I don’t have their numbers, but this isn’t the first place I’ve seen similar quoted. First one I found through some friends’ discussion was this, which puts us, at a quick glance, at around a third of last year’s total(still plenty bad).
If the model realized at scale repeatedly results in the same or similar effects, maybe there is something wrong with the model.
(Be those inherent mechanical flaws, flaws of ignoring parts of human nature, flaws of a model designed to work in a vacuum, or flaws of intricate and fragile necessary rules)
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.
I’m wondering if the degree of believability of the image has, or should have any bearing on the answer here. Like, if a third party who was unaware of the image’s provenance came across it, might they be likely to believe the image is authentic or authorized?
For another angle, we allow protections on the usage of fictional characters/their images. Is it so wild to think that a real person might be worthy of the same protections?
Ultimately, people are going to be privately freaky how they’re gonna be privately freaky. It mostly only ever becomes a problem when it stops being private. I shouldn’t have to see that a bunch of strangers made porn to look like me, and neither should Taylor. And mine are unlikely to make it into tabloids.