What Constitutes Business Failure?
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull‘s latest has the unfortunate title, “The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product.” I say unfortunate because the instant pot didn’t fail in any meaningful sense and, to the extent it did, it wasn’t because it was a good product. And it buries a really good point that she makes in the essay.
As Mull notes in the first paragraph,
Since its debut in 2010, the Instant Pot has sold millions of machines and spent years as a must-have kitchen sensation.
That’s rather obviously a success!
So, where does the failure come in?
[I]n 2019, when the private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the gadget’s maker, Instant Brands, and merged it with another kitchenware maker, the combined company was reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry. Perhaps counterintuitively, that the Instant Pot remains a useful, widely appreciated gadget is not unrelated to the faltering of its parent company. In fact, it’s central to understanding exactly what went wrong.
But that’s a failure of Cornell Capital to expand a brand, not a failure of the namesake kitchen gadget.
The Instant Pot certainly didn’t invent at-home pressure cooking, but it did introduce the concept to lots of Americans, and it did so in a plug-in, set-it-and-forget-it format that wasn’t as intimidating (or as explosion prone) as using a stovetop pressure cooker. If you weren’t sure how much you’d use the pressure-cooking feature, that was fine—the IP billed itself as a “multi-cooker,” and it also slow-cooked, steamed, sautéed, cooked rice, and made yogurt. At the height of its popularity, in the 2010s, you could get a basic model on Amazon for less than $100, so giving it a shot wasn’t much of a risk, even if you ended up using it only occasionally. As the device became more popular, it seemed to generate endless word-of-mouth praise for its ability to generate one-pot dinners, and Facebook groups, websites, and cookbooks sprouted up to teach new users how to get the most out of their machine.
All of this amounted to the kind of public-relations coup that companies are constantly trying and failing to buy for their own new launches. Those failures are not infrequently a result of the products themselves; at this point, it’s very difficult to come up with a novel idea for a consumer good that addresses some kind of real and reasonably common issue. The average American just doesn’t have that many problems left that can plausibly be solved at the level of inexpensive gadgetry. The Instant Pot flourished because the company found a tiny bit of white space in a crowded market, and it sold a machine that did a serviceable job at helping out a particular type of very common home cook: someone who cooks regularly for more than one or two people, more out of necessity than because they find the process creative or relaxing. There was no slick branding exercise foundational to the Instant Pot’s success. The device was the brand. It still is.
So, again, this is a success, not a failure.
Therein lies the problem, or at least one of the problems. A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. Arguably, it can exceed it—people who wouldn’t have otherwise seen themselves as Instant Pot owners buy into the hype. Predictably, after a decade of lightning-fast sales in the United States, things seem to be cooling off. Instant Brands does not release detailed sales figures, but from 2020 to 2022, sales of multi-cookers as a product category dropped by half, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Instant Pots dominate the category. Very few people seem to need or want a second IP within five years of buying a first one. Why would they?
So, essentially, the problem is that the company sold a whole bunch of gadgets and there’s not a lot more need for them.
From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. A company needs to grow.
There is no sense in which Instant Pot was a failure. It surely made huge profits for the IP holder. The Cornell overpaid for the company because it failed to see a dropoff in demand is, I suppose, unfortunate. But that’s business.
Finally, though, we get to the very good point obscured by the headline:
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leeched from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business. Recently, it’s become clear that those expectations are probably not sustainable even for companies that have produced era-defining software products. They’re certainly not sustainable when placed on the shoulders of the humble Instant Pot, which, despite being an object with a digital display and a wall plug, was never technologically innovative so much as it was a clever, useful packaging of existing components. This was not at all unclear during the product’s heyday, but private-equity interests tried to moneyball it anyway, as they are wont to do.
When Cornell Capital acquired Instant Brands, in 2019, it merged the company with Correlle Brands, which it already owned and which makes a few lines of kitchenware, including Pyrex. It then began steering the brand into new markets with new products—it tried Instant-branded air fryers, blenders, air filters. None of the new product lines really worked out, because lots of other companies already do a fine job manufacturing and selling those things, and no one really had a reason to choose the Instant Brands version over competitors from Ninja or Vitamix or Honeywell, which specialize in those kinds of products in the way that Instant Brands does the multi-cooker. There was a lot of money, at least while interest rates were low, but there was no second good idea. Of course there wasn’t. Success on the Instant Pot scale is very seldom repeatable. It’s vanishingly rare for it to happen to a consumer-products company even once. But the pressures and expectations of private equity mean that that sort of astronomical success can still result in failure.
