Creative Business Wrap – December 2025

I wondered whether to send out this newsletter this month. Events in Bondi over the weekend have cast a long shadow. When terrible things happen, everything we fill our days with can seem trivial. 

Nonetheless, I’ve persevered. Partly because, over the last month, I’ve had an unusually high number of people tell me how much they enjoy this newsletter (thank you!), which is encouraging. Also, because perhaps it might divert you away from the grim pall that seems to have descended, certainly over Sydney. But mainly because I think there’s strength in BAU: business as usual. BAU feels familiar. It keeps us focused and shows we don’t stop just because thugs and bullies want us to.

So here’s our December newsletter, which I trust will offer something to brighten your day. Thanks for reading throughout the year, thanks to our customers for the opportunities to work with you, and thanks to everyone who, like me, thinks that creativity and enterprise combine to produce something altogether more interesting than BAU.

Wishing you and yours happy festivities of whatever sort you like, and all the best for 2026. And in case you live in one of those households that watches the complex Christmas sentiment fest Love Actually about this time of year, may I spoil it for you?

Let’s start with a big move in the entertainment industry. Disney is entering into a partnership with Open AI, which will allow short-form content makers to use Disney characters in their work, albeit the ones without actual human faces. In the pleasingly titled “How Disney Got Hopelessly Lost in the Slop,” Nitish Pahwa outlines the deal, which includes a $1 billion equity investment and a three-year licensing agreement. The deal permits OpenAI subscribers to generate AI videos featuring more than 200 classic Disney, Marvel, and Pixar characters via products like Sora 2. This alignment with OpenAI is in stark contrast to Disney’s aggressive legal stance against other large technology firms.

Simultaneously with the OpenAI announcement, Disney initiated a legal battle by sending a cease-and-desist letter to Google, accusing the company of using Disney’s works without permission to train its AI. This legal action against Google is consistent with Disney’s previous efforts to protect its intellectual property (IP), including forcing Character.ai to take down custom chatbots and filing a lawsuit against Midjourney for generating near-exact replicas of its fictional icons. Pahwa argues this highlights the “confused, contradictory, and highly concerning” way the entertainment giant is navigating the AI future.

Ultimately, he suggests, the fallout from Disney’s AI strategy will lead to a “slopfest” on streaming feeds. But hey, if you’ve ever wanted to superimpose yourself into a light sabre fight with Darth Vader, now’s your chance.

Sticking with big corporate plays in the creative industries, Jesse Hassenger at The Guardian talks about the fallout from rival bids to buy US film studio Warner Bros., a move that immediately drew “eulogies and defences” from film fans worried about the future of cinema-going. The acquisition plan, timed to ruin the holidays “like a round of end-of-year layoffs,” signals a major step toward monopolisation, with the likelihood of either the Netflix purchase or a rival hostile takeover from Paramount further reducing the number of wide-release films produced each year.  

Netflix’s interest, says Hassenger, lies not in sustaining a pipeline of feature films or valuing the classic film library, which it “vaguely disdains”, but in eliminating competition (HBO Max) and seizing crucial intellectual property (IP). This IP hunger was clumsily advertised in an internal email that celebrated acquiring franchises like Harry Potter, Friends, the DC Universe, and bafflingly, the classic film Casablanca—not (yet) a franchise.

Hassenger then links this corporate behaviour to the challenges faced by cinemas, where patrons are often deterred by short theatrical windows—now sometimes only 17 days, down from the former 74-day standard—which makes watching movies at home far more convenient. Is this acquisition an attempt by “tech weirdos want control of our art and leisure”? Are these corporations treating the joy of moviegoing like a “productivity problem” to be solved by algorithms? And when is Casablanca 2 – Here’s Looking At You Again scheduled for release?

Now to the often-invisible workforce supporting the live music industry, coinciding with the ramp-up of music festival season in Australia. In The Conversation, Deanna Grant-Smith, Jessica O’Bryan, and Scott Harrison detail the precarious conditions faced by essential support staff, including stage crew, sound engineers, riggers, truck drivers, and dancers. This workforce globally endures issues like long hours, excessive travel, and inconsistent contracts. A 2024 CrewCare report found that 45% of crew reported working excessive hours, and 53% said their schedules prevented a healthy work-life balance. Notably, 47% of respondents rely on income from outside the industry to make ends meet.

