The gloves are freakin’ off this week as we’ve got analysts telling automakers to watch the southern border or else, fancy car auctions brawling, and now the BYD Americas CEO going on the record with a pretty tame take that sounds menacing coming from the biggest maker of EVs in the world. It’s exciting times to be writing about cars, my friends.
It looks like Mercedes could be the first foreign plan to fall to the UAW in its battle to unionize every carmaker in the United States as it hits an important milestone. Will there be a fiercer battle in F1 this year? It looks like it, but slightly fewer people seem interested in Netflix’s “Drive to Survive.”
In the good news department, we’ve got more confirmation that the next Chevy Bolt is going to be an LFP variant of the Ultium platform.
BYD’s Stella Li: ‘You Are Out, You Will Die, You Have No Future’
Channeling some real Heidi Klum in her Project Runway era-energy, we’ve got this excellent quote from BYD Americas CEO Stelli Li to Yahoo! Finance to kick off the morning:
Li cited the recent pause in EV investment as evidence of a slowdown in U.S. consumer adoption and compared that with China, where if a company does not invest in EVs “you are out, you will die, you have no future.”
That’s fun, but let’s keep it in context. Li was asked about this week’s freakout over the growing presence of Chinese automakers in Mexico/Brazil and basically said she didn’t see it happening anytime soon:
She added the Chinese company had little interest in targeting U.S. consumers as the upcoming factory would first and foremost serve Mexican customers looking to purchase an EV or plug-in hybrid.
“We’re not planning to come to the U.S.,” she told Yahoo Finance. When pressed why, she explained: “It’s an interesting market, but it’s very complicated if you’re talking about EVs.”
I think the phrase “upcoming factory” here is important. With everyone paying attention to Mexico all of a sudden and at least one senator proposing what is basically a 125% tariff on Chinese EVs, it’s probably smart to pretend like you’re not interested even if, long term, BYD probably does want to sell in United States.
Unfortunately, non-Chiense automakers can’t really enforce a “Monroe Doctrine” for Central and South America, markets that have a lot of consumers looking for exactly the kind of cheap cars that China is great at producing.
While I also believe that Li’s comments about investing in EVs or dying are true for American automakers, she’s clearly talking about the extremely competitive Chinese market, where subsidies encouraged roughly a trillion companies to start building cars. Now those subsidies have largely gone away and the purchase of EVs and PHEVs are beginning to drop, so it’s getting a little Lord of the Flies there, with both BYD and its closest rival Tesla trying to squeeze out everyone else.
According to Reuters, there’s a big new price drop in China for two of BYD’s most popular vehicles:
The newly launched Han sedans, available as plug-in hybrids and pure EVs, and the Tang hybrid SUV, will have a starting price that is 10.35% to 14.3% lower than previous versions, Reuters calculations showed.
The products came on the heels of BYD’s introduction of a new version of its Dolphin hatchback and newer plug-in hybrid sedan Qin Plus DM-i last week, both also at lower starting prices.
The pricing indicates that BYD is giving bigger discounts on most of these models than last year. The automaker lowered the starting price for the Qin Plus EV and hybrid by 15% and 20%, respectively, versus price cuts of 8% and 11% respectively for the two models in 2023, Reuters calculations showed.
Yikes! What we’re hearing from BYD is that car companies need to invest in EVs or die, but if they’re not fast enough they’re going to have to compete with a BYD that has a huge scale advantage.
UAW Meets 50% Target In Alabama
The United Auto Workers union has made it clear that the contracts with the Detroit Three were just a start, and that the organization wants to unionize all of the automakers with plants in the United States.
There have been attempts to unionize foreign plants for years, but they haven’t been particularly successful. With the momentum building, the UAW has a specific formula for how it’s going to approach unionizing these plants: If 30% of workers sign a union authorization card then the UAW goes public with that data, if 50% sign then the UAW holds a rally, if 60% sign they get a pizza party, and if 70% sign up then the UAW goes to the company to demand recognition or forces an election.
