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Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN adaptation for Netflix


Werthead

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11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

Netflix needs to take some gambles surely

Yes, but the issue is: what is the payoff to those gambles? As Ran pointed out earlier, that payoff has surely changed if Netflix is hitting its ceiling on subscriber numbers.

 

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14 hours ago, Ran said:

My understanding is that it's not $15 million an episode, necessarily. Deadline specifically said that it had "a budget as much as $15 million per episode", which suggests to me that maybe one episode was figured at that price, but others were lower. I would guess the premiere episode was the really costly one, as they tend to be.  I'd guess the show was like in the $90-100 million range, personally. 

Ah yes, thank you for the reply, that does make more sense. Nothing really looked cheap, but unless their salary/cocaine bill was through the roof I had a hard time picturing them spending 15 Million USD per episode.

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On 9/17/2022 at 1:45 PM, Veltigar said:

Question, but why is Sandman so expensive? I thought it was a great show and it still is highly likely to end up as my favorite fantasy show of the year (though I have to admit, House of the Dragon has a shot of overtaking it), but unlike Rings of Power or House of the Dragon it didn't strike me as that expensive?

The Dreaming and everything in it is CGI, to start with. Everything in Hell was CGI. Anything with the Corinthian's eyes is CGI, obviously everything to do with the Vortex was CGI. Matthew, Mervyn Pumpkinhead and the gargoyles were all CGI.

The only relatively cheap episode was the episode in the diner. Apart from that, everything else looks extremely expensive.

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7 hours ago, mormont said:

Yes, but the issue is: what is the payoff to those gambles? As Ran pointed out earlier, that payoff has surely changed if Netflix is hitting its ceiling on subscriber numbers.

Well if they’ve hit their ceiling, surely the question for them is ‘how many people unsubscribed once it was done?’. And if it’s a lot, then maybe that would point to a problem that there isn’t anything else established on the platform to keep them? Because they cancelled those shows?

I don’t really understand why they don’t just admit defeat and release episodes once a week. That’s clearly the better model for them, Disney is getting by on a couple of flagship shows that air at any one time, and another round the corner once it’s done. Why not get three months of subs from Sandman fans instead of one? Was the eleventh episode a sign that they’re dipping their toes into that?

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22 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Well if they’ve hit their ceiling, surely the question for them is ‘how many people unsubscribed once it was done?’. And if it’s a lot, then maybe that would point to a problem that there isn’t anything else established on the platform to keep them? Because they cancelled those shows?

It's harder to persuade people to buy a subscription than it is to keep them. People's brains just work that way. How many unsubscribed after season 1 of Sandman was done? Fewer than subscribed to see it. I don't know the exact figures but I'll bet my house on that.

But anyway, the point is that the calculus is changing. Netflix could justify gambling on expensive shows because they brought new subs and growth was the short term goal, even over profit. If growth is harder to achieve, profit becomes the overriding aim. At that point, the risk-reward ratios on expensive shows change.

22 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t really understand why they don’t just admit defeat and release episodes once a week. That’s clearly the better model for them, Disney is getting by on a couple of flagship shows that air at any one time, and another round the corner once it’s done. Why not get three months of subs from Sandman fans instead of one? Was the eleventh episode a sign that they’re dipping their toes into that?

They have done this for some shows, actually. Presumably the data gathered has gone into the calculations.

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1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

I don’t really understand why they don’t just admit defeat and release episodes once a week. That’s clearly the better model for them, Disney is getting by on a couple of flagship shows that air at any one time, and another round the corner once it’s done. Why not get three months of subs from Sandman fans instead of one? Was the eleventh episode a sign that they’re dipping their toes into that?

Apparently the completion rate for Sandman Season 1 is bad, but a lot of people have been asking if that's because the "bonus" 11th episode was added onto the S1 count and a lot of people who had watched Season 1 and enjoyed it didn't even know an 11th episode had been released. And I know on my Netflix, it didn't pop up in the "continue watching" panel either, as it should have done, I had to go find it manually.

Netflix don't release that information, but presumably they have access to it.

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I really think Netflix would recognize if the completion rate was just an 11th episode issue or not. My guess is people drop off half way through. Five seems like maybe it's a big hurdle for people, as it starts out very mundane and you don't really know where the story is going for awhile. It's a shame, as it and episode 6 are the best of the six I've seen so far.

