated films, because it leaves the best final impression.  It may not be a great indicator of how well the movie might age over time, but it certainly makes a difference when the choice needs to be made in the moment by Academy voters.

Movies by design are meant to be appealing; otherwise what’s the point in making them.  The best movies take risks, and sometimes that can be enough to gain the attention of the Academy voters when they are choosing Best Picture.  But most of the time, what matters in the moment is how this relatively small voting block feels while they watch a movie.  For some Academy members it’s what matters most.  Back in 2012, actor and singer Meat Loaf (who was an active Academy member with voting privileges) confessed that he voted for the Steven Spielberg movie War Horse (2011) for Best Picture purely because it was the movie that made him cry that year.  If that was the determining factor for him, then all the power to him; at least he voted for a movie he had watched.  But the bigger problem is disengagement from the voting members of the Academy, where they just go by vibes rather than making educated choices based on what they watched.  There may have been a variety of factors that could’ve contributed to Warren Beatty losing out on Best Picture to Chariots of Fire; his political stances, the entrenchment of old Hollywood in the Academy, the fact that Warren may have burned a few bridges over the years to get where he was at the time.  The judgement over time is that the Academy was ultimately making the safe choice that year and picked the least controversial film in the pack.  What Warren also represented (the outspoken voice of New Hollywood) also may have ruffled a few old time Academy members as well.  Thankfully, requirements for Academy membership has changed, and the Academy now has a broader, more diverse voting body than it did decades ago.  This has helped lead to more risk taking movies winning Best Picture, such as Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) and Anora (2024), but even still, those were movies with that were crowd-pleasing in the end, with a lot of “feel good” elements.  Unless you are one of the best movies ever made, you’ll be all but forgotten if you don’t leave a positive impression on your audience.  Happy Academy voters are generous Academy voters, and in the nearly century long history of the Academy Awards, this has been the formula that has most often brought home the gold.

For generations, the Muppets have been entertaining audiences with their good natured and yet slightly chaotic sense of fun.  And the remarkable thing is just how broad their fanbase has become.  They are truly an audience of all ages pleaser, from grown ups to young toddlers.  For many of us, Generation X’s all the way to Gen Alpha, they have always been there as a part of growth as individuals.  We learn the ABC’s and 123’s from the likes of Big Bird and all of his friends on Sesame Street during our youngest years and eventually we grow up to appreciate the delightfully absurdist and subtly adult humor of the Muppet Show.  Kermit the Frog may be the most recognizable character to represent a whole brand across the whole world since Mickey Mouse.  And the Muppets can even count people like Elton John and Quentin Tarantino among their biggest fans.  But what has made these characters who are just puppets made of felt so beloved by so many.  The Muppets weren’t the first puppet characters to become household names.  Puppeteering has been an artform for centuries, going all the way back to the Punch and Judy days.  But what seems to have set the Muppets apart has been the way they are presented to us.  The men and women behind the Muppets are not just great puppeteers, they are also skilled in the art of filmmaking as well.  The Jim Henson Company has been just as instrumental over the years as Industrial Light and Magic and the Stan Winston Studio in changing the way that movies are made.  What started as just a place to build and craft new types of puppets has grown into a visual effects workshop where some of the most creative minds in the industry can experiment with new ways to make the impossible possible.  And yet, even with all the technical advancements that have been employed by the Jim Henson Company to create all their brilliant practical effects over the years, the Muppets which are still puppeteered by hand are still their most magical creations.

To understand the reason why this kind of “Muppet Filmmaking” is special, it helps to understand the man who made it all happen.  The company’s namesake, Jim Henson, was a true original creative genius.  Born in Mississippi and raised in Maryland, Henson always dreamed of becoming a filmmaker.  While in high school, he found a creative outlet in creating puppets and performing with them.  He attended many workshops over the years where he would meet other puppeteers that shared his interests, including a fortuitous meeting with a future collaborator named Frank Oz.  After college, Henson and his small band of fellow puppeteers created a short form comedy for a local Baltimore TV station called Sam and Friends.  The puppets in the show were very simplistic, often lacking in much detail and character, but one puppet modeled after a frog that Henson puppeteered himself managed to stand out from the rest.  The other Sam and Friends puppets faded into obscurity, but Kermit as he became known lived on and would become the catalyst for what was to follow.  In 1968, Jim Henson’s workshop was hired to develop puppets for the new public broadcasting show for children called Sesame Street, a show that took the nation by storm and quickly became a institution for young audiences everywhere.  All the while, Henson was developing more and more elaborate puppets, which by now were being called Muppets.  In 1976, Henson and his team were given a prime time slot on television with The Muppet Show, and it became his biggest breakout hit yet.  Not only was the Henson Company making it big with their success as puppeteers, but they were also doing so while take bold experimental swings with what they could do with puppets on television.  They weren’t just bringing puppets to life, they were making them feel alive.  On the Muppet Show and Sesame Street, the most magical trick that Henson and his team pulled off was to make you forget you were watching puppets at all.  The Muppets feel like real living characters and that’s largely due not just to how they are performed, but the way they are staged as well.

