Tim Wu claims in The Master Switch, “mediocrity safely begets mediocrity: behold the true miracle of the modern entertainment industry” (237). I believe that this is a valid claim. The idea of the lone inventor has disappeared and been replaced with businesses focused on profit maximization. “By the twenty-first century, film would become much less predominantly a business of storytelling than it had been, and much more a species of advertisement, an exposure strategy for the underlying intellectual property” (231). With characters as intellectual property, a film can be viewed as an advertisement for that product. For instance, the movie Transformers is an advertisement for the comic books, toys, and video games all based on the characters in the movie. These characters are now not restricted to the movie theater and can even end up as a toy in a child’s Happy Meal. This profit maximizing technique of having movies be advertisement makes for mediocrity, as, “unlike a patent, a character copyright doesn’t require proof that you’ve invented something or affected a real innovation- minimal creativity will do.” (231) No longer is the drive behind movies ingenuity, but instead it is money. 

Without inventiveness as the purposeful of producing a film, mediocrity has taken over. For example, the producers of a flop like Evan Almighty remain unscathed because they are financial secure. In contrast, when Michael Cimino produced Heaven’s Gate, also a terrible movie, in 1980 he was banished from the film industry (236). Money is power and these large companies are in ultimate control of the industry. The turn in the cycle is that now films are no longer a creative outlet, but instead referred to as products and forms of advertisement. The resulting absence of risk taking inventors has made the film industry mediocre. Average movies produces average results. Without the pressure to produce a movie that will be a hit, film industries rely on mediocrity.

This mediocrity can be viewed as a “miracle” from the eyes of Cimino as the entertainment industry is safe from any types of “bombs” like the movie Heaven’s Gate. However, this is not everyone’s definition of a miracle. The “miracle” is financial stability, but some would argue a sense of creativeness in the entertainment industry is more valuable than any sum of money.