In the summer of 2023, a curious piece of digital ephemera broke the internet. It wasn’t a movie trailer or a game reveal, but a short, looping video of a plum-colored cartoon cat with googly eyes, singing a nonsensical song about being a “number one rat.” This was Pomni, the protagonist of The Amazing Digital Circus, an independent animated pilot uploaded to YouTube by a tiny Australian studio called Glitch Productions. Within a month, it had garnered over 300 million views. Warner Bros. Discovery, a century-old legacy studio, had just spent $20 billion on content that year. Glitch spent roughly $300,000.
This is the new landscape of popular entertainment. The old gods—MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox—still stand, but they are now weathered statues in a plaza that has been flooded by neon-lit esports arenas, audio-only rom-coms, and sprawling cinematic universes built on the backs of B-list comic book characters. To understand popular entertainment today is to understand the studio: not just as a lot in Hollywood or a campus in Tokyo, but as a state of mind, a content algorithm, and a risk-management machine.
While smaller in output, Ghibli’s productions are legendary in animation. Distributed globally by GKIDS, Ghibli films have found new life on Max (formerly HBO Max).
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After acquiring MGM, Amazon gained access to the James Bond franchise and the historic United Artists library. Amazon Prime Video productions are often high-budget "prestige gambles" designed to attract affluent subscribers.
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