Jim Henson, surprisingly, never considered himself a family friendly entertainer.  It was never his ambition to make anything just for children.  He always saw himself more as an Avant Garde filmmaker; someone using the medium of film to experiment with the illusion of life.  And while we may view the Muppets as a mainstream entity today, what Henson saw with his popular characters was a way to do things in film that no one would have ever thought was possible.  After the success of The Muppet Show, Henson was granted his greatest wish which was to direct a feature film, naturally starring the Muppets.  The Muppet Movie (1979) may seem like a fun comedic romp starring Kermit and the gang, but when you take a step back and think about some of the scenes in the movie, especially those where the Muppets are out in the real world, you start to realize just how experimental the film acutally was.  It’s simple things like Kermit and Fozzie the Bear driving around in a car that you don’t think are out of the ordinary until you realize they had to rig a car to drive on it’s own just so they could fit Jim Henson and Frank Oz into the front of the car to make it look like the Muppet characters are really driving.  There are many other incredible illusions found throughout the film, including in the opening shot where Kermit sits on a log in a real swamp playing his banjo, which involved Jim Henson cramming himself tightly into a hidden submersible that they then placed into swamp water so it would leave Jim hidden from view.  But perhaps the most mind-blowing sequence that the Henson Company ever put into one of their movies was in 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper, where the Muppets all ride bicycles through a park.  This sequence baffled visual effects experts for years wondering how they managed to get Muppets to look like they are really riding bicycles.  It was revealed that there was a hidden marionette rig just out of frame that helped to create the illusion, but it’s just another great example of how the Jim Henson Workshop was taking both filmmaking and puppeteering and elevating both artforms at the same time.

But the Henson Company wasn’t just keeping these tricks strictly in house either.  They were gladly aiding other filmmakers in developing more imaginative worlds for the big screen.  They worked on movies like The Witches (1990) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), creating creatures that could believably exist in the real world, while still being entirely out of this world at the same time.  Perhaps the strongest example of just how well the Jim Henson team’s talents had grown over the years was found in the galaxy far, far away known as the world of Star Wars.  While Star Wars creator George Lucas was getting help from many different visual effects companies from all over the industry, he saved a very special assignment for Henson and his crew.  In the second film of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas created this important new character called Yoda; a centuries old, diminitive alien creature who would end up training the hero of the story, Luke Skywalker.  It would’ve been impossible to cast any human actor in the role, so he knew that he had to turn to puppeteers to bring Yoda to life.  And who better to turn to than the greatest workshop for lifelike puppets in the entire world.  Yoda would be a lot different than the other Muppets.  Instead of felt, he would be made of foam and plastic, with highly detailed features sculpted into his face so that he would feel more lifelike.  To bring him to life, Frank Oz would be doing the honors of giving Yoda voice and movement.  The results were beyond successful, as Frank Oz and the Jim Henson artists proved that their Muppet characters could not only hold their own acting opposite human characters, but that it was also possible to have them give dramatic performances as well.  Yoda’s even sharing the screen with an acting titan like Alec Guiness and he still doesn’t feel out of place.  George Lucas tried and failed to campaign for an Oscar nomination for Frank Oz’s performance as Yoda, but regardless of a nomination or not, the creation of the character proved just how far the artform had progressed to where an acting nomination didn’t seem like too much of a stretch for a Muppet character.

One of the key things that really helps to make these characters come alive is the way real human actors interact with them.   It’s not just the case with Yoda holding his own with his Star Wars co-stars.  The collection of Muppet films over the years also demonstrates many different examples where the human actors truly make you believe that talking directly to a puppet is completely ordinary.  It’s honestly not a difficult thing to do, because the Jim Henson puppeteers are so good at their craft that they can bring the illusion of life easily into these characters just through personality alone.  There are so many examples you can find through interviews and special appearances made by the Muppets over the years where your eye is drawn directly towards the character and not at the performer puppeteering them, even when they are visible too.  These puppeteers just know how to make these felt creations feel alive in front of you and that’s helpful for the actor on the opposite end.  It’s easy to see how The Muppets have attracted so many talented people to appear beside them in both the Muppet Show series and in their films.  Sometimes, you even get performances from the human actors in the movie that actually shine through beyond what is called for in a movie where Muppets are their co-stars.  Some of the most special cases are Charles Grodin’s hilariously over the top villainous role in The Great Muppet Caper, as well as Michael Caine’s surprisingly straight forward performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in Muppet Christmas Carol (1993).  The fact that Caine’s performance as Scrooge would feel right at home in any other serious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic novel is all the more remarkable when he’s acting opposite Kermit the Frog.  It’s always a great thing that these Muppet movies have human actors that are selling the illusion alongside their puppet co-stars.  Keeping the artiface up only helps to make us see these characters as genuinely alive, and it’s remarkable how well that translates even into the real world.

