X Killer Cleanup

Sounds like these tropes need to be added to the list on Square Peg, Round Trope because of how many examples have been shoehorned.

If it will help clean up the tropes then knock yourself out. It's always nice having more people to help clean up these tropes.

Here's one from Creator Killer:

• While a success with fans at the time, Channel Awesome's fourth-anniversary film To Boldly Flee essentially dashed any chances of Doug Walker ever directing another movie again:
  • To start with, the film's incredibly Troubled Production took a toll on Doug's health, as he lost an unhealthy amount of weight and reportedly broke down into tears several times from how the film's development was negatively affecting the cast and crew. The controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)^note a bill proposed by Congress to combat copyright infringement on the web that would have resulted in the shutdown of numerous sites and content creators regardless of fair use. was being debated around the same time and weighed heavily on Doug and his brother Rob, as they feared that SOPA, if passed, would make it impossible for them to continue making their flagship show The Nostalgia Critic. Doug's only film directing credit since was for the Dragonbored segment for CA's next special, with no others being planned anytime soon.
  • On top of all this, the special also played a key role in destroying the working relationships (and even friendships) the Walkers had with the site's contributors, with many of them documenting the short deadlines and extreme conditions they were forced to endure under the two's direction without compensation. The fallout from this led to all but two contributors (one of whom only stayed to spite CA's management, which had ignored him for years) to leave CA by 2018, reducing the site to a shell of its former self.

"Reducing the site to a shell of its former self" implies that Channel Awesome still exists, so this isn't a Creator Killer. "The chance of Doug Walker ever directing another movie again" also isn't a creator's career. And some of this feels more like Overshadowed by Controversy anyway. Any second opinions?

To Boldly Flee is often cited as the tipping point for a lot of producers on the site that eventually led to them leaving the site, which turned Channel Awesome from a wide assortment of online critics to Doug and a handful of associates.

It's probably not a Creator Killer per se, since the site is still around and Doug still makes a living creating online videos. He did make a few original works afterwards, like Demo Reel and Dragonbored. If anything, it was the failures of those works that led to Doug focusing entirely on his reviews as a creative outlet.

I'd probably cut it, just to be safe.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Sep 24th 2020 at 6:18:14 AM

Alright, it's been cut.

Oh, and this blatantly non-applicable example:

• Smartphones killed Adobe Flash on the web. When Apple revealed the iPhone in 2007, many people questioned its claim to providing "the full web experience" on a mobile device since it would not support Flash, which a significant portion of web content of the time required. Steve Jobs fired back, publishing an open letter titled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he explained that Flash was unsuited to mobile platforms due to its poor performance and lack of hardware acceleration, as well as its closed nature making it impossible to extend it to add these features compared to other web standards. In spite of this, people argued that the iPhone was dead without Flash and that it would be trounced by Android, which would support Flash — only for Jobs' arguments to be completely vindicated after Flash on Android turned out to have terrible performance even for the rather poor standards Flash had already set and its development was canceled after a short while. Developers were then forced to resort to new web standards like HTML5 that provided the same functionality as Flash, but could be used with mobile devices, leading to a rapid uptick in HTML5's adoption as smartphones and tablets' share of internet traffic rapidly increased. Additionally, websites and browser developers, many of them unwilling to put up with Flash's notoriously poor performance, stability, and security any longer now that there was an actual, acceptable alternative (not to mention that the gradient-heavy Flash-based UIs began to look quite dated), began using HTML5 for desktop browsers as well, leading browsers to begin disabling it by default during the second half of The New '10s, culminating in Adobe and the major browser developers announcing that it would be discontinued completely in 2020.

"Adobe Flash on the web" is very far from a genre. This just sounds like shoehorning. Permission to cut?

If anything, that would be a medium killer, but that's not a trope.

Why not create a "format killer" page or redirect? Or would that be too general?

Slightly OT: A simpler way to describe those cartoons in the vein of Have You Got Any Castles? would be "inanimate objects have adventures when no one is watching", which sounds like a very basic description for Toy Story. Thus, Book Revue (or Review) did not kill any genre at all.