I might have made up the bit about the pizza party.
Earlier this year the Mercedes-Benz plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama hit the 30% milestone. Now the plant is at 50% and so a rally is coming. That’s a big deal in the deepest of the deep south.
How did Mercedes respond? From The Detroit News:
“Central to our success is our positive team culture that includes an open-door policy,” according to the statement sent by spokesperson Andrea Berg. “MBUSI has a proven record of competitively compensating Team Members and providing many additional benefits. We believe open and direct communication with our Team Members is the best path forward to ensure continued success.”
Tuscaloosa joins the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in reaching 50%. The Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama is also at the 30% threshold.
Drive To Survive Season 6 Numbers Are Down
As I experienced at the McLaren party earlier this year, it’s clear that the Netflix show Drive to Survive has been a huge boon for Formula 1, especially in the United States. But what of the extremely popular show?
It’s still extremely popular, but according to Netflix, it’s not as popular as it once was. Specifically, the new season is out and it’s had about 2,900,000 views in its first three days, which is down as Dave Nelson pointed out:
.@Netflix has released audience figures for the first three days of #DriveToSurvive season 6 and they're…. not great.
An average audience of just 2.9 million viewers have watched across its first 3 days, a sharp year-on-year drop of 30% on last year's equivalent figure.
— Dave Nelson (@f1broadcasting) February 28, 2024
Being a Top 10 show on Netflix is still a big deal, but a 30% drop isn’t great. What’s going on here?
I think it’s a few things:
- Timing: The F1 season hasn’t started yet, there will probably be more interest after this weekend.
- Fatigue: As with most popular things, there’s a moment where what goes up must come down and some normalization in attention is probably inevitable.
- A Victim Of Their Own Success: Part of why DTS worked was that you didn’t need to watch the races as the episodes were their own little replays. Now that people are watching the races and following F1 podcasts and F1 Twitter, et cetera, there’s less to learn.
Or, maybe, this season is just bad. I haven’t watched it yet.
More Details On The Next Chevy Bolt
GM smartly reversed course on its bafflingly shortsighted plan to completely kill the Chevy Bolt, but there’s a bit of a coda wherein we do not have one while we all wait for the future Ultium-based model.
It’s been pretty well known that the next Bolt was going to use an LFP battery cathode chemistry, versus the NCM batteries currently being used. Still, in an interview in Automotive News with GM CFO Paul Jacobson we get a little more color on those decisions and an admission that the country needs affordable EVs:
That’s why GM decided to bring back the Chevrolet Bolt EV rather than follow an earlier plan to develop a separate lower-cost EV platform. Reviving the Bolt nameplate in 2025, after discontinuing the first generation last year, will save billions of dollars, Jacobson said.
The next Bolt will use purchased lithium iron phosphate battery cells, a first for Ultium EVs in North America.
“We’ve got an established brand,” Jacobson said. “We’ve got a really good product that customers love. We can realize some of the efficiencies of the Ultium platform using LFP chemistry and technology and make it more profitable for us and significantly improve the business case for it.”
Yes, all true, and wouldn’t it be great if you were still building Bolts?
What I’m Listening To While I Write TMD
I love “American Water” so much. I miss David Berman so much. The Malkmus-on-Berman “Blue Arrangements” is kind of perfect.
I love your amethyst eyes and your protestant thighsyou’re a shimmering socialite jewel.
This definitely connected to the lower middle-class kid in me trying to chat up the Junior League girls.
The Big Question
Did you watch Drive To Survive this season? Have you ever watched it? Are you watching F1 this weekend?
I wonder if EVs are exempt from the alternate-days rule in Mexico City. This might explain the demand in Mexico
I’m halfway through the new season of DTS. I think it’s the best season they’ve had in a while. Silver Jews freaking rule. American Water is the best, although I also really, really love Starlite Walker. Berman’s final album “Purple Mountains” is a real punch in the gut.
What happens if 65% sign a union authorization card, Hawaiian shirt day?