Unfortunately, many films today don’t seem to try as hard in making the impossible feel real like these Jim Henson enhanced movies have over the years.  When Henson died suddenly in 1990 at the age of 53, he left a big hole in the world of visual effects.  No one quite had the same intuitive ability to think of ways of doing things differently the way he did.  A large reason why the Henson Company is now a part of the larger Walt Disney Company today is because Henson agreed to have them operate the management of his company while he would continue doing the things he loved the most, which was crafting in his workshop.  He wanted to create bold new things, and having the responsibility to run a company was getting in the way of that.  Sadly as a result of his absence, the industry began to move away from his workshop’s very DIY method of filmmaking.  One of the big things that changed was the advancements in computer generated imagery, which unfortunately was making the need for handcrafted puppetry obsolete in the creation of fantastical creautres on screen.  Ironically, it was a filmmaker who helped to give them one of their big breaks that was also leading the change that would hasten their downfall.  When he decided to create his prequel trilogy to the original run of Star Wars, George Lucas didn’t return to the Henson company to have them craft new and imaginative alien Muppets to populate his film.  Instead, he had his team rely heavily on CGI, including with the creation of characters in the film.  Jar Jar Binks would be a break through creation in character animation through computer animation, and sadly even Yoda would be given a CG make-over in the series (albeit still voiced by Frank Oz.  Now, Jim Henson was never opposed to embracing new technology to help improve the work that his team was doing.  In fact, Henson was already starting to experiment with a new rigging system that would allow him to animate a CGI character by hand the same way he would do with a puppet in something they called Project Waldo.  However, the only time this experiment was ever used was in Jim Henson’s last ever project before he died; the Muppet Vision 3D attraction found at the Disney Hollywood Studios at Disney World.

Since then, the need for these felt puppets in live action films began to wane, as CGI was giving filmmakers better and more lifelike results.  Even still, the Muppets never truly went away.  Sesame Street still provides valuable educational entertainment to young children even after being on public broadcasting for over 50 years.  The Muppets have also continued to make movies over the years, though many of them don’t have the same high quality as the ones that came out during Jim Henson’s time.  And though they keep trying, the Walt Disney Company doesn’t to know quite what to do with the Muppets that are now under their control.  They’ve tried to reboot the characters in many different ways, but audience interest seems to have waned considerably.  There really hasn’t been an adequate replacement at the Jim Henson Workshop since the sudden loss of Jim Henson himself.  Frank Oz had already left the workshop to pursue his own career as a film director and Jim’s son Brian didn’t last very long at the time top before leaving to pursue other things as well.  It also didn’t help that Henson’s hand-picked successor to play Kermit after him, Steve Whitmire, was fired by Disney due to toxic workplace complaints leveled against him by Workshop staff.  The Jim Henson Company has been in search of an identity in the years since Jim’s death, and sadly it has led to a long decline where the their influence in the world of visual effects has considerably waned.  And yet, there is still an appetite for Muppet related content.  The visual wonder of the movies made by Jim Henson during the 1980’s, including his more mature films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) have a strong nostalgic value, especailly as more and more people are getting bored with what CGI has been offering us lately.  And who knows what will happed to the Muppets in the AI era of visual effects. What really made the Jim Henson visual effects stand out is the fact that so much of the creativity comes through in the construction of the visuals.  Unlike other movies today, the Henson visual effects team are building things that are tangible and present in front of the camera. And that’s what’s getting audiences more interested again in the practice of Muppet Filmmaking; the fact that what we are seeing is present in the scene itself, even when it’s a talking Frog or Pig.

There are strong signs that some filmmakers want to bring back more physical effects into their movies.  And when your movie or show is filled with alien style creatures, the Henson Company  has a proven history in delivering on that.  This was definitely evident in parts of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, with J.J. Abrams incorporating many puppeteered aliens to fill out his scenes in The Force Awakens (2015), and Rian Johnson bringing back the non-CGI, Muppet version of Yoda in The Last Jedi (2017).  Sticking with the practical effect of having a Muppet style puppet in Star Wars properties, the popular Mandalorian series also won over many audiences with the introduction of Grogu (aka Baby Yoda), a true fully puppeteered character just like the original Yoda.  But the real test of the future will be whether the Muppets manage to survive the shifting sands of the movie industry.  As a counter balance to the rise of AI, more and more people are valuing the things that are tangible and real in their consumption of media, and the Muppets fit right into that.  Even as AI media generation improves, the appeal of the hand-crafted Muppets is enough to help boost it’s profile into a whole new generation of audiences.  One would hope it’s not just the characters themselves that are gaining popular traction with audiences; that the inventive thinking that enabled the Jim Henson company to take bold artistic risks also spills over into the general visual effects field as well.  There’s a reason why the original Muppet projects like the Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island still hold up and it’s not just the characters alone.  Jim Henson knew that audiences needed to be dazzled by visuals often never achieved before by special effects.  Muppet Filmmaking may be undervalued at the moment by the industry, but audiences are coming to realize it’s value, and it is shifting movie studios towards considering more practical approaches to creating imaginative special effects without the aid of computers.  Regardless of the shifting priorities in Hollywood, we know that there are still enough people out there who have been raised their whole lives with the Muppets being an especially fond part of our childhood memories.  Tmes will change, but there will always be a place in our culture  for Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and Gonzo to keep us looking for that rainbow connection.

It’s been only a couple of months into this back and forth battle between two media titans in Hollywood over the ownership of another media titan.  After declaring it’s intent on taking ownership of Warner Brothers last fall, the new Paramount media empire under the leadership of Skydance opened up a pandoras box that may likely change the make-up of Hollywood and movie-making in general forever.  Paramount’s intentions were ambitious, but ultimately they found themselves out maneuvered by Netflix, which put in the more lucrative bid for Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslev.  Netflix’s intentions were to bid as high as Paramount was in their first pitch, but say that they only were looking into buying the parts of Warner Brothers that weren’t connected to television broadcasting.  Since the merger with Discovery Networks in 2022, Warner Brothers has struggled to keep their massive media empire in top form, so they were looking to re-split the company up and sell each part for profit to new owners.  Warner Brothers would retain it’s movie production infrastructure, it’s studio lot, and it’s legendary library, while Discovery would be bundled together with all of the cable channel assets that Warner Brothers already held, such as networks like TBS and TNT, as well as the new channel CNN.  Paramount’s new owners, the Ellison family who had created Skydance Entertainment, were intent on collecting the entire package of both Warner Brothers and Discovery, but Netflix’s very huge offer to buy just the WB side of the business perhaps may have put Paramount out of reach.  They may still be able to purchase the spun off Discovery side, which will be worth significantly less, but from the actions that the Ellison family has taken in the wake of their dismissed offer indicates that they are still intent on winning the entire thing.

