See, this is the thing I
really miss about the era when DVDs / BluRays were still considered the primary distribution vector for media, because you'd totally have been able to have set up the menu so that it just played one of the versions at random, and then scattered throughout the various scene/chapter selection menus would be ways for you to alter the flow of the Canon Event in order to see the alternate versions as well as activate / decactivate those scenes to create a specific the "timeline" of the film that you're watching, so that each one had a particular designation.
All of that sort of ARG-type stuff that was cool about physical media is something I really miss, as for all of the cheap "port-it-from-VHS-to-DVD-and-slap-the-cheapest-menu-possible-in-there" releases, there were a LOT of ones that put genuine effort into that stuff the same way that official websites used to have that type of design attention put into them. Hell, back in the day, I wound up getting a decent number of
Godzilla DVD releases that were definitely Chinese bootleg releases but they'd always go all out in the menus and packaging to make them FEEL like a legit product as much as possible.
All of that stuff really evaporated because the upkeep of those sorts of big amalgamations of secondary media and ARG stuff weren't as marketing cost efficient as just giving every release its own Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, & YouTube page to grab eyes via cookie cutter social media platforms. That's heavily influenced how the movie is JUST the one video file that has to be generically cross-compatible across whatever streaming service platforms are distributing it.
That means that even things like subtitles are all just generically configured at a platform level and not individually curated to the media itself, where a movie released on physical media has the subtitles explicitly built JUST for that release. Those are literally a part of the video for films like
John Wick that have explicitly stylized subtitle delivery of specific lines of dialogue when the films use
foreign languages, or
sign language, and
even reading braille, where that's part of the VIDEO not just an overlay. Recently, that's been driving me nuts on things
Bleach where they'll often supertitle someone's name and subtitle their position in the video – and what you get is a massive black bar covering the ENTIRE SCREEN because supertitles aren't a separately configurable option and the only subtitle configuration is for CC.
Spider-Verse has always felt like everything about its presentation was really keyed into the audience's EXPERIENCE of the media, and that it wasn't something that you could just boil down to a video file with a generically interchangable audio track. There are SO many little sight gags like
the BAGEL hit, where the presentation we used to expect from physical media gave space to individually curate those experiences in a way that the globalized architecture of modern streaming distribution platforms just isn't interested in doing at all... and so the freedom that exists to play around with that audience-centric experience in theaters just sort of has no way to translate itself and that SUCKS.
Also, if the whole Lost Media thing is interesting to ya, I've been thinking about this particular shift since watching a video a couple months back about
Gorillaz and all the stuff connected to Plastic Beach being right at the center of all of those shifts in the industry. That's what's gotten me wishing for times when the crazy theatrical stuff in
Spider-Verse would have just been the precursor to getting to explore and dig into all those things in the space from that release until the next film.
Really though, I've been wanting a movie to do what they did theatrically for ages but even moreso. I'd always hoped that there would be some murder mystery film that got released where the conclusion of the film is totally different between 3-4 different versions, where basically all the same things happen but sometimes the perspectives of where you see it from are different and some cuts have more or less detail of certain scenes, and the release just creates a
Rashomon situation for the audience trying to figure out what REALLY happened.
Seeing how even something as successful as
Spider-Verse is seemingly getting those versions relegated into lost media makes that feel totally impossible and just... frustrated about the state of the industry as a whole (even beyond all of the things resulting in the strikes and everything else).
Adam Savage talking about how Hollywood's VXF & animation industries don't have a Cost Plus model and that it's what's murdering them manages to capture my emotional sentiment perfectly.
X 
. I think the moral of the story that is being set up is to not accept your fate also, rather than the opposite.