The Instant Pot, for its part, is not dead. Cornell Capital has brought in a restructuring crew, and the brand’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing allows it to continue doing business while it seeks relief from its debts. The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address. Even if the Instant Pot were the greatest kitchen gadget of all time, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome that faulty financial logic.
The expectation that stocks continue to grow almost certainly drives a lot of bad business decisions and, indeed, distorts the investment concept. The Warren Buffets of the world look for well-run companies that make good products over time. It’s not supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme.
The point is that Instant Pot was never something that should have been bought out and leveraged up and then blown up. This was not a bad business decision by investors who thought they could expand it globally to niche yuppie markets or had other ideas for a larger brand line. It was bullshit to get a deal for a PE company and institutions that needed to loan money, all of which, I’m sure, are doing okay, the wreckage being elsewhere. You don’t need to saddle a company with a huge amount of debt in order for growth. This is the just the logic of finance.
This seems to be an overstatement to me, at least as it relates to cooking materials. There are plenty of brands that sell dependable, long-lasting items that aren’t in need of frequent replacement. I’m thinking of things like my Le Creuset Dutch oven. The thing is a heavy, durable piece of cooking equipment and has no planned obsolescence either. I’ve had one of my pieces for more than 35 years. There’s a limit on the number of people who will purchase a single pot that costs $330 or more too, but the company has been making these pots since 1925.
I’d make the same argument for high-end knives or well-made clothing. If you purchase something that is designed to last for years, shouldn’t the growth strategy reflect this? And, if so, isn’t the business plan for never-slowing exponential growth the “failure” here, not the product?
This feels like the problem with American business in a microcosm, constantly pushing for maximum shareholder value and unsustainable growth, rather than paying attention to that pesky little thing of market forces.
ETA: I meant to conclude with: I agree whole-heartedly with your closing paragraph.
@Modulo Myself:
You understand how private equity works, the investor got their money out and the resulting debt sunk the biz. That means any company with a hot product is ripe for that type of exploitation.
@Jen:
Yeah, it’s sort of like saying anything that is good and durable is a terrible product, just the worst to be saddled with, especially if you can’t find a way to make it new.
There’s such a Soviet logic to late capitalism, where normal things simply don’t make sense, and the dream is to have knives with weird operating systems which need to be upgraded so you can use them properly.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m anti-everything, by and large. But I imagine that the PE model worked well in certain areas–like a specialty product which could be expanded via debt to be used in the global supply chain.
But I’m also guessing is that there are diminishing returns already coming in with the new Amazon-style economy. There was a huge amount of growth in building these shipping, storage, packaging, and distribution networks but that has begun to taper off.
Maybe Lounsbury can show up, insult everybody incomprehensibly, and explain to us in his lucid prose what’s going on.
That’s the real crux. Money was cheap but is unlikely to be cheap again for a long time. Money is leaving the market as the crest of the Boomers spend down in retirement. That’s going to sort out a lot of hubris.
I’ve begun to wonder if we aren’t ripe for a 1980’s takeover and sell the parts period. A lot of companies have profit sucking fat that can be rendered out. Musk quipped in an interview that he was able to get rid of so many employees because he shutdown the “activist” division. Other CEOs are reportedly paying attention to that trimming of fat.
There are dozens of Chinese mulit-pots and from what I’ve seen Instapot has no advantage other than name recognition. Not even as a status good, no one checks the brand of their friend’s multi-pot cooker.
@Jen:
I have lots of pots, pans, knives, spatulas, and other kitchen utensils that have been around for decades. About the only pans I’ve stopped using are the ceramic coated nonstick ones, because the coating does wear off as fas as nonstick qualities go. Much the same happens to teflon cookware, though that takes longer.
For nonstick now I use Westinghouse “marble” pots and pans. I’ve three all told, one has lasted over five years and nothing sticks to it ever.
@JKB:
That same “activist” division that helped Twitter maintain a market cap value that was 15-20 billion(!) more than what Twitters market cap is today?
What Musk has done to Twitter is proof that the saying go woke, go broke is so much baloney.
He gleefully cut off his nose to spite his face. Lucky for him that he could afford to do this. Not everyone can afford that luxury.
While Toys R Us was arguably destined to close up shop, didn’t something similar happen to Toys R Us that also saddled them with a similar amount of debt?
It is grimy as heck that the finance firms can do this to a company that they bought out.