However, an emerging influence, led by global artists such as Taylor Swift, could drive positive change. Swift’s recent Eras Tour made headlines for her decision to pay large bonuses to her crew, including lighting and sound technicians, caterers, and production truck drivers. While high-profile gestures from superstars are welcome, a related issue is the reliance on unpaid internships and student volunteers at many live music events, with 26% of festival staff in Australia being unpaid volunteers. Such arrangements perpetuate low pay and unstable career pathways, exposing structural risk and ethical gaps in the industry. For Australia’s music scene, the current festival calendar offers a crucial opportunity for artists, promoters, and venues to adopt a model that values the entire team by ensuring workers are “paid, rested, and valued”. Hear hear.

“Follow your passion”: good advice or not? Paul A. O’Keefe and E. J. Horberg argue that this mantra, famously delivered by Steve Jobs, is not a universal truth but a specific cultural narrative rooted in Western individualism and sustained by economic privilege. The Western worldview, exemplified by countries such as the US, holds an “independent model of the self,” in which actions are driven by individual preferences, making passion a natural fit as an essential ingredient of a good life. However, in cultures that prioritise interdependence and pragmatic concerns, such as Singapore, following one’s passion may be regarded as an indulgence that conflicts with priorities including stability, family obligations, and job expectations.

The research found that Americans evaluated the pursuit of a passionate career significantly more favourably than Singaporeans, expecting positive outcomes such as success and fulfilment. Americans hold stronger beliefs that passion is a “magical resource” that motivates and makes difficult work feel easy. Conversely, the Singaporean perspective, which is more prevalent in Asian contexts, views passions as potentially problematic, agreeing that they can be “too idealistic,” cause “tunnel vision,” and conflict with obligations. Cultural differences mean that Westerners focus primarily on the motivational benefits, whereas others are acutely aware of the pragmatic drawbacks of neglecting what one “ought to do”.

Creative practitioners, I think, often carry the weight of following their passion only to find they have made their passion a daily slog. I like that the authors recommend a balanced view: valuing passion without treating it as the primary metric of a successful career. It means recognising that prioritising security or duty is a valid path to a satisfied life, rather than seeing a stable job as simply “settling for less”.

Here’s a hearty meal of an article from Cory Doctorow, who once famously wrote about the “enshittification” of well, everything, and (inevitably) turned it into a book. Here, he argues that the massive investment flowing into AI is designed primarily to create “reverse-centaurs”. He sees the “reverse centaur” as a reversal of the traditional automation theory concept of a “centaur,” in which a person is assisted by a machine, such as using autocomplete or driving a car. Conversely, a reverse centaur is characterised as “a machine head on a human body,” specifically defined as a person who is “serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine, like Amazon delivery drivers whose productivity and behaviour are dictated by AI cameras.

Doctorow contends that this multi-billion-dollar AI bubble is not driven by technological innovation for the public good, but by monopolistic tech giants desperate to appear as “growth stocks” to investors, perpetually hyping bubbles like Metaverse, crypto, or AI to avoid massive stock devaluation. The underlying growth story sold to investors is that AI will “disrupt labour markets” by displacing high-wage workers, allowing corporate bosses to claw back salaries.   

For creative professionals, Doctorow says that fighting the AI bubble requires focusing on the material reasons for its existence, such as the myth that AI can perform complex, high-wage jobs. He cautions against supporting efforts to expand copyright to cover AI training (Atlassian, are you listening?)

And finally, here’s a look at how Christmas advertising has evolved over time. Written by Jim Ring, it demonstrates that while the methods of appeal change, the core themes often endure. The Victorian era, which formalised many Christmas traditions such as the Christmas tree and Santa Claus, also created an “unmissable opportunity to shift stock” through advertising, which was in its infancy amid the explosion of literacy and national newspapers.

Fast forward to the 1940s, and the tone shifted dramatically due to World War II. An advertisement from British Railways urged the public to reduce the number of Christmas presents sent and to avoid travel, using the well-known slogan, “Is your journey really necessary?” By the 1950s and 1960s, a sense of post-rationing liberation entered marketing, epitomised by Esso’s “Put a Tiger in your tank” campaign, which presented fuel not just as a commodity but as an “invitation to adventure”. This Christmas execution featured the famous tiger cheerily dressed as Santa (no, really), conveying a jaunty and slightly surreal message.

Where are we now? Well, the famous annual John Lewis ad for 2025 exhibits a sentimentality that suggests its makers have also been OD-ing on Love Actually. In it, a father reconnects with his son by recalling his days out clubbing in the 90s. The final tagline… well, I won’t spoil it, but let’s say it ditches the festive schmaltz for a call out to that “unmissable opportunity to shift stock”. It really is the most wonderful time of year… to spend. 😉