Blue Puddles Origin Story: Ecosystems
How getting outvoted by my kids accidentally built a framework.
My kids wanted to see Wild Robot.
I wanted to see Red One. Lucy Liu. Chris Evans. Dwayne Johnson. Jacked Santa. I thought this was an obvious call. Plus, my kids attended the ballet school a block over from where Red One was filmed (the toy car scene). My daughter told me of the day that one of the girls came in and said, “The Rock and Chris Evans are filming a movie down the street!” Teens and tweens dropping their refinement long enough to run out the door of the ballet school in black leotards and pink tights.
Despite all of that, we ended up seeing Wild Robot. And it turned out to be a solid choice.
Monday morning, I did what I always do – I went looking for info on the movie I was still planning to see. Only, depending on how well it did in the box office, I’d determine if I’d be seeing in in-theatres or at home on the sofa.
$34M Recouped. $216M to Go.
The headlines said Red One bombed. On the heels of billion-dollar Marvel runs this movie took in 34 million dollars opening weekend for a movie that cost 250 million dollars to make . That sounds like a flop.
And then I found one quote. One of the higher-ups at Amazon MGM said they didn’t yet know if the movie was a success.
Since when are box office numbers not the success metric for a movie?
I asked ChatGPT: How is this not a flop? Give me the math.
It didn’t give me math. It gave me something better – it broke down how Amazon MGM actually thinks about IP. Not as films. As assets.
Merchandising. Red One action figures showing up on Amazon shelves in the weeks before Christmas because we’d watch it every year now, the way families watch Elf and Home Alone and Krampus.
Syndication rights. A potential TV show. Sequels.
Subscriber acquisition. Every family that loaded it up on Prime Video on Christmas Eve is now a subscriber who stays for The Terminal List and everything else Amazon owns.
Turns out, the theatrical run was just to cover the marketing budget. The real money – the money that compounds for decades if they bet on the right IP – lives downstream. In every new subscriber, every rewatch, every related purchase attributed to Red One. The goal of the movie is to get people into Amazon’s ecosystem so that they can discover five other things they love on the same platform.
Most of us have had that experience – finding one thing you like that sends you into a bunch of related things. I like Chris Pratt movies – he’s always giving girl dad energy. Perfect brown noise before bed. My favorite? The Magnificent 7, though I’ve watched The Tomorrow War a zillion times. But his involvement with The Terminal List compelled me to read the book (which I loved). Then I watched the series on Amazon (which I loved way less). But I “second-chanced” the franchise when the prequel, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, was released – which I’ve since watched dozens of times. Now, I’m bought-in. And eyeing merch. And my kids are sick of me shortlisting what me and Reecer wouldn’t do to help the “boys downrange” count bodies like sheep.
Dark Wolf led to me buying Savage Son and joining a Jack Carr fan group on Facebook… and watching almost everything Hopper’s been in. 😏
(I won’t hear your judgments, and I won’t respond to them.)
My point: Amazon’s betting on our tendency to rabbit-hole – like I did. In their ecosystem, the fact that Red One is a movie isn’t a big deal – it’s just the format that IP took. So, it’s less about how much the movie took in at the box office, and more about how Red One performs as an ecosystem entry point – how this piece of intellectual property can pull interest and new / returning customers for years to come.
AND it’s a family movie, so it smartly sets up a new generation of Amazon customers – creating feel-good family moments in childhood that lend themselves nicely to positive sentiment in years to come.
Friggin’ brilliant.
And you know what I’ve already noticed? It was loaded up in our holiday queue a year later, right alongside Buddy the Elf, Klaus, Home Alone, This Christmas, and The Christmas Chronicles.
Holiday staples, all.
Yet Another Marvel Reference
I’d seen this mechanism before – I just hadn’t named it yet.
Black Panther brought people into the MCU who didn’t watch superhero movies. Not their genre. Not their interest. But it was an Africa-based Black superhero, and people wanted to see how the story came together. Those same people – who’d skipped the previous ten years of Marvel films – showed up for Infinity War to see what became of King T’Challa and his Dahomey-inspired army of fearsome women.
Marvel had figured out that every movie is a door. Each one brings in a different audience. Each audience stays for something else. Cap pulls one crowd. Wakanda pulls another. The Marvels pull a third. And once they’re in, they seek out more stories to like – once they do that, the recommendation engine can take it from there. Outcome?
They subscribe. They buy the merch. They watch the next one.
That’s an ecosystem.
Every Brand Needs to Think Like a Studio
Turns out Red One is a single door in Amazon’s robust ecosystem. Each franchise represents another set of doors – each one designed to bring in a different kind of person and give them a reason to stay inside the platform.
And that’s when my brain made the jump that it always makes when I find a pattern that maps cleanly to profits: Every brand is going to have to think like a studio now.
Not because of AI. Or Amazon. But because of how people consume content. Because of the interest graph – the invisible web connecting people to their niches, their fandoms, their specific weird obsessions.
Because the only scalable path forward for any brand is building a structure where each piece of content, each product, each piece of IP is a door. Where different people can come in through different entry points. Where once they’re inside, you have enough to keep them.
That’s an ecosystem. And it was July 2025 before I pegged empathy as the lever, and had language for what that meant for the brands I work with – and for the machines that recommend them.
Takeaways to Use Later
Insight 1: The old success metrics are… old success metrics. Box office. Traffic. Follower count. Reach. None of these tell you if someone came back. None of these tell you if they went deeper. None of these tell you if you built something worth rabbit-holing into. Measure retention. Measure depth. Measure return.
Insight 2: Every piece of IP is a door. The question isn’t how many people walked through it opening weekend. The question is how long it stays open and where it leads.
Insight 3: Red One is an attribution source. Not a movie. Not a streaming play. An attribution source—the same way a lead magnet is an attribution source, the same way a blog post is an attribution source. Amazon is tracking what the film brought in, how long those subscribers stayed, and what they watched next. That’s not a box office conversation. That’s a pipeline conversation. And once you see it that way you cannot unsee it. I couldn’t, at least.
Insight 4: The interest graph is the mechanism underneath all of it. People don’t browse anymore. They rabbit-hole. Amazon is betting on that. Marvel built an empire on it. Your content strategy should probably account for it, too.
Insight 5: Ecosystems are retention first, scale second. The goal isn’t to reach everyone. The goal is to bring in the right person through the right door and give them enough reasons to stay.
Framework connection: These insights are the foundation of Blue Puddles – a positioning framework for the AI visibility era developed by me – Sorilbran Stone of Five-Talent Strategy House. Blue Puddles applies ecosystem logic to AI recommendation systems.