This is another thing that has spread from the tech sector: you don’t have to pay reasonable dividends because the stock price is always going up. I’m old enough to have worked for pre-breakup AT&T. That AT&T paid a particular dividend quarterly, without fail. It’s share price moved up and down as interest rates changed like it was a bond.
It’s filing for bankruptcy. Their sales dropped by half. That sorta counts as a type of failure.
One of the things that seems to be happening in the post and comments is conflating Instant Pot the company with Instant Pot the product.
The company is failing because they have a single, very good, product that has pretty much filled its niche. It was a successful company but is in the process of becoming one that isn’t.
We’ve had an Instant Pot for about a decade now. It still works great, so there’s no need to buy another one.
Perhaps Instant Pot should have instituted “planned obsolescence” to keep the market alive.
@Mu Yixiao: A combined, post-merger company is going bankrupt.
Most of my good kitchen knives are over 20 years and heavily used as we cook for large groups, but I love knives and add a new one every year or two. I sharpen them myself. (A hobby really as I have way too many stones, but at present am down to 2 “systems”.) My oldest cast iron is over 35 years (not really sure how much longer) and the Le Creuset Dutch Oven is about 20 years old. Jen wins bigly there. Older wok is over 30 years. Like those above I just replace the non-stick pans every few years. Just bought a new food processor last month. Got over 20 years out of the last one. We have an Insta Pot with built in air fryer. Wife uses the pressure cooker part way more than I do but I do use the air fryer part.
Steve
It was poorly worded in the article. The company, Instant Pot, failed but the product did not.
I imagine there is some theoretical reason why PE companies could be a societal good, but I’ve only come across a couple that were even neutral. Almost all of them are parasites that only cause damage.
It used to drive me crazy when Romney would brag about his experience with his PE company, touting up how it was all about buying up inefficient companies and making them more efficient. The press is so clueless about business that they never even realized he was talking about the efficiency of capital within the business, i.e. the return on the capital assets of the company, and not what the average person thought of as efficiency. And what were the methods he used to achieve his “efficiencies”? Pay the workers less, and find legal ways to fire the older ones (who were usually the highest paid). Cheat people out of their pensions. Understaff the stores. Let them become messier.
@JKB:
Twitter Is Now Worth Just 33% of Elon Musk’s Purchase Price, Fidelity Says
Go anti-woke, go broke.
My opinion: a lot of “private equity” is really just a more complicated form of check kiting and should be treated as criminal fraud
Companies fail, sure.
But I’m fairly certain that’s not what’s going on here. How do I know?
So what happens (not always, but at least regularly) when private equity buys a company?
First, the private equity firm borrows money to fund the purchase. Often, an amount north of 90% of the initial purchase price. Sometimes, the private equity firm contributes only 2-3% of the purchase price. The rest is borrowed from third parties.
Second (and this is where it gets interesting), the loans used to purchase the acquisition target are put on the balance sheet of the company that was just bought. Meaning that if things go south, the buyer walks away with very limited losses. After all, they’re only out of their portion of the purchase price, i.e., typically less than 10% of the company value – and sometimes considerably less.
Third is where the magic happens. After the buyer takes control of the company, they may decide to sell of the most profitable parts of the company they just bought – thus immediately recouping more than their original investment. Alternatively, they may charge exorbitant “management fees” to help their newly bought toy to “expand,” through, for instance, a business merger.
Where does the money come from to pay for these fees? Why, the buyer simply has the company they just bought borrow some more money. Easy-peasy.
And in the end, when there is nothing more to milk, the acquisition target goes bankrupt. But all the while, the private equity firm made out like bandits. So who gives a fuck?
Pretty much the Goodfellas approach.
I’d bet dollars to donuts that Instant Brands would still exist if not for the loans it got saddled with during and after its acquisition by Cornell Capital.
ETA: This is fully legal, by the way.
For all that replace non-stick fairly often, let me suggest carbon steel. It has to be seasoned, but it is easy, and ours is as non-stick as non-stick for most foods.
Here is a link to the brand we have.
de buyer
“Where does the money come from to pay for these fees? Why, the buyer simply has the company they just bought borrow some more money. Easy-peasy.
And in the end, when there is nothing more to milk, the acquisition target goes bankrupt. But all the while, the private equity firm made out like bandits. So who gives a fuck?”
Legal… okay. But why do these folks every have the opportunity to do this more than once? Why can the debt-saddled company borrow MORE money? Why can the PE guys walk away from the bankruptcy and then repeat the process? Why is anyone willing to give them money again if this is what they do with it? Are investors just that stupid?
@James Joyner:
Because it’s sales dropped by 50%.
