Recently I had an argument where I said the end of a top movie was bad because it got dragged out to 5 parts. My counterpart made the point that people shouldn't take extra checks from their studios if they're dedicated to their craft. I said you can't demand that the studios not collect it. The money was probably a lot, and for most people money is a means to an end. C.S. Lewis has a point that fits here: you don't know how strong a temptation is until you actually try to resist it. It's easy to say "just refuse" from the outside.

Here's my point: Success is relative (money, acclaim, influence, or just doing what you love), and proliferating your art doesn't make you less successful., and proliferating your art doesn't make you less successful. By proliferation I mean sequels, spin-offs, and extra content to keep a property earning. Yes, it can hurt the quality, and my complaint about that ending is a quality complaint. But quality and success aren't the same metric, and one doesn't cancel the other. Some people don't count their success by how many critically acclaimed movies they've made or how many people their art made cry.

Then the argument went downhill and took the left path, as it always does. It came down to something like: is it success if it's proliferation, and would your career look the same if you hadn't proliferated?

I gave examples. Rockstar (RDR2 aside) is known as a commercial giant, not so artsy, but still successful. Hideo Kojima doesn't make nearly as much profit, but he has ten times the art and the critical acclaim. Even Coppola had to make The Godfather Part III at one point. Did that put an asterisk on his career?

Music is the same. Drake and Taylor Swift vs. Kendrick and Lana Del Rey. They aren't in the same stratosphere commercially, but nobody's calling the second pair failures.

Football too. Bielsa is hugely influential and admired, but he's nowhere near Mourinho's trophy count. Nobody calls either of them a failure.

And EA Sports is the best example of a proliferation giant, but come on, they're successful.

Akira Kurosawa was successful, and dare I say, so is Michael Bay. One is revered and had his commercial struggles, the other is panned and made billions. Both still count. You can even make the controversial argument that Bay stayed true to his craft: loud, kinetic spectacle, same way every time. Is that a craft critics respect? I'll leave that one to you.

So yeah, proliferation can thin out the work, and that's a hit to quality. But success has more than one column, and nobody gets to decide which one counts for everybody else. You don't get to decide whether someone should take the money or stay true to the craft, either.