David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Skydance, and son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, escalated things pretty heatedly by trying to circumvent David Zaslev’s agreement with Netflix, and go directly to the Warner Brothers Discovery shareholders in what is known in the business world as a hostile takeover.  But there’s still the flaw in their overall plan as they try to appeal to the shareholders with new bids to buy out the company with an assessment that still falls short of the value that Netflix has put on the Warner Brothers side of the business alone.  As it currently stands, Warner Brothers shareholders seem to be backing Zaslev’s plan to split the company up and secure two profitable sales instead of just the one.  Paramount may soon try to double up their offer if they truly want to gain the whole thing, but by that point, they may put themselves so deep in a debt hole that it could thwart any long term plans they have in building up their business.  This is the same situation that Disney has found itself in after they bought (and some would say overpaid) 20th Century Fox.  Disney beat out Comcast for the ownership of the legendary movie studio, but the cost was so high that it has put Disney into a debt whole that they’ve been trying hard to dig themselves out of.  Disney isn’t suffering too much, but having to deal with Covid on top of paying down the debt they accumulated from the acquisition of Fox led to many severe cut back over the last decade, and it’s led to a loss in quality control with many of their properties like Star Wars and Marvel.  Also, they own the massive Fox library of movies and shows, and have barely done anything with it.  Eventually things will be sorted out at Disney, and signs have recently shown that they are balancing out already for the studio, but it was after years of cost cutting, layoffs, and damage to the brand.  Whoever ends up getting Warner Brothers in the end will likely have to deal with some of the same problems, and it’s a symptom of one of the larger problems facing the industry as a whole, which is the trend of media consolidation negatively affecting the artform of movie-making.

Much like the banks, communications, and airlines, Hollywood is an industry that has fallen into the trend of consolidation as a means of generating profits for shareholders at the expense of the consumers.  This isn’t something new to the business however.  Movie studios have risen and fallen, and sometimes it was the regulating power of the government that had to step in to make the movie studios play more fair.  Ironically, one of the biggest regulatory smackdowns that affected Hollywood for years also involved Paramount Pictures.  The Paramount Decision delivered by the Supreme Court in 1948 broke up the monopoly that movie studios had over distribution in the early years of cinema.  Before the decision, the studios owned the movie theaters that their films played in, meaning that they had completely control over the programming.  It was great for the Studio system, but bad for the consumer, because depending on the market, your access to the movies would be limited by who owned the theaters in your area.  It also shut out independent theater owners from having access to movies that were in high demand.  So, recognizing that the movie studios wielded too much power over the access to the movies they made, the Supreme Court broke up their monopolies, which in turn led to the rise of the movie theater industry that ran independently from the studios.  This led to new exhibition innovations over the years that would in turn help to revolutionize Hollywood, such as the creation of multiplexes and large formats like IMAX being used for blockbuster films.  Had the Paramount Decision not been laid down, cinema would be very different today, and likely wouldn’t have proliferated like it had and become consumer driven.  For an industry to survive, it needs competition, and the more of it the better.  Monopolies only end up stifling innovation, because when fewer and fewer companies own a giant percentage in the market, they have less incentive to make changes that lead to improvement in their industries.

Unfortunately over the years, the regulatory restraints that helped to keep Hollywood in a competitive nature for a while have lessened, and we are seeing a renewed push to consolidate our media landscape again so that more power is in the hands of fewer people.  One of the biggest moves that has caused this in recent years is the rise in streaming.  Streaming offered Hollywood a new way of distributing their products; one which faced fewer regulatory restrictions than distributing through movie theaters and home video.  Netflix jumped on board this new technology early and it has grown them to such a level that they are now making a play to buy a big chunk of the old Hollywood with Warner Brothers.  All the other studios tried to jump in to compete, but Netflix has still managed to outpace them all.  Unfortunately, it’s all coming at a cost, with the movie theater industry suffering a significant reduction in revenue as they have had to adjust in this new streaming dominated environment.  In many ways, Netflix and streaming’s rise in general is Hollywood’s way of clawing back some of that monopoly like power they had before the Paramount Decision was thrust on them.  And indeed, the Paramount Decision has been defanged over the years, to the point where it no longer is enforced.  Movie studios have been able to own individual theaters across the country in years past, such as Disney buying up the El Capitan and Netflix buying Grauman’s Egyptian Theater (both in Hollywood), but in the last couple years we saw one major studio buy up an entire chain of theaters when Sony Pictures became the new owners of Alamo Drafthouse.  On the plus side, an institution as beloved as the Alamo Drafthouse has been save from bankruptcy, but on the other hand, they are now beholden to a mega corporation like Sony.  Is it possible that we might see more studios buying up more theater chains.  Alamo Drafthouse doesn’t quite have the same reach as say Regal or AMC, but it’s not that far off to think of a media conglomeration like Apple or Amazon buying up those chains just like Sony did.