Example has been removed

Bringing up the following from Inhumans:

• Franchise Killer: The show's abysmal reception, coupled with the agreement by 20th Century Fox to sell most of their entertainment assets to Disney^note a deal which popped up around the time the show was coming to an end, mean it's likely that this will be it for the Inhumans brand for quite some time as far as the Live-Action Adaptation format goes.
  • It may also have been this for MCU TV series in their original format; after Inhumans, only Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to end on its own terms, and everything else^note Daredevil (2015), Jessica Jones, Luke Cage (2016), Iron Fist (2017), The Punisher (2017), and The Defenders (2017) on Netflix; Runaways (2017) on Hulu; and Cloak & Dagger (2018) on Freeform. Agent Carter had already been cancelled by ABC beforehand, while the pilot for a New Warriors series was shopped around to no success. A Ghost Rider series that was in the works for Hulu was also canned as a result of all this. Helstrom was still made just before the Marvel Television restructuring, but isn't expected to last for long was cancelled, often without a proper ending, and Marvel Television was restructured as a subdivision of Marvel Studios, with Kevin Feige taking the reins for future TV series for Disney+.

• Genre-Killer: Of sorts. After the dismal reviews and disappointing box office returns, IMAX announced that they were unlikely to spend money coproducing a TV show ever again, and that this would likely be the last time they would ever screen a TV pilot as a theatrical release.

Lots of Weasel Words there. "It's likely" that this is the last live-action Inhumans adaptation. "It may" be the end of MCU TV series "in their original format," whatever that means. It's a Genre-Killer "of sorts."

Cut it all.

Since these are tangedly related to the above.

From Franchise Killer:

• The double bill of Inhumans bombing and Disney buying 20th Century Fox (and therefore the X-Men movie rights) turned the comics version into a complete punchline. They'd been on pretty rocky ground beforehand, seen as a Creator's Pet and Replacement Scrappy, but it was at this point that Marvel basically gave up on their plans of turning them into a franchise to rival the lost mutants, and titles started dropping across the board, culminating in a story literally entitled Death of the Inhumans. Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl seem to be surviving well enough, though, owing to them being at best distant from the series.

• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Following the success of The Avengers (2012), Marvel Television started developing several shows that were intended to tie into the films, but behind-the-scenes conflict between Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige and Marvel president Ike Perlmutter led to Marvel Studios splitting from Marvel Entertainment and becoming a separate studio under the Disney banner, thus creating a large rift between the television and film divisions. As such, Perlmutter greenlit a series based on The Inhumans,^note A property that he was trying to promote as a replacement to the X-Men, but Feige was not interested in. which was lambasted for its Protagonist-Centered Morality and Special Effects Failure, and was quietly cancelled after one season. Combined with the billion dollar successes of the films Black Panther (2018), Captain Marvel (2019),^note Both of them being films Perlmutter was notoriously against. and especially the one-two punch of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Disney decided to do some more corporate restructuring and folded Marvel Television into Marvel Studios, effectively ending all the shows that barely connected to the films. Only the beloved and well-established Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to end on its own terms; everything else was cancelled, either between Inhumans' failure and the restructuring or after Feige took the reins.

Edited by Anddrix on Sep 25th 2020 at 4:11:54 PM

The first one might be legit, but No Recent Examples, Please! requires at least a five-year waiting period to ensure that the franchise is actually dead. Depending on whether we're counting from the cancellation of the Inhumans television show (2017) or the conclusion of the Death of the Inhumans comic book (2018), we've got 2-3 years to go.

I'm a little fuzzy on what the "franchise" in question in the second entry is supposed to be. It talks a lot about internal shuffling and reshuffling of corporate production divisions, but a corporate production division is not a "franchise."

Alright I've got a weird one.

• In parallel with Britpop, the British music press went hot for "intelligent Drum and Bass", the authentic new sound of black inner city Britain. Goldie's Timeless (1995), although a fine album that's generally considered a classic of the genre, opened the door for floods of by-the-numbers d'n'b clones, and the genre quickly became a cliche of television background music and film soundtracks. His 1998 follow-up Saturnz Return was slammed by a jaded press as a self-indulgent, pretentious folly. The opening track, "Mother", was over an hour long. Both Goldie and intelligent drum'n'bass subsequently left the charts, never to return.

This entry is legit IMO because "intelligent drum 'n' bass" is in fact a real genre and I can't personally name any examples, as an electronic music fan myself, that have come out since Saturnz Return. Maybe Journey Inwards by LTJ Bukem, although even then that's more of a chillout album than a d'n'b album. However, this is how the example is written on Goldie:

• Genre-Killer: Saturnzreturn is by no means a bad album, but when it was released it came after a glut of Timeless clones, and "Mother" didn't help matters. After that album, drum'n'bass lost its commercial success until the release of Hold Your Colour.