@Kazzy:
Basically, yes.
It’s a pretty well-established fact that beating the stock market is very, very hard, i.e., it’s virtually impossible to consistently outperform the S&P 500 (example). This means that the best way to invest is to put your money in an index fund and leave it alone.
At the same time, there lots and lots of actively managed (i.e. more expensive) funds on Wall Street* that find plenty of people that are willing to invest their money in funds that – over the long term – almost always trail the S&P 500. These investors pay more to earn less.
People are greedy. Greed breeds suckers.
* I’m not even getting into crypto scams, penny stocks, and other assorted obviously unserious investments.
ETA: And then there’s, of course, the fact that the people who make these investment decisions for these third parties are not investing their own money.
Too often, all they care about are the next quarter and their end-of-year bonuses.
IBGYBG used to be an actual saying on Wall Street not so long ago.
@Mu Yixiao:
Well, if you saddle a company with way too much expensive loans so that it has to make cuts left and right (staff, product development, marketing, quality control) that’s what tends to happen.
@Kazzy:
You’re thinking of investors as people who are sitting on their own money.
They are middlemen–they represent institutional money of all types and have short-term goals which are not congruent with long-term growth.
Also, many of these PE deals are structured so that the debt and the PE firm are paid off ahead of everything else.
@steve: If it helps you to know what to do, I’ve had my cast iron skillet for about 45 years. My biggest problem is that I bought the chicken-frying pan and it’s getting too heavy for me to manipulate easily–getting stir fry out of the pan by tilting the contents onto a plate, etc.
@Stormy Dragon:Well, yes, but that’s not going to happen if we need Congress and state legislatures to do it.
@drj:
When did spinning straw into compost become “magic?” My understanding was that it’s biochemistry, not magic.
A bit too busy at the moment with work. So, briefly:
I’ve this idea the in essence “the market” will work largely by what incentives are available, per laws, regulations, taxes, etc. Right now, the incentive is to make money, whether a product or service is provided or not. That’s how come Theranos had a $1 billion stock valuation without a product, or with a very defective one.
Not everyone is doing this, so there are still companies that are dedicated to products or services, but these, IMO, are int he minority. Most care about how much money they make, or how high the stock is valued, and things like products, services, customers, suppliers, employees, etc. are a secondary consideration, if they are considered at all.
@drj:
I’ve never understood why it was legal to pierce the corporate veil this way, mixing assets and debts of the company and the owners.
@Modulo Myself: It is the logic of leveraged buyouts, which is a sub-set of Private Equity, the popular press visbible sub-set.
It is the sub-set the popular press writes about as LBOs often blow up, but a sub-set. MidCap small PE doesn’t get on popular radar. and of course the quietly successful investments don’t get attention nor written about.
@Sleeping Dog: If they got their equity paid out in preference before bankruptcy, else they were wiped out.
@Stormy Dragon: Of course you do. With opinions and thinking of a quality rather like JKB, although photo-negative of him ideologically. An opinion as accurate and useful as his idiotic anti-woke blithering on.
@Modulo Myself: This is inaccurate as a generalisation. A PE Fund manager that is not a KKR or a Blackstone typically has to have some 5-10% of own money expsoure in a Fund – the management company being a separate legal entity from the Fund, in our lingo it is the GP and the outside money are the LP.
The LPs in USA land are for mid and large market PE generally big pools of capital like public retirement and pensioin funds (as Calpers etc) and trade union retirement funds. My own are DFIs principally.
Of course people do love to hate financing entities, be they medieval bankers, jewish money lenders or modern banks – a structural resentment that will never go away.
Of course the Lefty component on this is rather of the same quality of observation as the knee-jerk anti-government loony libertarian component in the Right in USA land.
@Michael Reynolds: When one puts on ideological lens to do business, righty or lefty, one does rather tend to crash. Of course being a competent tech manager does not translate into being competent in media-advert platform even if such platform is tech based.
@JKB: What Musk has done is the equivalent of getting rid of 95% of the quality control on Twitter and thinking that he has a viable product. Advertisers don’t like paying money for having their ads come up next to Neo-Nazi comments, porn, or other bottom-of-the-barrel postings.
The crappiness of Twitter self-policing is why people are leaving. No one wants their social media feed to be crammed with bots, spam, and 8chan-level comments. It’s all garbage.
Second, Musk isn’t checking to see the exact status of what is getting posted. He keeps making up stories–like “we’ve gotten rid of abusive and anti-Semitic comments”. How can he prove it, especially when experts say the opposite? If I were an advertiser, I would want to know who I was showing my ads to–I want to know that the audience has the money and the inclination to buy my products. I want to know that the supposed audience is in fact real and not generated by a bunch of bots.
