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Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - The Rise and Fall of Rooster Teeth
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings
Posts: 1015 |
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WB was already trying to sell the RWBY IP before the announcement of RT's closing, and I don't think that would change. It's just a matter of whether whoever they sell it to would bring back the same people. And it sounds like it would only be cost-effective and less time-consuming, but hey what do I know. And Miles Luna has been freelance for years, yet was still able to work on the show. So it's not without hope yet
Hopefully people can agree that regardless of whether you hate or love the show, passionate and creatively-driven folk should get the chance to finish the project they've worked so hard on for years (hopefully under somewhat better management) And let's keep arguments about it to a minimum preferably, because it's always the same song and dance |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4498 |
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Hard to say what will happen. RWBY has been big enough that I can see another company wanting it, and maybe now WB will be willing to part with it for something more affordable. On the other hand, if it is accurate that RWBY was not profitable, anyone looking at it would also have to have a plan in mind for how to change that. Conceivably, having the same people working on it, but under different management calling the financial shots could get it there, but my bet would be that any buyer wouldn't do that since they won't want to risk it turning into the same thing but someone else writing the checks.
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light turner
Posts: 148 |
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I get what you're trying to say, but Monty Oum died almost 10 years ago. I don't think it's accurate to say RWBY is anyone else's story or project to finish but his. That ship sailed a long time ago. |
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Philmister978
Posts: 323 |
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Bizarre how their mistake with the Transformers franchise wasn't brought up. Fans are still not happy about it and treat it like it's RWBY's recent seasons - toxic garbage.
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4655 |
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That entire opening bit took me right back to my best Internet days. Kudos.
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4457 Location: New York |
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Well when it comes to Transformers mistakes since roughly the end of Robots in Disguise (2015) the War for Cybertron Trilogy is just a drop in the Energon bucket. If it wasn’t for their nostalgia based Studio Series and Legacy figures, the franchise would be completely bleeding money, while now it just bleeds money for new production tie-ins, with the sole bright spot being those legacy toys and the comics from Skybound (after years of unpopular, poorly selling material from IDW). Rooster Teeth meanwhile, I want to say nice things, but the legacy of that company in the past ten years is one of employee abuse, embezzlement, rampant crunch, and every attempt at making a big franchise to take it to the next level falling flat on its face. Do I feel bad for the employees losing their jobs? Yes, but this was not sustainable. From what I understand as per the most recent Rooster Teeth podcast and some public statements is that Rooster Teeth has been trying to negotiate a “soft landing” for RWBY with no success, after it became clear no one had interest in buying Rooster Teeth as a whole. They have 60 days from last Thursday (the sunset period for the company) to negotiate a sale under their conditions. If they don’t sell by then, Warner just takes the IP and sells to whoever wants to pay, no strings attached. My guess (key word guess) is that any interested buyer in RWBY wants to buy direct from Zaslav sans strings or a requirement to continue from where Warner left off with the same staff. From there, it’s easy enough to reboot RWBY, either as a proper anime with 2D animation, as the basis for some sort of video game (for better or for worse, the world of RWBY is ideal for a Genshin Impact style mobile RPG) or being thrown into a shared universe like the one the Nacelle corporation is making (which is admittedly the funny ending, RWBY ending up in the same shared universe as the Biker Mice from Mars). As for Gen:Lock, do you think anyone wants to buy that? I can’t see it. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2168 |
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Man, after the vicious criticism I'd seen of RWBY, amounting to "they're just aping popular anime and games with no sense of what makes them actually work", it was fascinating to see it actually become legit popular back in Japan. And the Japanese VAs weren't just professionals, they were big names. Saori Hayami, Yōko Hikasa, Ami Koshimizu, Hiro Shimono in main roles. Kikuko Inoue as Salem, Megumi Han as Penny, Marina Inoue as that villain whose figurine was in Doctor Sleep -- jeez, looking at the encyclopedia page, they got Megumi Hayashibara to play Yang's mother. Hell, I've played two critically acclaimed visual novels whose casts weren't anywhere near as stacked. The creator of Raging Loop, from what I've heard, got a bunch of theater students to do its voice acting. And currently I'm in the middle of Muv-Luv, where Takehito Koyasu voices a limo driver, and one secondary heroine has a briefly-appearing rival voiced by Kaori Mizuhashi… but the main cast? Soichiro Hoshi voices the main character, but most of the time his lines aren't voiced at all. The VA for one of the main heroines has barely done anything else of note; the other's has been more successful, but never really expanded out of eroge. After that the most you can find is things like "voiced Shinobu in Love Hina" and "a flat chest is a status symbol". Anyway, back to Rooster Teeth… this whole discussion just reminds me of Gainax, the original "just a group of fans who made it big" studio. And they, too, had absolute clownshoes management on the business end. Just ask Hideaki Anno, or Lea Hernandez for that matter. Hiroyuki Yamaga's made some great stuff -- I still fondly remember Abenobashi, and as incredibly uneven as Royal Space Force is, it's also bursting with imagination -- but the degree to which Gainax has bled its best talent, with two cases of people leaving to start more successful studios, while Gainax itself dissolved into corporate gibberish after Wish Upon the Pleiades, speaks for itself. |
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The_Outsider
Posts: 40 |
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I find it very unlikely that whoever acquires the IP, if there's anyone interested, would continue the current storyline, buying something that should cost on the high end of 7 to low 8 figures when the previous owners openly admitted they never made a profit out of it is a tall order, specially considering diminishing returns and demand elasticity.
