Tag: Disney converged

The Library is Full of Them

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As I mentioned in an earlier post Disney (and by extension Hollywood) realizes that they’ve alienated the male half of the human race.  And as I gleefully mentioned this is all their own fault and it’s hilarious that it’s a surprise for them.  And after torching two of the most valuable male-oriented intellectual properties (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), instead of trying to fix the problems and repair the damage to these brands they’ve decided to bury their losses and start from scratch with brand new franchises.

Well, you’ve got to admire their optimism.  Maybe they haven’t heard the old saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  But it’s their money (or their stockholders anyway).

But in a sense, they’ve got it half right.  Half of their problem is that sequel after sequel has drained all the life out of their franchises.  So new stories and characters is a good direction to go in.  People like to be entertained and meeting new characters is part of that entertainment.  And even though there are only a few overarching plots to an adventure story it helps to change the names of the heroes, villains, magic rings, super-weapons and princesses from story to story.

So far, so good.  But now comes the tricky part.  Listen up Disney:

DON’T MAKE THE HERO A GIRL-BOSS.  THE GIRL IN THE STORY IS THE LOVE INTEREST OF THE HERO.  SHE IS THE REWARD FOR THE HERO SAVING THE DAY.  SHE MAY TAKE UP A BOW OR A DAGGER IN A PINCH BUT SHE’S NOT THERE TO SAVE THE HERO AND SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE.

I hope I was clear there.  Use the traditional hero saga as the backbone of the story and find a writer and a director who can work with such a story in a creative and entertaining fashion and you will make billions of dollars.  Just as a for instance Joss Whedon directed the first Avengers movie.  It made $1.52 billion worldwide at the box office.  That’s a lot of money.  And part of the reason for that enormous sum is because Whedon knows how to make likable characters in a movie.  He blends humor, action and drama in the correct proportions and at the right moments.  In other words, he’s not a hack like all of the DEI directors that have bungled the last several years of your franchise flops.

Now, granted he is demanding and sometimes slightly abusive toward the “talent.”  But they’re getting paid millions of dollars to dress up in spandex and fool around in front of a green screen.  The least they could do is take a little hectoring from a prima donna director to earn those millions.  So anyway, my advice for Hollywood is to find the few creative talents out there; directors like Whedon and Christopher Nolan.  And purchase the film rights to books that millions of people love.  And don’t mess with the stories and characters.  Put them faithfully on the big screen and then instead of trying to recreate success with endless sequels move onto another story!  Did you know there is more than one book in the library?  There are several.

I know it’s a radical departure. But it’s just so crazy it just might work!

A Light Bulb Turns On at Disney

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According to Variety magazine:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

Disney has realized that young men are tired of their girl-boss inhabited movies.  And now it’s a problem because Disney needs their money.

And I quote:

“Numerous studies show that Gen Z men in particular are a lonely, gaming-obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns — not the easiest segment to grasp.”

So even when their desperate to attract an audience they can’t help but mock and belittle men and boys.

Rather than rant on my own I’ll borrow the Critical Drinker’s rant.  He is much more amusing than I am.

 

 

Long, Long Ago in a Studio Far, Far Away

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As the tent-pole summer movies of July fade into August obscurity and dinosaurs, Superman and lesser Marvel superheroes get rated and dissected by the movie critics I think it has been established beyond a shadow of a doubt that the failure of Hollywood to replicate the billion-dollar paydays from earlier versions of Star Wars and the Avengers franchises can now be definitively explained.  They forgot that a superhero movie (or even just a plain hero movie) requires a hero.  And the requirements of a hero (whether in book or on a screen) include that we like the hero.

And that seems to be where Hollywood has gone off the rails.  They’ve managed to make a bunch of movies where the heroes are unlikeable.  For the most part these unlikeable heroes have tended to be of the type currently known as the “girl-boss.”  The prime example of this category is Rey, played by Daisy Ridley in the Star Wars movies.  The type includes the following traits:

  • Although small and thin she is completely capable of defeating men many times her size.
  • She hectors male characters about their obvious shortcomings compared to her.
  • Completely humorless.
  • Has no flaws.
  • Has no setbacks.

Now, this sort of character fits perfectly into the social messaging of all modern Hollywood films.  It allows older franchises with male protagonists to be replaced with the girl-boss.  Examples include Rey in Star Wars replacing Luke Skywalker, Helena Shaw replacing Indiana Jones and Captain Marvel basically replacing all the Avengers.