Given that Musk has now removed 95% of the individuals who were policing Twitter and gathering the relevant data, why should I believe any of Musk’s statements, especially since none of the data is now being made public and the tools which used to gather the data are not being maintained?
(This isn’t just Twitter, by the way. Go read the analysis over at ArsTechnical about Elon’s electronic truck, which looks to be a total disaster, engineering-wise.)
@JKB: I’m just trying to wrap my head around using Musk’s history with Twitter as an example of how to run a business…
@Mu Yixiao:
That’s a reason for a company to downsize, not to go bankrupt. The Instant Pot could be produced at a sustainable margin, but it needs to sell a lot more because the company was saddled with a huge amount of debt and they needed a huge revenue stream just to cover the payments. Private equity firms for the most part don’t invest their own money to take over a company – they borrow the money for that and also to pay themselves a sizeable reward and then transfer that debt to the company they bought.
@Lounsbury:
Indeed, at least when it’s done with the subtlety of cavorting cocaine hippos. See: Musk Twitter, but also Disney. It’s not just doing right it has to be about doing right well. And as I’ve said many times, the route to using any medium to change hearts and minds does not begin with a series of press events pinning your own corporate virtue to the changing of hearts and minds.
Matthew 6:1-4
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
Michael 6:15
But when you do something decent, when you try to use any creative medium to lead people toward righteousness, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your propaganda effort may be in secret. Then your audience, having been allowed to experience your media, will reward you.
Seduce, don’t declaim. Move, don’t lecture. Respect your audience even when they may not deserve respect.
@MarkedMan: Really, you don’t actually understand PE, so explanations like this are of a JKB quality in both accuracy and utility.
Private equity is intermediation. Just as is commercial banks (which do not lend their iwn money, but depositors, by and large) or a public investment holding company like Mr Buffet (who is investing shareholders money). Primitive misunderstanding of PE does not get you to any useful other than ideologically pleasing Just So Stories.
LPs, investors in PE funds are typically endowments, retirement funds and like seeking juiced long term returns as PE funds proper have 10 year life spans. And typically inside of the Fund LPs require GP (the Fund Manager, what you are calling the PE company inaccurately) to invest 10% of total capital along side of the to share risk alignment. Often for non headline firms including component of recycled fees (not pocketed) capitalised.
Ex the LBO segment, the large non visible portion of market is doing prudent leverage and return is off the the IPO or trade sale in an M&A.
Of course you lit understand PE via KKRs and Bains who of course do make leverage plays with aim for juiced quicker return.
And Hedge Funds that are confused with this and do public and private – that is unlisted
While of course heaven forbid USA actually look at comparables in markets to see what a market is like without growth equity (except of course when Leftists want to seek narionalisation)
I am presently arranging such from an American PE, madcap, and max leverage is 60, at term, 50 at start. Bringing equity so debt can be raised. This is the typical madcap midmarket, rather than the visible LBO.
@Michael Reynolds: Well Musk clearly did not understand that being an advert (tech) platform CEO is nothing like being a user of such. Nor the fundamental difference between being a media company and a physical produ to or finacial cum technology product. His competency was and is clearly restricted to keeping together physical product companies to a certain level of market dev. Which is not a trivial skill and one tech genuises doing IP invention typically lack. Ideas themselves, even great product ones do not flourish from invention.
While his newfound MAGA fandom can trot out excuses the reality is he has driven own failure as Twitter CEO. Partly from incompetent public com as media advert based co, partly from general incompetent mgmt re this company type and stage.
@Mu Yixiao:
Sales does not equal profits.
They have the leading name in Instant Pots, and a stellar reputation for quality, and a lot of recipe books mention them by name (are cooking times going to be the same with an off brand pressure cooker? best not to deal with the hassle and get the real one). That suggests they can charge a bit more to make up for some of the lower sales.
Whether that would work out or not is an open question, but this didn’t.
@Modulo Myself:
But SOMEONE is left holding the bag, no? This company went bankrupt with $500M in debt, right? So who is owed that $500M, how much are they getting, and whose head will roll on account of the loss?
@Kazzy:
Depending what the interest rate was, the party holding the debt may not have actually lost any money except on paper (if you’ve collected $550 million in interest on a $500 million debt, does the debtee defaulting cost you anything?), and even then, they get to use the paper loss to offset other gains for tax purposes.