That’s the other big fear being cast over Hollywood; the groups that are coming in to buy up these legacy studios.  It’s not unusual for the big Hollywood studios to have been part of some larger conglomerate.  At one point, Paramount Pictures was owned by an oil company called Gulf+Western, and this was during a time when Paramount was experiencing it’s Golden Age in the 60’s and 70’s, with movies like The Godfather (1972) coming from their studio.  Warner Brothers at one point was owned by AT&T and Columbia Pictures of course is now just referred to as Sony Pictures.  Out of all the major movie studios in Hollywood, only one has managed to retain it’s own independence throughout it’s whole history, and that’s Disney, which in a way has become a conglomerate in it’s own right.  One way or another, Hollywood has done what it need to do to keep the showbiz rolling along, including many of it’s most storied studios having to sell to outside interests.  The only hope that we can get from this shuffling around of ownership in Hollywood is that the studios themselves will manage to maintain an identity through all of it and still deliver for audiences.  Gulf+Western managed to succeed with Paramount during it’s time because they had someone like Robert Evans in charge of production; a guy who could pick all the right films to make.  But, when a bad leadership team is in place, one that usually is put in by a corporation that doesn’t know how to run a movie studio, it leads to some disastrous results.  A major reason why Warner Brothers is in the position of being bought out now is because of poor management in the past, especially after the disastrous launch and re-branding of HBO Max and the Project Popcorn initiative that saw them suffer heavy financial losses.  But bad management alone is not the only worry.  A lot of the new suitors that are trying to consolidate power in Hollywood are making changes that will fundamentally change Hollywood, and not always for the better.

Coming back to Paramount Skydance again, there are some troubling signs about what might happen to both Paramount and Warner Brothers if both were to come under the control of the Ellisons.  Larry Ellison is a major figure in the world of big tech, and one of his most recent business ventures has been to invest heavily in the field of AI.  This has boosted his net worth making him one of the richest men in the world as his Oracle data centers and cloud services have been instrumental in building the rise in AI.  And with his son David now calling the shots at Paramount, it’s very possible that AI is going to be integrated into the productivity of that studio to a very invasive degree.  It’s something that we are already seeing being played out at another massive data driven company that also now owns a legacy studio.  Amazon became the owners of MGM 2021, which itself was already a heavily diminished brand from it’s heyday, and in the years since people have noticed that they’re movie output has leaned very heavily on Amazon product placement.  The notorious straight to streaming remake of War of the Worlds (2025) was ridiculed heavily for it’s shameless incorporation of Amazon branded products, but it doesn’t just stop at the things we buy off their website.  Amazon is also a web hosting platform for much of the internet, and they are very much trying to jump on that AI bandwagon.  Their most recent action film release, Mercy (2026) starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson, is just straight up pro-AI propaganda, and that is a tad bit concerning.  It’s also very sad given that it’s an MGM release, further tarnishing that legendary brand.  At this moment, we don’t know what the Ellisons may end up doing with Paramount because they have only just started there.  And it’s not a good sign when David Ellison’s first action as a studio head is to aggressively pursue the acquisition of another studio.  He should honestly prove himself at Paramount first before we think he would do a good job of running Warner Brothers as well.  The meddling from Larry Ellison is also not a great bode of confidence, given his shady ties with fellow financers.

Netflix being the other top contender isn’t ideal either.  If their streaming business model were to be applied to a studio like Warner Brothers, it would be Armageddon for the movie theater and home video industries.  Netflix Productions CEO Ted Serandos has publicly put it out there that he would honor the same theatrical window that Warner Brothers already has for all their future projects, but what guarantee do we have that he’ll keep that promise?  Netflix is also another mega corporation that’s built on collecting data, and they are not opposed to incorporating more AI technology into their platform.  One of the more disturbing ideas that has been floated around with regards to places like Netflix and Paramount is a thing called User Generated Content.  The movie studios basically want to turn their streaming platforms into another YouTube space, with more of the platform being devoted to short videos made with AI to boost the content available on their platforms.  It’s one of the reasons why Disney allowed OpenAI to use their IP characters for their video generating AI software Sora.  Disney at some point wants to host these AI videos on their streaming platform, creating more user engagement similar to the traffic that YouTube sees on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, it minimizes what makes streaming worthwhile in the first place, which is to have movie and TV shows on demand.  By turning these platforms into YouTube clones, with lower quality AI videos as their main draw, it continues to devalue media in general.  It’s already bad enough that movies and shows have been reduced to being called content.  Now they’ll have to compete for attention with AI shorts, which by the way the users on the platform will never be able to own for themselves, because these streaming giants will own all the rights.  That’s one of the disturbing realities of tech companies starting to move in an take over Hollywood.  It’s a further erosion of the things that made movies special.  You just know that this AI driven stuff is what will be boosted by the algorithms, and the movies that were made by hand and employed hundreds of people are going to be push into obscurity.

