A lot has been written about the IP problem besetting mainstream filmmaking today. IP, or intellectual property, refers to all the preexisting material adapted to film by studios and producers. It’s a way of minimizing financial risk by relying on familiar sources that have already found favor with consumers. These include best-selling novels, popular comic books, hit video games, and remakes of beloved older films and television shows but also, increasingly, successful brand-name commercial products such as Barbie, Air Jordan, and BlackBerry.

In short, IP refers to all of those plus any sequels, spin-offs, remakes, or reboots that follow from the ones that make big money. The blockbuster hit A Minecraft Movie, based on the beloved video game, will inevitably beget Another Minecraft Movie. Stockholders and investors may be reassured by a full slate of IP projects, but in the meantime the theatrical exhibition side of the movie business is in free fall as bored viewers skip new releases or wait for mundane content to show up on streaming services.

IP it is argued, is killing cinema as we know it. Or knew it. But then, at the same time, it’s the IP movies that so often make billions of dollars while original films tank at the box office. A lot has been written about that phenomenon, too, in long think pieces that wind up blaming audiences for their dreadful taste in films.

It’s become such a familiar topic that it’s featured as the main comedic target in the premiere episode of the new hit Apple TV+ series The Studio, a satire of the contemporary American film industry in creative decline. The show is about a new studio head named Matt Remick, played by Seth Rogen, who yearns to save Hollywood by making great, original, auteur-driven pictures again. But he can only nail down the top job in the first place if he promises to do “the Kool-Aid movie.”

In order to do that, he winds up having to torpedo his own dream project, which is making what has been announced as Martin Scorsese’s last film. It happens to be based on an original script dealing with the horribly grim subject of the Jonestown massacre. For a brief, desperate interlude before he inevitably shafts Scorsese (who plays himself), Remick hopes to make Scorsese’s movie a nightmarish combo of daring originality and cynical IP sellout. He thinks he can angle the film toward the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which emerged from the horrors of the Jonestown tragedy. That way he could still claim to be making “the Kool-Aid movie.”

Rogen and Evan Goldberg are the writing-directing-producing team behind this series. And that might explain why The Studio seems a bit soft and overly affectionate toward the industry it’s supposed to be brutally mocking — the two have long been very comfortable in Hollywood. The incredibly prolific duo run Point Grey Pictures, and they’re just as accommodating when it comes to cynical showbiz willingness to monetize everything, regardless of issues like quality, creative ambition, and human dignity.

In interviews, Rogen downplays any “end of the industry” woes by saying that the way Hollywood works naturally changes over time, so in order to succeed, you simply adapt to the change. He seems to be the opposite of the character he’s playing in The Studio, which ridicules Remick’s overly romantic notions of great studio filmmaking of the past every bit as much as it mocks the crass Hollywood executives raving about how fantastic the Kool-Aid movie will be.

In their early years as a writing team, Rogen and Goldberg had no trouble churning out a critically despised but moneymaking adaptation of The Green Hornet (2011) as a follow-up to the popular, critically praised original comedies that put them on the map — 2007’s Superbad and 2008’s Pineapple Express. Their initial promise as idiosyncratic comedy talent has faded considerably since then. When directing films over the years, they’ve tended to opt for predictably rowdy satirical comedies with outrageous premises, plenty of slapstick, and crude sexual jokes, like This Is the End (2013), The Interview (2014), and Sausage Party (2016).

Their most recent feature film as writers and producers is an animated reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series — itself an extension of a vast media franchise encompassing comics, television, merchandising, and video games — called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023). They’re very active film producers and are involved in various capacities in television, too, with a particular highlight being the 2022 Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, a comedy-drama that’s also a sympathetic study of the marriage of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

A lot of their TV work draws on IP sources, such as adaptations of comic book series like Preacher and The Boys (which led to The Boys Presents: Diabolical in 2022). And Rogen and Goldberg are inclined to embrace media crossover sequel and franchise possibilities as well. The 2016 animated movie Sausage Party, which they cowrote and coproduced, was followed by the 2024 Amazon Prime Video television series Sausage Party: Foodtopia. Their follow-up to the film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the new animated Paramount+ TV series Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And on top of all that hyperactive productivity, it’s important to note that Rogen is often performing in these films and television series as well.

In short, by the current standards of the entertainment industry, Rogen and Goldberg are ideal high-functioning, wide-ranging talents. Many successful filmmakers might have cringed at the prospect of writing and producing 2016’s Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, a sequel to the 2014 comedy Neighbors. Empowered by the accumulation of so much industry success and influence, they might have fought to distance themselves from cranking out IP content in order to concentrate on more ambitious projects and develop a coherent creative vision. But not Rogen and Goldberg. They seem to have no Matt Remick–like delusions of grandeur or love of film art for art’s sake. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine them following up their successful series The Studio with a film spin-off called The Kool-Aid Movie.