I mean, the show just aired it's 9th season, there's just no way to market that to new viewers, considering the wildly varying quality of the earlier stuff, not to mention for it's first 8 seasons, RWBY was basically free, yes they staggered the release schedule for free users, but there was just zero incentive to actually pay for any subscription sevice to watch it earlier. Any company that acquires the IP will have to take into account locking it behind a paywall will make the existing userbase (what's left of it, anyhow) angry, just like the move to Crunchyroll pissed off more than a few fans. So yeah, the only way out is a reboot, give it a few years, let the existing fans forget about it, then bring it back for the next generation. |
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Doubleclouder
 Posts: 48 |
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I was not aware Rooster Teeth was involved with Transformers. Although to be honest I haven't paid much attention to the franchise since the Prime series back in 2010 since none of it really appealed to me since. |
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Ashen Phoenix
 Posts: 2920 |
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I despise WB and Zaslav for their consistent trend of axing completed projects and burning bridges left, right, and center with creators.
The part of me that grew up on Red vs. Blue, RWBY, and Roosterteeth is heartbroken, but the adult in me recognizes the decline in quality and the rise of controversies in recent years. It's depressing to read time and again about the mistreatment of staff, the toxicity of a few that detonated the fandom at large, the seemingly endless firing of people that made the company special. At this point, a complete reboot of RWBY as a franchise would be met with mixed emotions. The vibrant character designs and striking fight choreography were always what drew me to RWBY, never its story. When it hit its stride, it did a decent job of the fascinating premise it set up, but even during Monty's era I had to drag myself through the clunky plot points to get to the "good stuff." |
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OpenYourEels4TheNextFeels
Posts: 87 |
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Also, the leading actress' character (Abra) has psychic powers (y'know, "The Shining"), and Emerald has the power to psychically induce Hallucinations, so she honestly makes more sense as a character for Abra to admire than Daenerys Targaryen (who was the character Abra was a fan of in the book). Also, last I heard from my friends who still watch, Emerald actually had a face turn and joined the good guys back in like 2021 or something. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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Bringing up the IDW comics (the original ones, not the unpopular and poorly-selling 2019 reboot) reminds me of why I felt so infuriated by Rooster Teeth's War for Cybertron Trilogy. I was one of the many "non-traditional Transformers fans" who hadn't given the Transformers franchise a second thought since I was a kid, until IDW's More than Meets the Eye brought me back into the fandom. I remember being really enamored so many of the core ideas in that "golden age" of IDW comics: "queer robots in space", traveling from world to world like the crew of Farscape, getting into madcap yet oddly high-stakes hijinks; religious cults obsessed with organizing Cybertronian society based around how useful someone's alt-mode was; Starscream getting elected leader of Cybertron and gradually being forced to become a competent civic administrator. Now, I was never going to dip my feet into the legacy action figures (I was already way into gunpla at that point, and had no desire to jump onboard an entirely different mecha line that had what I perceived to be absurd secondary market prices), but I bought up all the IDW trades I could, hunting them down on eBay, in comic shops, and at used book stores. Somewhere around that time, I remember learning that Rooster Teeth were going to be making a new animated series, and I was optimistic. I was never the biggest fan of RWBY aside from the original trailers, but they seemed to know how to create works that tapped into the same sort of fandom energy that the IDW comics had been drawing in. I was hoping that they would take a look at what other contemporary Transformers media was doing, and draw some inspiration from it. Rooster Teeth then released a grim and gritty retread of G1, that seemed entirely designed to sell legacy action figures. It had none of the humor, character development, or even the characters that I liked from the IDW comics. Where were all the former Autobot soldiers trying to open a bar on a spaceship? Where were all the stories about Megatron as an activist getting roughed up by corrupt Autobot cops? Where was the Decepticon secret police with the guy who transformed into an electric chair? I felt like it was a complete tonal whiplash from the "new direction" that Transformers fiction seemed to be going in. It made the stuff I liked in Transformers feel like a fluke that Hasbro had no desire to replicate, because it turned out that the sorts of people that the progressive IDW comics had brought into the franchise didn't buy toys, and that seemed to be all Hasbro cared about when it came to making "tie-in media". |
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rano
Posts: 3 |