In any case, the most immediate problem is that Hollywood is going to feel a lot smaller.  No matter who ends up with it, Warner Brothers will no longer be independent, and it may end up loosing it’s identity in the process, like how 20th Century Fox has now just become 20th Century Studios, a subsidiary of the Disney Company.  Every time there is one of these consolidations in Hollywood, it makes it all the harder to get anything made because one more buyer has been taken out of the market.  But, it’s something that can’t be stopped at this point.  By law, Warner Brothers must be sold to the highest bidder in order to please their shareholders.  The fact that such a transaction is so insanely expensive that only the biggest corporations in the world would have the kind of capital to make it happen is itself another troubling aspect of all this.  More and more money is in fewer hands these days, and the ones with the kind of capital to buy a legendary, 100 year old studio like Warner Brothers are also the ones with not the greatest intentions for running a studio the way it should be run.  A lot of these acquisitions usually leads to a loss over time in the original studio’s identity.  MGM is a shell of it’s former self, and Amazon is not exactly helping to restore it to glory.  We don’t even know how Paramount will be under the Ellisons because all they’ve done is try to buy more of the pie that is Hollywood.  Netflix could have kept growing to become a competitor with all the other major studios, but instead they’re using their capital to move into a legacy studio.  In the end, whoever gets Warner Brothers will then have ownership of one of the greatest movie libraries in Hollywood, if not the greatest one.  But the cost will be severe for the industry, as many people will be laid off due to redundancies and the competition between studios will be reduced.  Like I said before, industries see better innovation when there is competition.  When the number of studios in Hollywood is reduced by one, we get less needs from those remaining studios to improve on their own output.  Eventually, prices will rise while the “content” becomes less appealing, because there is less care put into them.  That push for User Generated Content is one of the most troubling new trends, though hopefully the failure of Quibi showed that consumers are not interested in paying premium prices for short form content.  It’s up to us the consumer to keep the standards up with our demands of the studios, and let’s hope that we’ll make our demands heard depending on who ends up with Warner Brothers in the end, because that’s what a studio with it’s great legacy of making our lives better with it’s movies deserves.

This last month, as people all over the world were ringing in the New Year, another event was taking place both on the big and small screens.  Netflix’s flagship series Stranger Things was ending it’s 9 year, 5 season run and unlike other premieres on the streaming platform, it wasn’t rolling the season out with all episodes available at once.  Instead, they released the final episodes of the show in three batches; four episodes during the Thanksgiving holiday, the next three on Christmas Day, and the final episode would premiere on New Year’s Eve.  Clearly Netflix wanted to allow their audience to savor this moment over a longer period of time, allowing anticipation to build before the final episode would drop.  But that wasn’t all they were doing.  In select theaters across the country, they would also be playing the final episode on the big screen at the same time it premiered on the platform.  This was especially impressive, given Netflix’s traditional aversion to the theatrical experience.  There are only a few TV shows that could generate this kind of anticipation for it’s final episodes, and especially rare for it to warrant four walling the experience in a theater.  But Netflix wanted this show to go out with a bang, and now the world has had a chance to digest this final run for the series.  And the response has been, well to put it lightly, lukewarm.  In general, the final episode’s response has garnered generally positive remarks, but the consensus is also that it was more good than great.  And there is also a fairly vocal contingent of viewers out there who were really let down by the final episode.  But, what is especially interesting is seeing just how extreme the reactions can sometimes be.  There are tons of videos online slamming the final episode of Stranger Things as a betrayal to the fans, that the show is now considered a failure because it didn’t end the way they wanted.  Stranger Things is only the recent big franchise to face this kind of scrutiny, as bringing a long running series to an end has become an increasingly difficult thing to do in today’s media landscape.

There’s something that should be understood about any development of a television series and that it’s not as easy as it may seem.  Coming up with a killer concept for a show and then selling that to a network or streamer almost seems like the easy part.  After that comes the execution of that idea, and this is where things can get complicated.  What is true for most shows is that they have the benefit of novelty in their first season.  That was definitely the case for The Duffer Brothers, the duo behind Stranger Things.  Their hybrid of Spielbergian adventure tropes and Stephen King style horror really caught the attention of audiences when it first premiered on Netflix in 2016.  It wasn’t authentically unlike anything else on television at that time.  And it quickly grew a following, becoming a true cultural phenomenon.  The thing that really helped the show develop it’s quick rise in esteem with audiences was the fact that it had a very easy entryway into it’s story.  The 80’s era aesthetic was great nostalgia bait, and the tightly scripted story kept the plot moving at a strong pace.  Not only that, but it was also exceptionally well cast, especially with it’s child stars, most of whom were making their debut with this show, as well established veterans like Winona Ryder and David Harbour who saw this show propel them to new heights.  If the show never got a second season, you could still tell that it felt like a complete work in it’s 8 first episodes.  But, like most successful shows, there inevitably needs to be more.  Stranger Things got a second season renewal fairly quickly, and that puts a whole new level of pressure on the creators of a show.  Not only do you need to do it all again, but you have to make it even better.  There has been talk that the Duffer Brothers didn’t have a plan past season one, but that is almost never true of anyone who sells a show.  All writers who pitch shows knows that they need to have long term strategies in their pockets just in case their show lasts beyond it’s first season, especially if they are telling a serialized story.  Throughout it’s 9 year run, the Duffer Brothers have always had to prove themselves to get that next season greenlit and keep it going for one more run.  But, they were also well aware that it could all just stop without warning.