This example is no longer legit because drum 'n' bass is verifiably not dead and the entry even says as such. I think it may need a rewrite. Should the latter example be rewritten to specifically mention the "intelligent" subgenre, rather than drum 'n' bass as a whole? Or should they both be nuked, and why? If anyone can help let me know.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 25th 2020 at 7:06:49 AM

I think the following entry from the FranchiseKiller.Film page might need to be looked at:

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a brief Franchise Killer for the X-Men movies, since it was intended to take the franchise in a different direction following the original trilogy (as the title indicates, the plan was for a series of Origin Story movies for key characters of the franchise; X-Men Origins: Magneto would have been the next installment), but the terrible reaction to it killed these plans and a different (and much more successful) direction was chosen in the semi-reboot X-Men: First Class (which itself was partially an adaptation of the proposed Magneto-led movie). It also killed off a potential Deadpool film, until a 5-minute test reel with a CGI Deadpool (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) was leaked online in September 2014 to a very positive response, leading Fox to put the movie back in development, which was released to great reviews and the film (somehow) becoming Fox's highest-ever grossing Marvel adaptation. The film was so reviled that it, along with X-Men: The Last Stand, were both rendered Canon Discontinuity via Cosmic Retcon in X-Men: Days of Future Past. The Deadpool movie is a reboot that completely ignores Wolverine, except for a brief Take That!.
  • The franchise would ultimately meet its end with Dark Phoenix, which suffered a headache of a production and got mockery from audiences long before its release in the aftermath of Fox ultimately getting acquired by Marvel parent Disney, as everyone knew the franchise would be done at some point to prepare for the characters' integration into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Indeed, the film was opened to largely negative reception (even worse than Origins Wolverine) and opened to an abysmal $33 million domestically and ended up only making $252 million worldwide against a combined production and advertising budget of $350 million, the lowest-grossing X-Men film in history. With Disney ending up with a $133 million loss on the film, the biggest such loss of 2019, it's safe to say any thought of the franchise continuing in some way as is is now out of the question, and the property will spend at least 5 years on hiatus due to the tightly-knit nature of the MCU. The New Mutants spin-off film instead ended up being the last in the series, though that only ended up being the case because of the film being delayed at least four times over 2 years, due to the Disney-Fox merger and planned reshoots that never materialized due to conflicting schedules. And when it ended up finally releasing it ended up receiving middling reviews and ended up doing even worse at the box office than Dark Phoenix (though being released in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic didn't help matters), marking the final nail in the coffin of the original series.

Thoughts?

The first section can go, as if the series came back after being killed, X-Men Origins: Wolverine did not kill the franchise.

The second I'm not sure. Do we consider "the original X-Men series" to be a franchise in its own right? If so, keep. If not, cut.

If anyone has second thoughts though, I'm open to them.

I've been going back and forth on it. Agreed that Wolvie Origins didn't kill it; the franchise kept right on trucking after that film.

How dead the franchise is depends on how we define it. If we're considering Deadpool to be part of it, then it's not necessarily dead; Disney has made noises about making a Deadpool 3 as a direct continuation of the first two.

That's a technicality in my opinion though; Deadpool was enough of a tonal and continuity shift from the mainline X-Men films that, despite there being some shared DNA between them, I think we're safe considering only the "main" X-Men films involving Wolverine, Xavier, Magneto, etc.

That being the case, I think there's an argument to be made for Dark Phoenix as a Franchise Killer. Certainly the Disney buyout had a lot to do with it, but if Dark Phoenix had been a smashing success, it's possible to imagine Disney keeping the franchise alive instead of canceling all future plans (except New Mutants, which they were contractually obligated to release under the terms of the buyout).

I'd say X-Men Origins: Wolverine can probably fit as a Stillborn Franchise, since it was supposed to be the launch for a new line of X-Men Origin movies. But it's failure led to the Fox putting a hiatus on the series and restructuring things until First Class served as a Soft Reboot for the series.