The problem with these replacements is that the producers think that just saying that their new characters are just as good as the originals (if not better) is enough.  For some reason they didn’t think it would be necessary to hire good writers and directors to make the movies exciting and entertaining.  But as it turns out they are extremely important if you don’t want your movies to be unwatchable crap.  And that is the thing that all these movies share.  They’re awful.  And unfortunately for Disney they’ve been making these “better” movies and television series in the Star Wars and Marvel series for about ten years and they’ve completely dissipated the enthusiasm and good will of their legacy audiences that paid billions of dollars to see the older movies that actually were well written, exciting and entertaining.

Over the last six months it has finally dawned on Disney (and the other studios) that they’ve killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.  They’ve alienated about 70% of their audience and destroyed a machine that printed cash.  From what I’ve read, the most recent Marvel movie “Fantastic Four” went to lengths to not go down the girl-boss lane and even had a decent script that could be enjoyed as an adventure movie.  The problem is that most of their old audience didn’t bother to give it a try and so the movie while not a complete bomb is struggling to become profitable.

Regardless of whether “Fantastic Four” makes money I think we may be at a turning point in the fantasy-adventure genre.  It has finally dawned on the studios that social messaging for the woke agenda is box office poison that has a tiny audience.  As the recent purchase of Paramount by Skydance Media demonstrates, entertainment that doesn’t make money ends up on the auction block and then the chopping block where the unentertaining and unprofitable components get sliced off and thrown in the garbage.  And similar things are happening all over the media and entertainment world.  CNN, MSNBC and CBS are all finding out that woke ideology doesn’t equal profitability and if they can’t adapt to a world that isn’t amused by it, they’ll be out of work.  I guess I’m an eternal optimist but maybe, just maybe, in a year or two decent fantasy adventure may be produced in Hollywood again.  At least it could happen!

Long, Long Ago, In a Franchise Far, Far Away

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In the late 1970s a movie studio green lit a modest science fiction/fantasy film called Star Wars that made so much money that the studio and the creative team that owned the rights to it made billions of dollars from sequels, toys and every other monetizing scheme imaginable.

And why did all this happen?  Well, accidentally or on purpose the makers of that original movie tapped into the primal desire of young men (and it was almost exclusively boys and young men) to watch an exciting updating of the young apprentice’s journey to becoming a hero.  Whether it’s young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone or the Marine recruit proving himself on the battlefield of Iwo Jima or the hot shot pilot in a Top Gun movie, every boy (and man) enjoys the visceral experience of seeing the hero prove himself in combat and if he’s lucky enough win the heart of the princess (or in less monarchical times, some pretty girl in general).

And 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm rode that male archetypal fantasy to fame and fortune for almost forty years.  But in 2015 Lucasfilm (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Disney) launched the seventh film in the Star Wars franchise, “The Force Awakens” and drove a stake right through the heart of that golden goose.  With Kathleen Kennedy producing and J. J. Abrams directing all of that male-oriented story-telling was jettisoned and replaced with “girl-power.”  Kathleen Kennedy gleefully proclaimed that “The Force is estrogen.”  Well, “The Force Awakens” made billions.  Of course, it would have made billions even if it was just an empty screen for two hours.  That’s how much good will had been built up over the course of decades for the franchise.  But the following two films and the various spin-offs like the recent television series “The Acolyte” have completely dried up those wells of enthusiasm that had been produced previously.  The last couple of movies have lost money, in fact hundreds of millions of dollars.  And now the folks at Disney have cancelled a number of Star Wars productions and they’re trying to figure out how to fix their dying franchise.

Well Bob Iger, I’ve got an idea.  First off fire Kathleen Kennedy and all the people who decided to create the monstrosities that caused all this damage.  In fact, don’t just fire them but publicly abuse them verbally and force them to apologize for their heinous sins.  Then make a short trailer video for the next film.

It will consist of all the most egregious scenes from all of the horrible movies you released since 2015 in short snippets in a nightmare montage.  Then we switch to Han Solo in bed waking up from a nightmare and expressing relief that the whole thing was a bad dream.  He then gets up and joins his son, wife and brother-in-law at breakfast and he tells them some of the details of his nightmare and they all have a big laugh at how ridiculous it all sounds.

Then you get some good writers to reread the Arthurian legends and the pulp science fiction stories from the 1930s and you start making money again.