To their credit, they knew that this couldn’t go on for very much longer.  While it was only 5 seasons long, with less than 50 episodes in total, each season came with lengthy breaks in between.  Seasons 1 and 2 followed in quick succession, but then it took 2 years to get the third season, then three years to get season 4 (mainly because of Covid) and then another three years after that to get the final season.  And in all that time, the cast themselves were also growing older.  The child stars were now all in their 20’s, and it was becoming harder with each passing year to make us believe they were still teenagers.  So, there clearly needed to be an endgame, and it was time to execute.  But what is particularly interesting about each progressive season of Stranger Things is that each season keeps building in scale.  If you watched seasons one and five back to back, you would be amazed as the scaling up the show went through.  Netflix opened up their wallets for the final 8 episode run of the show, putting nearly half a billion into the season.  That makes it one of the most expensive shows ever produced, which is remarkable given how it started as just a small nostalgia driven horror series.  But, when things scale up at this rate, this is where some shows begin to fall apart.  For the Duffer Brothers, the question that keeps being asked about how they handled the final season was if this was truly their vision from the get go, or were they being mandated by Netflix to go big and loud in their final season.  The biggest criticism levied at the final season was that it felt bloated and lacked the tight scripting of the first couple seasons.  Most of the final season involved a lot of talking about the plot rather than characters actually doing anything.  But, even with everything as big as it is in the final season, the Duffer Brothers still executed a plan to tie everything up.  This often becomes the biggest problem with most shows that try to come to a satisfactory end.  Sometimes the story becomes too big and unwieldy to ever be wrapped up in a way that pleases everyone.  The fact that even though it ran for nearly a decade Stranger Things didn’t have too many episodes over that span of time, making the overall story far less of a quagmire to regin in.

We have a good many other examples in recent years of shows and franchises that have attempted to close the book on their stories to varying degrees.  The year 2019 in particular was especially noteworthy for franchise capping finales, and it also showed us the different extremes between how to end the story the right way and the wrong way.  On the good side, we had the Marvel Cinematic Universe close out what would be known as their Infinity Saga with the record-shattering blockbuster Avengers: Endgame (2019).  Pretty much across the board, the movie was hailed for it’s exceptional handling of how it ended it’s story, which spanned over 20 movies over ten years.  No other film in the world was more anticipated than this one, especially after it’s predecessor Avengers: Infinity War (2018) shocked us with one of the most devastating cliffhanger endings in movie history.  But the reason it worked was because there was a plan from the get go about where Marvel wanted their multi-franchise spanning narrative to go, with seed planted across multiple films, all culminating in this final event.  The same couldn’t exactly be said about the other major two franchises that closed their stories that same year.  Game of Thrones was undoubtedly the biggest television series in the world during it’s run in the 2010’s.  And through seven seasons it was unwavering in it’s audience appreciation.  But it’s eighth and final season was a different story.  Something was off about the final stretch of episodes, like it was speed running through too many important events in order to get the show over with much quicker.  The short and oddly paced final season of Game of Thrones felt like a different show entirely from all the seasons that came before it and audiences felt that the they weren’t being rewarded for all the time they invested in this story.  Part of why things were so disjointed was because the show had far exceeded the source material it was based on, the original books by author George R.R. Martin, who gave show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the broad strokes, but not all the details about how the series would end, so a lot of it was up to their interpretation, which probably ran contrary to what fans wanted.  And then there was the unmistakable failure of Star Wars Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker (2019), a movie that is a clear representation about the dangers of executing a multipart story without commitment to a plan.

The two latter examples are perfect illustrations about the risks involved in developing a story to span many years without a clear idea about how to execute the final phase of that story.  It’s easier to fly the plane than it is to bring it down for a safe landing, to use an apt metaphor.  While it is fun to build anticipation and provide twists and turns that can change the course of the story at any moment, eventually every story needs to come to an end, and this can often be the trickiest part.  One of the most basic lessons in screenwriting is learning the three act structure.  Sure some writers play around with linear storytelling and try to break free of act structure, but the vast majority of stories told follow this principle, where the first act introduces character, their world and the inciting incident, then act two proceeds with ascending action until the story reaches a turning point, which then leads to a climatic third act that brings the story to an end.  Most popular shows get that first act right and then has a little too much fun in that second act, losing too much focus leading into that third.  It’s hard to bring the story to a close when you’ve set up so many side characters and subplots to fill out that middle part of the story.  For Game of Thrones, things got a little too complicated, with so many main characters that became fan favorites populating the storyline.  In order to bring closure to all that, the show would’ve need at least a full 10 episode season rather than the 6 that it got.  Unfortunately for Benioff and Weiss, they never expected to be the ones to bring this story to a close.  They were adapting Martin’s novels, and unfortunately he hasn’t published a new volume since 2011, the same year that the show started airing.  So they had to improvise in the last stretch of the show, interpreting the broad strokes that Martin had given to them.  They clearly didn’t deliver for most people, but it was almost an impossible mission to accomplish.  It should have been easier for The Rise of Skywalker, but that was a whole different level of failure in execution.  It’s been pretty well reported that the Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars was put into motion without a clear endgame about how it would end.  It started off strong with The Force Awakens, but Rian Johnson’s trope killing second chapter The Last Jedi took some bold swings that divided many fans, and in a panic Lucasfilm decided just a year and a half out from release to scrap what they were doing for Episode IX and start from scratch, creating a wholly unsatisfactory finale that tries to please everyone and instead does the opposite.  Improvisation only gets you so far as long as you can “yes and” each segment of your story correctly, and Star Wars did not do that.