They need to get to 70% to get a vote. And when that happened before a a VW plant, it turned out that when people get to vote with a secret ballot they don’t always follow through with voting for the union like they do when they get some public pressure to sign the cards.
I’m not saying that’s true this time, but hitting 50%, while significant, doesn’t yet mean a lot.
Wasn’t trying to make a big statement about the significance or not, just a lighthearted (bad) joke referencing Office Space.
Just got back from Brazil. Car-spotting there was fun as always, and on this trip it was the cars from BYD that surprised me the most. I believe it was around 2014 when I first experienced spotting a Chinese-made car there – a derpy little thing that I believe was a Chery QQ.
Wow, what a difference 10 years makes. Not so much around the Duque de Caxias area where the Renault Sanderos, VW Gols, and Fiat Mobis hold strong. However out around Barra da Tijuca, well into the Zona-Sul region of Rio there were a number of remarkably nice looking BYD products doing quite well keeping up with the Fury Road pace out on the main roads.
The one that really caught my eye was some type of big executive electric sedan that was entering one of the gated main apartment buildings out on The Peninsula, an observed-access planned community of sorts we stayed in for a few days. Nice place, and that BYD at least looked the business of being a really nice car. I’m not a big fan of tariffs, but I can certainly understand the desire to keep this newer stuff out of the US mix, especially when factoring in the Chinese government’s possible involvement in something with as much consequence as a car being sold here. It’s going to be interesting to watch at the very least.
As to DTS, I still haven’t gotten around to watching any of it. I never really got into F1, but I became quite enamored with WEC and IMSA last year, so I’m maintaining the Peacock Premium subscription in order to watch the 12 hours of Sebring coming up in a couple of weeks. Go Pipo and go Cadillac!
I wasn’t sure where you were going with the Project Runway picture at first, but my initial thought was “Is he using this to call out how absolutely sick Li’s outfit is in that header photo?”
“You are out, you will die, you have no future.” At first glance I thought this was advice to the graduating class of 2024.
Pizza party was thrown by Mercedes to try to win over workers. “Sure, higher pay and better benefits are okay if you’re into that sort of thing, but who doesn’t like PIZZA?? Eh, Eh?”
A big congrats to the M-B workers, I hope they are successful.
“so long dental plan!”
“Lisa needs braces”
I started watching 5minutes of this season’s DTS. Then promptly went back to boycotting it because I don’t want to support F1 after the Andretti stuff. Yes I am petty about it. Yes it’s a weird choice to make. But here I am.
Also there’s too much cussing to watch it with my daughter, so that limits my viewing opportunity anyway.
Unfortunately GM is on a roll of bad software implementation on their products. That’s what happens when you hire a bunch of ex Apple people and make them work the GM way.
The Chevy Bolt was successful based on how good it works, price and the value it has in general. They followed the same recipe with the Chevy Trax and its the third model with more sales in their brands. GM needs to fix whatever is wrong with their recent launches before they even get into releasing the Chevy Bolt, the car has a cult following it.
The software and project planning was set in motion and pretty much done prior to the ex-Apple gang showing up. Now they have to sort it out as an inherited problem. They’ve made it clear that a working product is now more important than a launch date. That’s a change and changes are being made.
Just in time for this Senate Bill https://insideevs.com/news/710459/byd-usa-tariff-china-evs/
then again, pretty sure it will not pass probably in this session.
I am almost done with this season of Drive to Survive and have watched all previous seasons. I believe I started watching when Season 3 came out.
Some of the cinematography and the look inside the driver’s and teams’ personal live is still great, but as far as the news on F1, I follow the subreddit and maybe the the drop in viewership can be attributed to people getting their news and drama from other sources.
Will Buxton’s dramatic commentary style has grown a bit tired on me. I groaned when Danica Patrick first showed up on the screen. Just not a fan of her monotone, simplistic commentary and the forced dramatic pauses ala Buxton. It’s like they are the Greek chorus explaining what just happened in a dramatic way but without the comic relief.