$180MM in, Disney Cuts Its Losses on the Acolyte

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Disney has systematically dismantled the greatest cinematic money-printing franchise by turning the Star Wars brand into a woke, feminized version of the space fantasy series that George Lucas spawned back in the late 1970s.

Generations of boys and men have enjoyed the good/evil, dark/light, David/Goliath dualism that is as old as Thermopylae, the Odyssey and the Bible itself.  But Disney (and Lucas himself) had to mess with the classic “apprentice becomes hero and wins the princess” and instead went with girl-boss saves the universe despite helpless and/or evil men.

Well, the response from the paying audiences has been souring over the last decade and now it’s bottomed out.  And the latest symptom of this rejection is the cancellation after one season of “The Acolyte.”

This incredibly expensive television series was trashed by the fans and viewership plummeted by the season finale.  And so it’s been cancelled.  And the reason that the producers attribute the cancellation to is:

misogyny/homophobia.

Well, there you go.  The misogynistic homophobes have voted with their feet.  Now will Disney learn from this or do they need to lose some further hundreds of millions of dollars?  Let’s see.

Disney Doubles Down … Again

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The four-time Emmy winner and “Ms. Marvel” helmer told CNN that “it’s about time” a female filmmaker was behind a “Star Wars” film franchise installment. “Wonder Woman” filmmaker Patty Jenkins was previously attached to direct “Rogue Squadron” when it was announced in 2020; the film was removed from the Lucasfilm production calendar in 2021 and officially shelved in 2023.

“I’m very thrilled about the project because I feel what we’re about to create is something very special,” Obaid-Chinoy said of her upcoming sequel to “The Rise of Skywalker,” adding, “We’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”

Well I guess the only fitting comment is from Cartman.

(Not Safe For Work)

Guest Contributor – TomD – 28NOV2023 – Disney Woes

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

 

Just read this in PJ Media (link)

Reports of Disney’s Death Are (Not?) an Exaggeration
Stephen Green | 5:11 PM on November 27, 2023

As Disney’s two-time CEO Bob Iger prepares to host the company’s annual town hall on Tuesday to provide “hints or guidance for what the next phase of ‘building’ will bring after the problem-solving phase,” it’s time to ask if Iger is able “to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.”

The first quote comes from a Hollywood Reporter item on Monday detailing the company’s Wall Street woes. Traders and managers will be watching Iger on Tuesday for “possible color, body language or even outright updates on various topics,” ranging from the company’s ongoing series of box office flops to troubles at their fabled theme parks.
The second quote is courtesy of Jonathan Turley. His Monday column — almost in time for Adam Smith’s 300th birthday — shows how Smith’s “invisible hand” has undone the company’s woke agenda. Disney is now “negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers,” Turley writes, and is “even reporting a decline in licensing revenue from products associated with Star Wars, Frozen, Toy Story and Mickey and Friends — iconic and once-unassailable corporate images.”

“Wish” is Disney’s latest animated effort that isn’t a sequel or reboot and it opened over the long Thanksgiving weekend to middling reviews and worse box office sales. Well, not entirely not a reboot — one of the characters is the glowy Star, as in Pinocchio’s “When You Wish Upon A Star.” “Wish” looks to be another big money-loser in a yearlong series of them, including “Indiana Jones and the Whatever McGuffin,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the live-action Little Mermaid, and most recently, “The Marvels.”
The Disney+ streaming service is losing money and eyeballs. Impressions — the streaming measure of viewership — is down 14% from last year, the company says.
The worst news is that Disney’s intellectual properties — the company’s seed corn for future growth — are in terrible shape.

The good news is that $7.5 billion in cost-cutting measures have restored some sense to the company’s balance sheet. The bad news is that the maintenance-heavy Disney World and Disney Land are reportedly looking a little worse for wear. Or as Wall Street’s Jamie Lumley warned, “As the business looks to slash costs and make streaming profitable, there are sure to be concerns about cutting too deep and impacting the business going forward.”

But the company can’t cut its way to health. It needs to start selling tickets again to the kinds of movies and theme park experiences people expect when they see the Disney label.

Walt Disney and his brother Roy were jealous guardians of the Disney name and reputation. Given so many more recent changes, this seems like much longer ago than 1983, but I’m reminded of “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” It was considered a Very Big Deal at the time when Disney produced a Ray Bradbury film with such a dark mood and storyline. At the time — Walt had died and Roy was no longer involved in day-to-day operations — Disney was looking to branch out from family fare like the Herbie movies and “Pete’s Dragon.”