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53 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Apparently the completion rate for Sandman Season 1 is bad, but a lot of people have been asking if that's because the "bonus" 11th episode was added onto the S1 count and a lot of people who had watched Season 1 and enjoyed it didn't even know an 11th episode had been released. And I know on my Netflix, it didn't pop up in the "continue watching" panel either, as it should have done, I had to go find it manually.

Netflix don't release that information, but presumably they have access to it.

That’s true, I only knew because I saw people talking about it here. I really wish Netflix would let Apple TV show their stuff in ‘Up Next’ which is how I watch basically everything now, my Netflix watching has dropped off quite a bit as a result.

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Had several friends who started and didn’t complete the season without my urging - I think the back half of the season with the collectors and rose shifted gears and they didn’t really get into it without an episode to episode payoff.  I know it hews pretty close to the comic, but the pacing/focus change seems more challenging to casual viewers.  My spouse (who deep dived into the comics for the first time because she liked the show so much) is now worried they won’t finish it with renewal hanging out there for so long…maybe they sell it to Amazon?

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11 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

That’s true, I only knew because I saw people talking about it here. I really wish Netflix would let Apple TV show their stuff in ‘Up Next’ which is how I watch basically everything now, my Netflix watching has dropped off quite a bit as a result.

They do have the ‘new episodes’ label on series, but honestly I tend to ignore it as it can be a bit glitchy. 

I really think Netflix would be looking at the data a lot harder than one metric to see how something performed. Otherwise the data they collect is mostly useless.

Im very surprised the show did as well as it did as it’s not an easy sell and with the wealth of fantasy titles on their books it could easily get lost 

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I think this whole discussion points to a fundamental flaw in the business model and the tension between being a television/movie studio vs being a content delivery platform. The metric of subscriber numbers makes sense for the latter, you're fishing in the pool of existing content for what people want to see and someone else is doing the speculative work on developing the art form, but (obviously imo) it doesn't work in the long term for a studio as you're killing your darlings before they even have a chance to find their feet. 

On 9/18/2022 at 7:36 AM, DaveSumm said:

Long term for Netflix, at what point does the damage for being seen as a Series Canceller outweigh the cost analysis for just this show? Their library will just fill up with more Season 1’s of cancelled shows.

And this is one of the reasons why - my enthusiasm for giving new shows on Netflix a try had greatly diminished over the last couple of years. Perhaps most problematically its got the potential to be a feedback loop as well - as less people are willing to give them a chance because they'll just get cancelled after a season, then they'll kill off even more and reinforce the lesson.

At the end of the day for me, if the current level of success of Sandman isn't enough for them to build on this first season then they have no business green lighting projects like this in the first place. Starting things already hanging by a thread does not make for a stable business. They've had some big success in animation in the last year as well, but still gutted one of the animation related departments anyway.

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Well, I liked the show, but the title character actor isn't quite working out for me (and independantly for my brother as well, who also liked it on the whole, as I found out last weekend). There is just something undefinably goofy about him, and the way they have the music swell with pathos after his pretentious, pseudo-deep pronouncements is a bit silly IMHO :P. But the show is still absolutely deserving and it would be a huge pity if it got cancelled.

 

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  • 1 month later...

"Season of Mists" could be excellent, but I wonder if it'll capture the same whimsy and strangeness of the various deities and other interested parties in the same way that the comic did.

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On 11/3/2022 at 12:53 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… “A Game of You” and “A Season of Mists”?

Probably at least one of the remaining Brief Lives stories, given that A Midsummer Night's Dream is widely-rated as one of the best, if not the best, stories of the whole run and sets up the thematic element that The Tempest later closes.

I think the last Brief Lives story won't be adapted since it involves another DC character, though they could possibly change their identity (or just pay to use her, she was super-obscure).

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On 11/4/2022 at 7:09 PM, Werthead said:

Probably at least one of the remaining Brief Lives stories, given that A Midsummer Night's Dream is widely-rated as one of the best, if not the best, stories of the whole run and sets up the thematic element that The Tempest later closes.

I think the last Brief Lives story won't be adapted since it involves another DC character, though they could possibly change their identity (or just pay to use her, she was super-obscure).

Brief Lives is the pivotal story arc of the entire series.  It is arguably the point of catharsis for Morpheus.  It is when he cannot look away from how his experiences in captivity have changed him.  Without Brief Lives Morpheus’ full story doesn’t make sense.

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