I also wonder if most of the cast is now more cognizant of the Netflix cameras (it seems like they often acknowledge the cameras from afar) and are becoming caricatures of themselves or tempering their conversations or emotions. Some of it no longer feels as genuine.
I felt like this happened with Deadliest Catch too. After the show got big, it started to feel like they were deliberately stirring up drama between the captains on the show (whether at the direction of the producers or just because they thought it would make better tv). Which is a shame because enough crazy stuff happens on the Bering Sea every winter as it is. They don’t need to manufacture drama to make it interesting.
BYD not being interested in the US market is like Danny Ocean not being interested in a casino.
Big question(s) response: No. No. No.
F1 was an utter snoozefest this year, so of course there is less viewership to boot. Even the most dominant years of Merc had at least some remote competition within the team because Bottas is fairly good at qualifying, Perez has been a non-factor.
I’ve watched every F3, F2 and F1 race (including the sprints) over the last three seasons, and have never watched even a minute of DTS. I have friends who say it’s great but I find the on-track drama to be plenty.
Of course, I don’t know what I don’t know, so maybe I am missing out after all. It’d be just like me to jump on the bandwagon just as it’s falling out of favor.
The Bolt looks like a suppository on wheels compared to the baguette-able Renault. Man, I love French cars.
The Bolt could have been much prettier than it is.
This is true of 80-90 percent of modern cars, IMO.
To paraphrase the great Steve Martin, as Vincent Antonelli-
“The dress. The dress is tragic.”
Aside from meeting U.S. safety standards, the Chinese would have a major hurdle to surmount: just guessing here, but I have to believe the Chinese dealership experience and customer expectations are much different than ours.
Would the Chinese manufacturers find it difficult to accept and/or deal with recalls? How do they cope with either shortages or massive oversupply of vehicles? Those are things Japanese manufacturers had to adapt to, and I would guess they will be just as difficult for the Chinese.
All that leaves aside the Fair Trade issue, which would definitely be a problem, at least after the first initial surge of consumers queuing up for low-price cars.
Wait until you realize how weak and pathetic the US safety standards largely are. Most of the “difficult” standards to meet in the US are for things like headlights and emissions; and it turns out both are pretty trivial in this day and age with a product designed from the get to go be a global EV.
If that were the reason I’m pretty sure we’d have a lot more “global car” options available from foreign markets
There are far more factors at play there. The US is an odd market and breaking in with a new brand or odd model is hugely expensive and highly risky from brand recognition to logistics and post-sale support. That requires a lot of volume (or extreme prices) and patience to lose money for years before even a good-fitting car might turn a profit. In regards to safety itself, it’s not meeting the minimum federal targets that’s so tough, it’s being able to compete with established players that score highly on well-publicized IIHS since safety has become a prime selling point. Plus, as they are getting squeezed by rising costs everywhere else, people are becoming even more risk averse in regards to cars, so chancing a new model is even less appealing than in the past that is littered with companies that tried and had to withdraw.What would these outside players even offer as unavailable models that would be highly likely to sell in meaningful volumes? Even established players have withdrawn categories of car that had decent sales, but were still not enough to sustain any/enough profit. The lowest risk category are the inherently boring CUVs, but every established player already has them and most buyers of those aren’t looking for weird or to stand out or to roll the dice on something slightly different for the sake of being different. Look at Alfa Romeo, even—that’s a company that’s over a century old and had some established brand recognition before they returned and they are barely hanging on with their CUVs where almost nobody else is struggling. Maybe if someone were to come in very cheap, but then volumes have to go way up and the quality still has to be respectable enough at those lower prices in spite of the cost floor for producing a car being quite high (which is why so many established brands have ditched their lower and lowest priced vehicles).
At least for the vehicle occupants, the US safety standards are more rigorous than most – even Europe. For example, US airbags have to be designed to protect unbelted occupants whereas Euro standards assume all passengers will be belted.