Results were mixed at best, and I’m being overly generous.
It took a 1984 hostile takeover attempt and a long-term recovery plan courtesy of incoming CEO Michael Eisner to restore Disney’s luster. Eisner understood Disney’s creative strength — and it wasn’t in jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon with “The Black Hole,” or another cheesy Love Bug movie.

It was in getting back to classic animation with “The Little Mermaid,” and in recognizing similar strength in the fledgling Pixar Animation Studios.

Iger can cut costs but, in the end, what he needs to do is remember what the Disney brand means — and work as furiously to restore it as Eisner did, and as Walt and Roy used to work to protect it.

Unless we see evidence of that in Tuesday’s town hall, Disney shares might be up a bit on Wall Street’s hopes but I ain’t buying.

South Park is Making Disney Lose Billions of Dollars

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Anyone who has kids or grandkids is aware that Disney has been on a jihad to “diversify” their movies and tv shows.  This entails replacing characters who in earlier stories were male or white or sexually normal with women and specifically non-white women and very specifically non-white, queer women.  This was very noticeable in the Star Wars franchise where all the heroes are now women and all the men are either lame or evil.

But that was only the beginning.  Next comes the princess movies.  Apparently the irony of a character named Snow White who isn’t white was too complex for Disney.  And diversity has become the marching orders going forward in the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU).  So the old white male heroes like Iron Man and Captain America have been either killed off or put out to pasture and a new generation has been introduced.  So we’ll be getting Black Captain America and Black Spider Man.  But the most egregious example of DEI awfulness is the female Marvel superheroes.  And now that innovation has born fruit, poisonous fruit.  Whereas previously they produced Captain Marvel, we now have “The Marvels.”  That’s blonde haired Captain Marvel joined by two diverse and empowered female heroes who battle against a female super-villain and “don’t need no men to get in their way.”

The reviews of this movie have been scathing.  Apparently when you make message fiction it’s not necessary to have a coherent plot or likeable characters or even a recognizable beginning, middle and end.  You just stop when the special effects guys run out of stuff.

Well, there is no need to complain about this movie.  Making the Marvels was its own punishment.  Based on its opening box office, the movie is already predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.  And all this pandering to diversity has inspired the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone to create an episode that mocks Disney’s endless crusade to artificially diversify their movies.  In this episode Cartman finds himself both transformed into a diverse woman and also assuming the place of Disney’s diversifier in chief; producer Kathleen Kennedy.  In this guise Cartman endlessly orders the showrunners for his movies to “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay.”  Here’s the “not safe for work version.”

And now both Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger of Disney have made public statements complaining about what’s going on.  Kennedy has stated that South Park is causing Disney fans to think poorly of Disney’s movies and that is causing the poor box office.  She hints that legal action is forthcoming.

Iger is a little more grounded in reality.  He admits that a portion of Disney’s audience really is consciously unhappy with what he calls Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.  And he states quite openly that his solution to this situation will be to “double down” on more diversity, equity and inclusion.

You’ve got to respect his honesty.  Okay.  In the face of a string of movies and tv shows that because of the emphasis on unentertaining social messaging have bombed at the box office Disney is going to give us an even stronger dose of social messaging.  The beatings will continue until moral improves.

This is pretty great.  Disney is a corporate behemoth.  They’ve had a built in cash machine tied to the American family for generations.  And now they’re committing public suicide just to prove they can do it.  Well, how stupid do their competition have to be.  They should jump at the chance to provide these families with exactly what they used to get from Disney.  Hire some decent writers who don’t hate normal people.  Pay the special effects people to animate it and get rich.  Give them knock-offs of all the Disney and Star Wars and Marvel stuff but without “putting a chick in it and making it lame and gay.”

There. That’s not so hard to figure out, is it?

Will Iger Retreat from the Woke Agenda that is Ruining Disney’s Business?

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In the linked article the Financial Times speculates on whether Disney will sell off its television business or ESPN or Hulu or blah, blah, blah.  It also wonders about the recent spate of theatrical releases that have underperformed or out right lost money.  As it goes through the litany of business divisions that have problems it seems that one option seems to be ignored.  Instead of concluding that television or streaming or movies aren’t really the “core” business of Disney maybe they should be looking at why each of these formerly lucrative businesses is suffering.

