Daily Inspiration Quote by Bob Odenkirk

Odenkirk’s lament lands because it punctures the indie myth at the exact point where the culture still wants to believe it. “Independent” used to signal a scrappy way of working: lower budgets, stranger ideas, a community of people willing to fail publicly. His phrasing tracks a rise-and-fall arc - “huge scene,” “great for a few years” - that sounds like someone remembering an actual ecosystem, not a brand category. Then comes the gut-punch verb: “co-opted.” It’s not that studios simply noticed indie film; they absorbed its aesthetics, its talent pipeline, and most importantly its credibility.

The subtext is about power, not taste. When he says indie has become “very corporate,” he’s pointing to how risk is managed now: the surface codes of independence (quirk, grit, social relevance) can be packaged inside studio logic, where marketability determines what gets made and what gets called “bold.” Indie becomes less a mode of production than a marketing sheen - prestige without unpredictability.

Coming from Odenkirk, the critique carries an insider’s weariness. He built a career in comedy’s margins and later became a prestige-TV face, so he’s watched “alternative” culture get professionalized in real time. The repetition - “Now, it’s become very corporate, the independent scene” - almost stumbles, like he can’t quite make the contradiction sit comfortably in one sentence. That awkwardness is the point: a word meant to describe freedom has been turned into a controlled product line, and everyone is expected to act like nothing happened.