Where the US falls behind is the active implementation of those standards. There’s no national safety inspection regimen for registered cars and most vehicles are self-certified by their manufacturers. But you know a new Chinese OEM will have every single trim level of every single model tested out the wazoo by NHTSA and IIHS for a decade or more after introduction.
Not sure about those headlight standards.. it seems to me our ‘standard’ is a couple of fireflies in a jar, and the rules are mostly restrictions to prevent any kind of modern headlight advances that would bring our cars into the 21st century.
Hell, Citroen came up with the turning headlights in the 70’s in the SM, and they’re still banned here today.
I hope someone tells Lexus this. They’ve sold cars with standard adaptive headlights in the US for 20 years.
Federal minimum safety? I would think it’s just mostly meeting the odd US standards for windshields, lighting, etc. Scoring high on the ever-moving-goalpost IIHS (who I’m convinced just want cars to be more expensive to fix so that they can justify raising our rates further)? Maybe not, but if they’re cheap enough, a lot of people probably won’t care (which would be enough to excuse being built in China and rolling the dice on some quality issues, as well). I might not be looking so much for cheap, but fun. Give me fun and IDGAF about safety—take the damn airbags out for all I care (though, of course that wouldn’t pass federal minimums).
I’m not one to trust insurance companies to have my best interest at heart, but they also want to reduce payouts for injuries.
They can now just copy a play from home insurers (refusing to cover homes in California) and refuse to cover specific vehicles they don’t like.
I wonder who else besides Tesla themselves will cover the Cybertruck.
While they force larger, heavier vehicles that cause worse damage to pedestrians and cyclists . . . actually, they cause more deaths and quick deaths are cheaper to deal with than extended hospitalization and repeated surgeries, so maybe you’re right. I’m only half-serious about their intent as I’m sure it’s as much down to incompetence as malice per the usual with garbage humans, but they do love to bitch and whine about increased repair costs when much of it is down to the crap they convinced people that they need or The Man to mandate. Like, a $300 windshield is now well over $1k if the car has the stupid nannies behind it. A bumper cover has sensors behind it, so now $300 cover and $1k paint has those added parts costs and has to go to the dealer to recalibrate all that junk or get the CANbus to recognize it and those are just the most common minor damages. Of course, the whining only happens after they jack their rates and people complain to the government. Feel bad for us! We’re actually losing money! (On a mandated service with little regulatory check because they can just blackmail a state by saying they’ll stop operating there if called to reduce prices. If what they claim is true, they’re either utterly incompetent at risk assessment and management or full of it. If they really are losing money, instead of hitting everyone, they could just overcharge the shit out of the assholes repeatedly rebuilding houses in known natural disaster zones or who have a history of house or car claims or driving offenses, forcing them out and reducing their liabilities that way, but they aren’t targeting the true problems because they don’t want to solve the problem, they want to raise everyone’s rates for the extra profit. It was like the credit card companies after 2008 raising everyone’s interest by a huge amount—while they borrowed at 0 or near enough—to make up for their incompetence ((or “incompetence” as they knew they would see little repercussions when the gravy train inevitably derailed)) in extending credit to deadbeats with little proof of income, essentially penalizing the responsible people because of their incompetence, for which we the tax-payer already bailed them out. They should have gone to prison and that’s me being very generous.)
My theory with Drive to Survive is that it’s a victim of F1’s one-driver battles for the lead. The real fun is in the midfield, but coverage of races (as in, the broadcasts, not DTS) doesn’t often show that. If longstanding fans are even getting tired of watching the Max Show, then it can’t be great for new fans, either.
I’ll probably watch DTS the next time I’m at a friend’s place with Netflix. My bigger concern is for next season with Gunther Steiner leaving Haas, haha.
What’s weird is that the show hardly acknowledges Max’s dominance at all – granted, “the same guy wins every damned race and it’s not even close” would have made as boring a 10-episode arc as F1 in general was last year for people only watching the front runners, but to not cover it at all was a choice. Could be Max is still holding a grudge because of the way season 1 made him look like a prick in the Danny Ric drama and they’re not getting any material out of him.