A lot of these major franchises have to balance between being bold in their final acts while at the same time being mindful about what the audience wants.  Sometimes, one is taken into consideration more than the other.  One thing that often becomes a problem in the final stretch of writing a long form story is getting too attached to the things you create.  This is particularly true with the characters.  Something that a lot of people have noticed about shows that run for a long time is that you can tell who the most popular characters are by how much plot armor they have in the story.  Plot armor is where characters seem to defy the odds a little too well in the story and survive situations that otherwise would’ve been their downfall in any other case.  For a show like Game of Thrones, this is something that really separated the early seasons from it’s latter years.  The show was notorious for killing off main characters in sudden shocking moments, like the now infamous Red Wedding scene.  Then in the later seasons, popular characters would manage to survive in the most convoluted ways possible.  To a lesser extant, this is a criticism leveled at Stranger Things too.  But, not every story should be so ruthless to it’s characters in order to tell a compelling story.  There is a term used in writing called “kill your darlings” which is the way of telling writers to not be so protective of something they love in their story when it’s actually acting as an impediment to plot progression.  But, this saying doesn’t mean that telling a compelling story involves actually killing off characters either.  The struggle of writing is to follow the story as it progresses and find that balance that works in it’s service, even if it means being a little ruthless.  But stories need to inspire too, and sometime that involves doing something to please the audience as well.  As the story gets bigger, this balancing of plot also gets more complicated, and many writers find working with that pressure to be a bit too much.  That’s often why the longest running shows are the ones that are open-ended, where each episode is one self-contained story.  A show like The Simpsons still keeps going for over 30 years with no end in sight because there was none to start with.  It’s just a show that lets us observe one adventure at a time with the citizens of Springfield and makes every episode a continuation of that formula.

One thing that showrunners and their team of writers also have to deal with in the execution of their final episodes is the proliferation of fan theories.  The longer a show goes and the bigger a hit it is, it will inevitably bring a lot of discussion by fans around how they think it’s all going to come to a close.  Sometimes the theorizing takes on life of it’s own, and shows unfortunately end up disappointing fans because it didn’t meet the expectations that they had created in their own heads about how the show would end.  Stranger Things ran into this scenario, which resulted in a rather bizarre fan theory that there was going to be a secret final 9th episode that would be the true ending of the series, instead of the one that we actually got.  Suffice to say, the “Conformity Gate” theory proved to be nothing but a hoax, and the Duffer Brothers specifically went out of their way to say that their finale was indeed the end of the show.  For a lot of fans, it’s hard to say goodbye, and making up excuses for things not going the way you wanted it to go doesn’t mean that the show betrayed you.  Writers try their best to wrangle together a story the best they can, and then it’s a coin flip as to whether it will please everyone or not.  The only situations where it’s appropriate to criticize the work of the writers is when it’s clear they did not put the effort into making their endings work.  The way that Benioff and Weiss seemed to check out early in the writing of the final season of Game of Thrones is worthy of criticism, as is the corporate meddling and the lack of a plan that derailed The Rise of Skywalker.  But, fandoms can also get a little out of hand in the way it assesses the ending of a long running series.  A lot of people sharply criticized the final episode of The Sopranos when it ended with a non-ending as the screen cut to black abruptly in it’s final moment.  But over time, that abrupt cut has sparked numerous discussions about it’s meaning, and now it’s proclaimed as one of the most memorable finales of all time.  Oftentimes, it takes a moment to sit with the ending of a show to come to terms with how you feel about it.  In time, what we feel as a betrayal by the show with how it didn’t meet our expectations will over the years be looked at as exactly the way it should have always ended.

For many things, it isn’t just the journey that matters but also the destination.  For Stranger Things, not everything about the fifth and final season was perfect.  It had many problems to be sure and probably could have been trimmed down considerably; especially with many of those sitting around and talking moments.  But, for me as a fan of the show since it started, I do have to say that they nailed the final scene of the show.  We met our main characters as little kids playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons in a basement game room, and in it’s final scene, Stranger Things has those same characters once again playing D&D in a the basement.  It’s a full circle finale that ties it all together; these are the same characters, but they are fully reshaped by the adventure they’ve been through, and the game now hits very different for them.  It reminded me a lot of the way one of the greatest franchise finales, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) also ended.  In that movie, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, the Hobbits also return to their unspoiled home forever changed.  Life goes on, but it will never be like it once was.  The final scene of Stranger Things finds that same note and executed it perfectly.  In the end, for someone like me, it makes it all worth it if you get that final note right, even if everything before it wasn’t the tidiest.  Honestly, it what defines the greatest finales from the ones that are either bad or forgettable.  No one really remembers everything that happened in the final episodes of Cheers, Newhart, or The Sopranos, but we all remember Ted Danson telling a late bar patron “sorry, we’re closed,” or Bob Newhart waking up and realizing it was all a dream, or the lights literally going out on Tony Soprano.  That’s the sign of great storytelling, where the ending just feels right.  It will take time for us to fully assess where Stranger Things lies in the history of franchise finales.  It may not have been the smoothest landing, but it still got the job done.  Sure it was a tad too long, and a little overblown with big bombastic moments, but that tender final scene of friends bonding over a game they love is what brings it to a satisfactory close and that’s something that the Duffer Brothers clearly should feel proud of.  They tackled one of the most difficult jobs in all of writing and left us with something that more than anything feels full and complete.