@Michael Reynolds:
Is Disney doing poorly? I hadn’t noticed. They seem to be pretty ubiquitous.
(The MCU is not at its previous levels (but still raking in cash) and they are trying new things to keep it fresh — some work, some don’t, and it’s all a prelude to getting the X-Men anyway.)
——
And, I suppose, the Fantastic Four. But I’m not sure movies are long enough to do justice to four heroes, the kids, and a villain all at once. 7 characters with some kind of an arc, in a two or three hour movie? Eesh.
And you need the kids — the redeeming quality of Reed Richards is that he is a very loving father. Otherwise, he’s a bit of a dick, as shown in the previous movies. (In the comics, you have various other Reeds from other universes who don’t have kids and they are all terrible people)
@Kazzy:
No idea, but in all likelihood the people who made the deal and got paid their fees were not putting money up for it. They get paid no matter what, and there are bonuses for putting deals together. Nobody gets a 3 million anti-bonus in finance for fucking something up.
Cracker- I have the big Lodge “cauldron”. It weighs about 40 lbs IIRC. Well seasoned now but getting harder to handle. I do love it for big church events though since it holds heat so well it keeps food warm forever.
Steve
I have a La Creuset tagine–it has a cast iron base and a ceramic top. I’ve had it for at least a decade and use it at least 1x a week. Aside from my French press, it’s the oldest thing I use frequently.
@Lounsbury: Lounsbury, you seem to be a reasonably intelligent guy with some specialized knowledge, but also one who has convinced himself that he is spectacularly intelligent and has a stunning breadth. You therefore often come off as much less intelligent than you probably are, especially when you so frequently employ the usual tactics of the utter moron, such as mindlessly spewing contempt and insult them like a obnoxious teenager who had woefully poor upbringing.
@Gustopher:
Actually there are internet rumors Disney is looking to sell Lucas Film. They are cash poor and have a big payout to Comcast coming. Iger is cutting jobs and culling media, just like Zaslav. Mermaid’s a flop, Elemental doesn’t look like another Toy Story, Indy looks at very least unprofitable, Thor Waititi, She Hulk, Miss Marvel. . . So, no, Disney is not doing well.
@Gustopher:
It seems to have begun to dawn on people that multiverses are a bad idea. Really should have been obvious. It kills jeopardy and diminishes character.
@Michael Reynolds: I really don’t understand why Disney thought that remaking animated classics over again with live actors was going to get them another respectable bite at the apple, financially. The animation –> theatre musical path seems to have much more staying power. The number of people you can cram in a theatre is smaller, of course–but you can keep the buzz going for much longer if it’s even halfway successful.
@MarkedMan: Hmm… Maybe I shoulda read his post today. Sounds like I might have gotten a laugh or two. Still not gonna, even 5 minutes reading him is 5 minutes I’ll never get back–and that’s allowing for my time possessing no opportunity cost whatsoever now that I’m retired.
@steve: My mistake. I considered buying one of those, too/instead of but decided against it based on cost of purchase and not needing to be able to cook for my 50 closest friends. (And in my one attempt to make soup for the congregation after Sunday service, the head of the women’s group came to me to ask how she was going to handle the problem I’d caused by not making enough. As if I knew. 🙁 )
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Lord knows, I’m wrong often enough, especially about people I haven’t met with in person, so it is definitely possible that Lounsbury is the Titan of Finance he projects, albeit a laughably arrogant and ill-mannered one. But given that his typical post is a semi-intelligible mishmash of Argument-from-Authority and bloviation which, if you squint at it generously and just right, might be interpreted as making sense, it is equally likely that he is an angry and embittered accounts clerk at a toaster manufacturer, cosplaying as a financial genius, while cursing his bad luck in getting into ever more credit card debt by pursuing every internet theory into day trading hell.
I was speaking of your JBK comment, tho I’m not a Louns fan much either. Today, he’s provided a service in reminding us that PE is more expansive than the vulture capitalism that we normally think of, but the point may well be a distraction in this setting, too.
@Michael Reynolds: Multiverses came out of necessity. DC’s flagship characters were all developed before WWII. While Superman aged pretty well, the original incarnations of Flash, Green Lantern, and others were just incredibly lame. They started rebooting those characters in 1959 and introduced the multiverse a couple of years later to explain the existence of parallel characters.
It took Marvel quite a bit longer to go that route but their major characters (with the notable exception of Captain America) started rolling out in 1961. (And Cap had essentially disappeared after WWII and was famously revived in Avengers #4.)