A24 is at the same stage of the hype curve Netflix was with House of Cards. They're going to commoditize their own aesthetic, expand until quality is mediocre at best, rinse and repeat.
replies(5):
- Land Rover building reputation with their rugged Defender and then cashing in on that by pivoting to a far less capable luxury SUV. Same with most off road cars.
- North Face making serious mountaineering gear to suburban fashion brand with reduced quality.
- Blue Bottle going from a high quality local SF chain to scaling internationally under Nestle. (and quality taking a hit)
etc, etc...
Once a brand accumulates sufficient reputational capital through genuine quality, the profit-maximizing imperative inevitably drives extraction over quality. (I would extend this argument briefly outside of the domain of economic theory and into physics: we do not observe low entropy being temporally consistent anywhere in the universe.)
The market doesn’t reward maintaining expensive quality standards when cheaper alternatives can temporarily coast on accumulated goodwill - shareholders demand margin expansion, private equity needs returns, and the competitive landscape punishes companies that leave money on the table by over-investing in product integrity.
Less of a moral failure by individual companies and more structural incentive alignment: capitalism systematically rewards converting hard won brand trust into extractable rents until the reputation is depleted, at which point capital simply moves to the next target.
The pattern you’re observing isn’t a bug but the logical endpoint of a system that treats reputation as just another asset to be optimized for shareholder value rather than a covenant with customers.