Bringing up this example from Genre-Killer:

• The triple flip-flop box office and critical failures of The Mummy, Justice League and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, combined with the twin successes of the two part finale to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Infinity Saga" pretty much marked the death blow for the "cinematic universe"; the idea of movies set all in the same universe yet not exactly being sequels. Beasts and Mummy were blasted by both critics and audiences for basically being glorified two hour trailers for future movies, whereas the sheer indifference to any future DC movies caused by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad and Man of Steel caused audiences to reject the idea of being drawn to DC movies the same way they were drawn to Marvel movies, both because they were tired of paying to see glorified trailers for other movies, and asking mainstream audiences to sit through two hour misery fests is a tough ask. The successes of Infinity War and Endgame, on the other hand, were proof to audience that the storytelling format had been taken to its logical extreme and exhausted, with emotionally based storytelling and a farewell to superheroes audiences had come to live over a number of years. The failure of Mummy was enough to cause Universal to take the hint that nobody wanted this; Beasts caused Rowling and co to seriously re-evaluate where the Hogwarts universe was headed and caused serious delays in the series' third installment, and League was a reckoning for everyone at DC and WB, to the point where series executive producer Geoff Johns (who was hired to fix the films in 2017) tore future plans down and had every film in the universe since be stand -alone movies with cursory acknowledgement of the previous films- Aquaman has a single mention of Steppenwolf, Shazam! only acknowledges other DC Universe through a character being a fan, and Birds of Prey only has a few micro-sized acknowledgements of Suicide Squad all done in the first ten minutes of the film. It is also worth mentioning that despite being the highest grossing R-Rated movie of all time, Joker is its own contained story.

Isn't the MCU still going, though? If so, the example is invalid; maybe the idea of other companies aping the MCU is dead, but since the MCU lives on, the genre has not been killed. Though I haven't really been paying attention lately so maybe someone more knowledgable than I could fill in with some more details.

The MCU is still alive. Cut.

Bringing up this recent example from Genre Killer Video Game because it just seems wrong to me:

Not only is the implication the Batman Arkham games were the first high-effort licensed games to not tie directly with an existing product weird and quite wrong, the death of the licensed game is really more just a case of changing market conditions: consumers caught on to the usually lousy nature of licensed titles, development cost increased, licensors raised fees to get big licenses, etc. so it was no longer viable to just shovel shit out and the cheap cash-ins moved to mobile. I don't think Arkham really changed anything in that respect.

Also, I thought of adding this disclaimer to Genre-Killer. Thoughts?

When adding examples, be wary of Overly Narrow Superlative. If you have to add multiple qualifies to describe the "genre", it probably isn't an example. Die Hard On AX is a genre, "American-produced Die Hard on a boat" isn't.

My mention of the MCU was a bit narrow, but I don't feel that's reason to delete it. (Worth noting too that the Torture Porn and YA examples mention franchises that were still going, so by that logic, those have to go too if my cinematic Universe has to go just because of the MCU)

While we're at it, does this need to be in the movies page at all?

[[quoteblock]]The failure of the film adaptation of Watchmen killed any attempts at more serious, literary, comic book based movies for nearly a decade. The joke among critics was "Who watched the Watchmen?". The R rating for what appeared to be a superhero film indicated that this wasn't for children and the cerebral plot (this being Alan Moore), lack of humor, and the fact that it was too slavishly faithful to the graphic novel, were too much for adult audiences expecting another light escapist action romp in the same vein as Marvel and DC films. It wasn't until the success of Logan that R-rated, serious superhero adaptations began being looked into again. Elsewhere, the R-rated superhero film has mostly been used for home releases of DC's animated films as well as an extended cut of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Black Comedy fare such as Deadpool and its sequel. A Genre Relaunch occurred in 2019 with the smash success of Joker, the first R-rated film ever to make over $1 billion worldwide.[[/quoteblock]¡

Not only is the implication that it's the only "serious, literary attempt at a comic" that wasn't the Dark Knight just plain wrong (considering there were lots right after), it just feels overly narrow and seems to be speaking more about Watchmen itself than what it's trying to get at. It's also quite redundant when there's already an entry about Darker and Edgier superhero movies. As someone said earlier here, There's a difference between "Die Hard on a Boat" and "French Die Hard on a Billionaire's Yacht between Greek Islands"

I'm not going to argue that the Channel Awesome example should've stayed (their downfall was caused by a scandal, not a failed work, so it's more fitting for Role-Ending Misdemeanor). However, the Creator Killer description says it's enough that the work badly damages the creator's career/reputation. Something like "Popular Band never had another hit after Flop Album flopped" counts — it's not necassary that the band broke up shortly after its release.

Edited by MathsAngelicVersion on Sep 26th 2020 at 2:29:43 PM