Earlier this month, I read a story in Vice about group of NFT “investors” who had become the victims of a “rug pull.” According to the report, the developer of a planned game called “Evolved Apes” had taken the money investors thought would go to the project and instead simply vanished. The report went sort of viral, I assume partly on account of how absurd a picture it painted of the NFT world, and how hard NFTs are for the average person to understand.
As far as I can gather, the idea behind NFTs is that you can own a piece of digital art, like a digitized animation cel, its authenticity verified by the blockchain (somehow?), and that this is somehow an investing strategy. You pay for the digital art in the hopes that someone else later on will pay even more.
The idea for Evolved Apes then, was that this group of people would all own various NFTs, of these crude ape renderings. They would then pool their money to create a fighting game and some other multimedia projects involving those apes, and the games would, presumably, become more popular, causing the original NFTs to rise in value. For most people, I imagine this idea sounds both bafflingly inane and staggeringly idiotic, an attempt to somehow combine a Ponzi scheme with beanie babies and crypto. The weird idea at the center of it is that the tail can basically wag the dog; that one can begin with the individual, meaningless non-story elements of a story, and then simply create a story incorporating them, thus giving them value. Conceptually, it’s a bit like trying to make Looney Tunes as a pump-and-dump scheme for your rabbit drawing.
At some point during Marvel’s absurdly extravagant premiere for its new movie The Eternals, which blocked off half of Hollywood Blvd, had police monitoring the crowd from rooftops and featured in-house Marvel “reporters” interviewing guests on the red carpet like it was The Oscars, I wondered if what I was experiencing was essentially just a massive-budget NFT scheme. Disney and Marvel own “The Eternals,” a piece of IP (intellectual property) created by Jack Kirby in 1976, as part of their corporate assets ledger. On its own, the rights to a semi-obscure, 45-year-old comic book can’t be worth much. But what if Disney could create… an entire ecosystem of content… in which those Eternals drawings could… fly around and fight and stuff? Then they might be worth millions! Billions, even!
I know, I know, I’m supposed to be reviewing the movie, and not the spectacle of the premiere or the corporate strategy and blah blah blah. But in a roundabout way, I am reviewing The Eternals the movie. To be sure, The Eternals isn’t the first semi-obscure comic book property to be turned into a film. But it feels more than any before it like the tail trying to wag the dog, driven less by the ideas of its creators than the hopes of its investors.