In each of these ventures, Disney has attempted to take a winning formula and mangle it by substituting a woke alternative.  Star Wars was chloroformed to provide a platform for the “Estrogen = The Force” narrative.  Now The Marvel movies will follow suit.  Kill off Iron Man and Captain America and substitute Captain Marvel.  And finally Indiana Jones is wheeled off to an old age home and Unlikable Girl Jones is brought in.

And now in the most brilliant example of brand poisoning on record they are openly sabotaging the classic cartoon properties of the 1930’s.  Snow White is an empowered girl boss who “don’t need no man” and is too busy with her empire building to fall in love.  She’s doesn’t need Prince Charming and for all we know she doesn’t swing that way.

Honestly, you’ve got to admire a campaign as boldly insane as the Disney reset.  One thing they’re responding to is the future status of those movies from the thirties and forties.  It’s getting close to the point where their copyright protection ends.  Snow White was made in 1937.  2037 is in fourteen years.  At that point anyone can repackage that movie and sell it.  By then Disney may be known as the non-binary children’s entertainment company.  Somebody else could have an amusement park where the old fashioned “normal” male and female Disney characters walk around and entertain the kids.  Who knows, maybe the amusement parks will be the business that Disney sells off.  Maybe someone else will restore the brand with a more family friendly attitude toward these formerly wholesome places.  It’s a thought.

Iger’s vision for Disney is embracing the woke sensibility and make it the their brand.  It’s a bold decision but right now it looks pretty dangerous to the company’s profitability.  Whatever they think they know about the future of the children’s entertainment market it looks like most parents still want to bring their kids to see movies where the beautiful girl is saved by the handsome prince from the evil stepmother or the evil witch and they live happily ever after.

You know, I hope Disney continues down the road they’re on.  Killing off the biggest entertainment company in the world may be the only thing that can save that industry.  There’s something to be said for being a true believer.

 

Disney Hemorrhaging Money on Woke Films – Everyone Astonished

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So, let’s talk about something less depressing than the train wreck that is Western Civilization.  Let’s laugh at the misfortune of Hollywood.  And specifically let’s mock Disney and their putrid movies.  Look at this article and the underlying video.

“The YouTube box office analyst known as Valliant Renegade laid out his argument in a recent video in which he estimated that many Disney blockbusters actually lost money or barely broke even during their theatrical runs despite the news media spinning them as hits.

They include Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.

Two of the titles were outright bombs — Strange World and Lightyear — while two others are still in theaters, The Little Mermaid and Elemental.”

Now, admittedly, Disney has deep pockets.  They can absorb losses that would bankrupt smaller companies and move forward.  But let’s think for a moment about how they will analyze these problems and what their idea will be to address them.

They will see that these films include heaping doses of progressive girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias and they will assume that the problem is too many racist and sexist Americans refusing to celebrate wokeness sufficiently.  After all, what parent wouldn’t want to send his kids to a movie with a gay kid as the main character?  Or why wouldn’t a Buzz Lightyear origin story benefit from a lesbian kiss?  Why would this make parents uncomfortable?

So, their solution to this rejection of woke content will be … doubling down on girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias!  Now how could that possibly fail?

So, I’m incredibly happy for Disney.  This winning strategy may be able to do the impossible; namely bankrupt the largest remaining Hollywood studio.  And just to keep things hopping along comes the fifth Indiana Jones movie.  And from everything I’ve heard it’s going to be a humdinger.  Picture if you can an eighty-year-old Harrison Ford shuffling around the set getting hen-pecked and brow beaten by his “god-daughter” as she performs the heroic stunts and he gets lost in the caves and probably soils himself.  Oh yeah, that’s gonna be box office gold.

There is some word on the street that some of this is beginning to dawn on Disney’s front office and there might be a program to step back from the precipice of woke financial suicide.  But that wouldn’t be my favorite outcome.  I really hope they give us some more Captain Marvel and Rey Skywalker and She-Hulk and whatever trans-super-hero they currently have on the drawing board.  This is really good stuff.  It will reinforce to parents just how screwed up the role models that Disney pushes on their kids are.  It will dovetail with the gender dysphoria that seems to have magically exploded among the teen and pre-teen age groups that are Disney’s target audience.

So, yeah, I do hope that other studios start to return to healthier cinematic fare.  It’s high time that some of them figure out that there is an enormous domestic and international audience for healthy role models in the super-hero genre and in other genres too.  But for Disney I hope they never turn back.  If they crash and burn it would be a powerful lesson for the corporate world.  And it comes right at the point where conservative boycotts seem to be picking up steam.

What a wonderful coincidence.