There Are No Stars Today, Just Ghosts of Our Past

I promise this article has a happy ending that is excited about the possibilities we have today and in the future. So stick with me!

I got really excited about seeing Mike Tyson fight again. He was unbeatable when I was a teen and an early adult. Some of my favorite memories were going to parties and watching the fights on pay-per-view. 

So I was filled with nostalgia at this chance to see Iron Mike Tyson put on his gloves one last time and take down some loud-mouth social media influencer. Laura and I made drinks and cooked dinner while the undercard matches streamed on my laptop set on the kitchen counter. 

Poor Laura never made it to the women’s bout, which may have been the best that night. I lay in bed next to her with my headphones on, trying to stay awake long enough to see Tyson fight. 

As I said back in the 90s, Tyson has to knock you out in the first three rounds, or he’s in trouble. By the third round, he was in trouble. Still, the old champion went the full eight, two-minute rounds with the young upstart who was thirty-one years his junior.

To his credit, in the last seconds, Jake Paul brought his hands together and bowed to the legend before him, a gesture of great respect. They hugged and said encouraging things to each other as everyone filed into the ring. I didn’t need to wait to see the decision but did so anyway. Paul won by unanimous decision, beating one of the greatest athletes of all time.

I went to bed with a bad feeling in my stomach. It felt like vandalism. It was like one of those protestors throwing tomato soup on a famous painting at the Louvre just to get attention.

In Paul’s defense, he is a showman who has built his fame on the internet with spectacle. Getting an aging heavyweight champion to come out of retirement to fight him was a feat in itself. It’s my understanding that Paul was behind organizing the whole event, which was so successful that Netflix had outages due to the sheer number of watchers worldwide streaming the event live at the same time.

But why was it successful? 

Jake Paul is a known name for sure, but certainly could never pull such numbers. He needed a legend like Mike Tyson to bring hundreds of millions of eyeballs to this event. There simply isn’t any young contemporary boxer who could have instead. Personally, I couldn’t even tell you who the current heavyweight champion is without googling it.

This made me think about all the derivative reboots, remakes, and sequels Hollywood spits out year after year. Most of them fail because they’re never the same as the originals for those of us who were fans, and the younger generations don’t care about what was popular in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. 

It’s only when you bring out an aging legendary movie star like Tom Cruise that you get a banger like Tom Gun: Maverick. 

But even that couldn’t save a movie like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, where we got to see an octogenarian Harrison Ford be lectured about his white male privilege for two hours by some millennial or something… I don’t know, I didn’t see it. It looked too sad to watch for me.

But the reason they dragged Ford out to reprise one of his iconic roles again, was because it was the only chance such an expensive movie could recoup its cost. They certainly weren’t going to fill the seats with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, just as Jake Paul couldn’t fill AT&T stadium himself. They needed the old legends to do that.

But who are the stars who will take their place? Who in twenty or thirty years will have to come out of retirement to prop up some young upstart? Anybody…? 

There aren’t any, and that’s okay.

In the early days of mass media, it was far easier to stand out. There was radio for music, TV for short-form narratives, and movie theaters for big-budget films. Video games were poor representations of what was popular back then. Just ask anyone who’s ever played Atari’s E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial video game.  

In these narrow lanes of entertainment, a singer, athlete, or actor could make a name for themselves. But entertainment has splintered into thousands of rivulets of interest. The Beatles were big because rock n’ roll was one big conduit of popular music. 

Now, it is scattered into an endless tree of sub-genres within sub-genres. Just look at how many styles of heavy metal there are today: death metal, doom metal, nu metal, baby metal…

Technology and social media have driven this bifurcation. No longer do you have to settle for what everybody else likes. You can go down rabbit holes and find exactly what you like in music, novels, video games, movies, shows, or whatever else you like to delve into for escapism. 

Not only that, but you can now create your own content and compete with big corporate entertainment companies. Jake Paul himself was just a regular guy who posted his antics on YouTube and became famous enough to challenge Mike Tyson to a fight. There are independent YouTubers who get more viewers by complaining about streaming shows than the shows themselves. How? Because they’re able to find their audiences and cater to them without spending the money the Hollywood studios have to put out.

The truth is that big corporate media can barely compete with us independents. Their overhead is so high that they have to hit absolute home runs with mass global appeal or lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you didn’t know, I’m an independent historical novelist. I always say that if you want to be published by one of the big publishing houses, you better write about Romans, Vikings, or Nazis because those sub-genres of historical fiction are the biggest sellers. To pay for their staffs and for office buildings, they have to make millions before they can pay their authors thousands.

But as an independent, I can write nineteenth-century historical military novels that serve a niche audience and still have success because it’s just me I have to pay for. 

The independents can be nimble and take risks that the cumbersome media giants can’t afford. This is why they continue to spit out reboots, remakes, and sequels, because they think those are sure bets. But there’s a risk in not taking risks: stagnation and audience apathy, which eventually drives them into the arms of independents like me!

Check out my latest novel about the Austro-Prussian War! I guarantee you won’t find anything like it from the big corporate publishers!