Quote:
Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium
Or a closer example: How many people have seen Fritz Lang's Metropolis?
|
::raises hand:: I won't say I liked it, but I watched it. Very strange. And the original book by Thea von Haribou was even harder to get through.
Classic Trek's structure may have been "cowboy space opera," but the writing raised it far, far above that.
The difference between appealing to a niche audience and appealing to the masses is that mass appeal fades faster, because you simply can't be all things to all people all the time for very long. Pick one or two things and do them really well, and your audience may not be big, but it will be devoted and long-term. The LOTR movies were able to straddle both mass appeal and geek chic because they were three, finite movies. Done. ENT succeeded in quality when Manny Coto took over and started telling stories for the core audience. The great unwashed of the TV audience doesn't want the same thing the core audience wants, so making a series in a niche franchise and then pitching all the stories to the mass audience is like a guaranteed recipe for failure. The mass audience won't be interested in the premise and the core fans feel bored and betrayed.
Now, once Nintendo gets folks to buy the Wii, then what? What's the strategy to make them repeat buyers of the next platform, or the more advanced platform? Because the mass audience of video-game players will not have their interests permanently captured with Wii; they're going to go on to the next fad -- iPod phones or dogs with GPS built in or whatever. Nintendo has to turn them into core fans, into more interested gamers, or they will only have a sales blip (however large).