I used to be an avid F1 fan since I was in elementary school, watching Lauda win the ’84 championship made me start karting. I used to watch even the F1 free practice sessions back when they were showing them live on EuroSport.
All that is to say I’ve stopped watching F1 ever since it has turned into the RedBull procession for the last 3 seasons.
DtS is not for me regardles of how competitive F1 is, I’m just not into reality TV.
I’ve not been watching F1 as long as you have, but I started in the late ’90s. As long as I can remember, it’s been a tale of dominance by one team, or at most two. We had the Schumacher era, the Vettel era, the Hamilton era, and now the Verstappen era. Yes, I’m leaving out a couple of years where others won, (Button, Rosberg, etc.) but it’s generally been a championship where one team makes the most of the rules, the others struggle to catch up, and when they do, the rules change. The last two to three years are not out of the ordinary.
While I agree that there’s always one team that got the best out of the ongoing rules and engineered the best car according to them, that doesn’t always lead to utter domination, like the rest of the field doesn’t even come close to mattering.
These days that’s even more amplified by how reliable the cars are (I can still remember when having a car breaking down in half the races in a given season was common even for a top team), and by the fact that in the car-driver ensemble the car part matters so much more than the driver’s skill (I remember many years ago when a good driver could sometimes overcome a middling car with pure skill and pull results way above what his car should allow, it was in fact pretty common in wet races).
While the “Max Show” was definitely boring last year, I don’t understand why you say that midfield battles weren’t covered. Most of the time, unless there was something going on at the front, the focus of coverage during the races was the midfield. The producers, and of course the owners, want to keep the audience entertained, so when Max takes off at the front, the focus changes to where the action is. That said, F2 and F3 are far more exciting.
True, they definitely did a better job of showing the midfield last year. The occasional cutaways from the action to “yep, Max is still out in front” were still annoying, though. Picture-in-picture that bore, please.
Well, what the BYD exec failed to mention was that the company gets a pretty nice benefit of having massive CCP government subsidies. Their plan is simple: Go into every market, dump their products at such cheap prices that it drives whatever domestic automaker out of business- establish total dominance. That isn’t a fair trade practice and thus why I am all for having tariffs unless they want to come back and play fair.
You left out the uyghur forced labor that most manufacturing sectors in China (including automotive) are taking full advantage.
I enjoyed this season of DtS more than the last two. It’s gone back to more behind the scenes stuff and less of a rerun of the season I had already seen. It could probably have been an 8 rather than 10 episode run though. It did not need two episodes on Alpine.
Also the opening with the Stroll’s super yacht party, doing their best the Roy’s from Succession (the event organizer saying “oh sh*t Stroll is early”) impression was TV gold.
When I saw the photo, but before I read below it, I was really hoping that you were starting a new bit wherein every reference to an auto exec was going to be a picture of Tim Gunn or Heidi Klum. I don’t know if any auto exec deserves to be represented by Tim, but the bit you’ve got with Tavares works so well I thought you were expanding.
I mean, I wouldn’t really mind if they used Heidi Klum as a stand-in for every auto exec…
She just doesn’t age, man. I had a crush on her when I was like 14 and I still have a crush on her at 33.
Jennifer Aniston vibes.
Please make a Bolt ute. I am begging you.
^This right here. A bench seat EV ute would be killer.
Nah… what we need is a Bolt 4 door crossover coupe!
Bolt 4 door crossover coupe cabriolet
I’m three episodes into the new season so far and it’s actually quite good compared to some past seasons! That said, they brought on Danica Patrick, so it gets serious demerits for her commentary. It’s widely held in every online F1 space I’ve been in that her commentary is universally panned, but outside of her mercifully limited screen time, the season was more enjoyable than the past two.
Agreed. They should have gone with Hinch instead.