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The media is making Zaslav a scapegoat. Warner Bros has been in financial trouble since the 1980s, which is why it has changed ownership so many times. AT&T bought them in 2019 only to sell them in 2021 at nearly a $50 billion loss and that is only part of their sordid history. The worse part is why no one is able to turn The Dream Factory around: the American entertainment industry overall has been in decline for ages. Major declines in network TV ratings, cable ratings and subscriptions and movie attendance going back decades. 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Cannon Pictures, MGM, TriStar, Orion, Turner, MGM, New Line, DreamWorks, Viacom - either no longer exist or do so in a diminished capacity and that is just the movie side. Paramount and Disney are tens of billions in debt, are looking to offload some of their assets but can't find any suckers, excuse me, buyers. Sony turned things around by using their TV division to produce cheap shows for money-losing networks owned by others, and using their movies as glorified advertising for PlayStation and merchandising. LionsGate is also doing pretty good right now but only after downsizing and emulating Sony. This leaves Universal as the only truly healthy big American media company, and this is primarily due to their being owned by Comcast, whose ISP division is healthy but their cable division is being affected by cordcutting. Yes, while some attrition and consolidation is going to happen in any industry, notice the lack of new entities to take their place. Streaming companies? Don't count because their goal is to be global operations like Netflix as opposed to primarily domestic entertainment companies. Again, the media doesn't talk about how the entertainment industry is a longtime basket case. All they do is advocate for the projects that they want to see made. Whether these projects will attract audiences and make money is a problem for somebody else. Right now you have entire demos and regions of the country that practically never watches network/cable TV or attends a movie. The industry is relying on a small percentage of the population for which it just keeps increasing prices. The average movie ticket cost over $11 last year meaning that a $100 million "hit" actually only sold about 9 million tickets in a country of 330 million. Been going on for years and never attracts attention because the media only reports revenue, not attendance or profit. TV? Same. The media endlessly hyped up Succession despite practically no one watching it: around 2 million average weekly viewers. Succession was incredibly expensive to make - location shoots and sets in New York City, A list talent, etc. - meaning Warner Bros lost an obscene sum of money on it, but it won all those Emmys right? The entire industry needs to make the same types of decisions that Zaslav is making right now - produce things that make money and ditch things that don't - or else it won't be around much longer. Not hyperbole. Instead, imagine trying to tell someone 20 years ago that MGM - the studio of James Bond and Rocky - was going to go bankrupt twice and wind up a tiny division in Amazon because no one else wanted to buy them out of bankruptcy a third time. Or that Lucasfilm would become a Disney division only 7 years after Revenge of the Sith finished #2 at the global box office and 20th Century Fox would do the same a few years later. Or that Disney would try to sell ABC for a fraction of what it paid for it in 1995 only to fail to find a buyer. Paramount? Same. The only one to make a serious pitch for Paramount or ABC is Byron Allen, who is known at this point as "the guy who keeps trying to buy everything despite not having any money" and is something of a running joke (meaning that his pitches aren't actually serious to anyone but him). |
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4457 Location: New York |
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I’m going to avoid making this a judgment of the IDW comics, but long story short: no one bought them. In fact, retailers have claimed openly that Skybound’s run outsold IDW’s by a margin of 10 to 1.
But that honestly makes the failures of Rooster Teeth’s attempt at making a Transformers show all the worse, and an example that as a company they were not sustainable. When you have one side who really was into those comics, and another who demanded something similar to what Skybound is making (side note, the sooner someone gives the Skybound run to Trigger to animate the better. They’ve apparently been hinting they want to do a Transformer show for years now) you ended up making neither side happy, making a dull plodding affair that didn’t have the dialogue IDW fans wanted or the action and storytelling Skybound fans wanted. Rooster Teeth I think will be a cautionary tale about what enthusiasm can overcome, and its limitations when you’re competing with the big guys. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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I also think that, based on how positively IDW fans have been speaking about the Skybound stuff (even the negative comments are more along the lines of "it is too focused on action for me, but I can see why it is popular" or "not nearly as good as More than Meets the Eye or Last Stand of the Wreckers, but maybe that's not a fair comparison", rather than outright rejection), if you make something specifically for one "side" that's good enough, the other side will turn up, anyway. Like you said, it is a shame that Rooster Teeth didn't really seem to provide something that any of the more vocal segments of the fanbase wanted. |
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