I have a theory about why stuff like Drive to Survive, Marvel movies, and other stuff like that is doing poorly lately.
It’s all a knock-on effect of Twitter dying.
There’s no pressure to see something right away because you have to be part of the conversation. There are fewer outlets where people will go “wow you have to see this part!”
Twitter naturally had many problems, but it did have the effect of getting people interested in stuff, both from their friends and whatever happened to be trending. Hell most of my interest in F1 stemmed from posts that people I followed made. But since I don’t use Twitter anymore and haven’t found everyone on bluesky yet, my interest has dropped off.
While we didn’t need social media back in the old days, we also had a lot less material thrust at us. It’s easier for everyone to get into a show when everyone has three networks and they’re always playing that show Thursday.
Everyone on Twitter thinks everyone is on Twitter. Something like 20% of internet-using adults in the US used Twitter at all. It was heavily used by reporters and thus heavily reported on, but that doesn’t mean most people used it or relied on it.
But even then, people reporting on it spread news and what’s popular. Since it’s dead, you don’t have that part either.
It’s not the only thing that drives people to content, but it is an important factor. It was influential enough that it did drive the popularity of some things, and gave pressure to be “part of the conversation.” A healthy percentage of Drive to Survive viewers did go on the site to discuss the series. And if that’s part of the fun, they are going to drop it or just put it off.
That’s fair but I do think his point is accurate for “prestige” coded stuff like Drive to Survive vis a vis the Marvel movies.
Plenty of people who never use Twitter go and see Marvel movies (or used to), but the demographic for DtS as I understand it trended younger, more liberal, and more into the “discourse”, aka the median Twitter user.
It’s true, I watch DTS and do come to Twitter for the Discourse. And dumb jokes.
How is a sports reality show prestige television? It’s the same as any other reality show. Artificial drama and parasocial relationships. I’ve never heard anyone use that term about a (theoretically) unscripted series.
Hard Knocks is IMO definitely prestige TV for example. The heights it reaches in the discourse are far above the actual number of viewers.
But Twitter users are also heavier media consumers in general and there have always been knock-on effects. If there are fewer people talking about shows on Twitter, there are fewer Buzzfeed articles that just compile a bunch of tweets on those shows.
It’s not the only factor, but it was a bigger driver than its user base would suggest, because, like you said, it was (and still is) heavily reported on.
20% of the US adult population is still 10s of millions of people. Even if only a fraction of them are moviegoers, that could very easily be a large enough audience to make or break a movie.
Alright, alright. Fair points all around.
Maybe you don’t use it anymore, but Twitter isn’t dying/dead. Sure, there is a lot of crap on there, but it’s still the defacto place to go for real-time breaking news and unfiltered videos. I don’t think it ever drove engagement of meaningful media consumption on its own, or plays a role in shaping news/pop culture narratives today, but it certainly sheds light on things that aren’t going to make the advertiser friendly Nightly News with Lester Holt.
Interesting point. My own anecdotal example of this is that I watched two seasons of The Walking Dead mostly so I could be involved in the discussion about it on a forum I was a member of back then. I actually didn’t like the show much after the pilot, but the discourse kept me watching it.
That said, I firmly believe the problem Marvel has is that their movies have been declining in quality since at least Endgame. Plus the well has been poisoned by bad movies from Sony (oof, Madame Web, which I saw last night) and DC. But that’s a discussion for a whole other enthusiast site. 🙂
I could care less about traditional motorsport like F1. How has it benefitted gearheads at all in the past 20 years?
It gives you something to complain about. There is some value to that.
If you could care less, that means you care at least a little bit!!!
The very first episode of the new season of Drive to Survive has probably one of the best edits in cinematic history. When Lawrence Stroll is talking about his passion for cars and says he’s not as good of a driver as his son is and they quick cut to Fernando looking away awkwardly is just fucking comedic gold.
That episode was pure gold, the cuts and jumps to Fernando perfectly told you what everyone already knows, but would never tell Lawrence to his face or otherwise.