7 ms·
Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned wit
by anticodon 3y ago
Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned with the woke ideology, you don't make movies interesting, you make them shallow and sometimes even loathsome.
But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.
- arrrg 3y agoCare to elaborate with an example? The point you are making seems quite abstract and incomprehensible to me.
- anticodon 3y agoColossal losses of Disney due to "rethinking" of classical plots in a "new ideology" way. People just don't want to watch it. But for some reason it's not possible for Disney to avoid it and continue making movies in a way that was mainstream maybe 20-30 years ago.
- SpiritualGuide 3y agoDisney losses are because of other factors, like a whole world of new content being available... including engaging video games in all platforms and all phone apps and content and remember that any and all entertainment content competes with them. The entire history of art relies on rethinking of classical plots in new ideology.
- mcpackieh 3y agoI don't think Disney can seriously blame competition from video games when they hire a notorious "mystery box" writer to write/direct the first movie of a new trilogy for their most valuable IP, and predictably he sets up ticking time-bombs of unsolvable mysteries that future writers/directors don't know what the hell to do with. People like to slag on Rian Johnson, but it was JJ Abrams that trashed the trilogy and left the mess to Johnson. And none of this has anything to do with video games anyway, Disney executives dropped the ball with bad hiring and that turned the Star Wars fanbase sour to future movies.
- renegat0x0 3y agoRecent flops: nearly all new star wars content, Indiana Jones, buzz lifhtyear, Thor love and thunder, Ant-Man quantumania. All should have been hits. People did not want to watch new content. Why? You mostly anwered in comments. Most of you complain that writing is bad, and I believe this majority. That would also mean that critical drinker and nerdeotic are correct in their analysis. I think it all comes to inflation of woke. Woke is the goal, nothing else really matters. The movies become predictable. Fame character cannot loose a fight. It is a checklist driven scenarios, where you have tick all the same boxes. You cannot depict unlikeable bad gay person. There were in history movies about racism, gender, but they were not preachy. They were discussing the issue. That's the difference.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago>All should have been hits. Why? Is it not possible the proportion of the population that wants to watch movies (especially non novel ones) in movie theaters is trending lower and lower? Based on the fact that the examples you listed are all sequels, the quality of the content is also suffering, but it is very possible that even if it was not suffering, the demand would be lower.
- defrost 3y agoDisney profits have been strong and generally upward or steady from 2010 through to present with the sole exception of a massive hit to their Park revenue segment ( early 2020 - third quarter 2021 ) https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/gross-p... https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-walt-disney-company-by-operating-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-wa... The only apparent "colossal losses" to Disney seem to be due to Disney World attendances cratering during the pandemic.
- mcpackieh 3y agoDisney's accountants have very powerful magic, but the fact remains that Disney is trashing all the Lucasfilms IP at an alarming rate. Lots of cancelled sequels, projects on hold, and the movies that do get released get lukewarm receptions from lifelong fanboys who should have been ecstatic for it.
- defrost 3y ago> Disney is trashing all the Lucasfilms IP at an alarming rate. Seems a bit unfair to blame Disney for upholding the work started by George Lucas. Are they even capable of trashing Lucasfilms IP to any degree greater than that already demonstrated?
- mcpackieh 3y agoYou're not going to see me defending Lucas's slop, but I think the fanboys have a lot more goodwill for even the worst aspects of the prequel trilogy than they have for Disney right now.
- defrost 3y agoI won't defend either nor step on the judgement of the true fans, etc. However we are both commenting on a sub branch headed by a comment: Colossal losses of Disney ... You mentioned Rian Johnson and his work on Part two of trilogy ?? (I honestly don't bother with anything past the original version of the first film) Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Regardless of its trashiness in the eyes of fans it still box officed $1.334 billion after a budget < $320 million (according to wikipedia). Let's agree that it was slop ... but it was slop that made bank for Disney.
- Gordonjcp 3y agoCan you give an example of that?
- junek 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alvah 3y ago[flagged]
- mst 3y agoThere's a fair chunk of content out there these days that's thunkingly woke in a way that annoys the crap out of me - stuff that might as well end with an "and the moral of the story is" segment ala moralising kids TV. Stuff with a wider range of actual three dimensional characters that aren't all the usual Straight White Person fare is fantastic, but not everything with non-white or non-straight people is actually any good. The example I always come back to of doing it right is Russell T. Davies' Queer As Folk, where the characters all felt -real-, I could imagine running into them on a night out down Canal Street and sharing a natter outside a club over a cigarette - and found myself rooting for them to be happy -because- they came across as real flawed people rather than Avatars of Representation.
- hef19898 3y agoOne drama series that does this very well is the Lincoln Lawyer. Everyone there is a character with personality, motivation. All of those are, at least to me, rooted in who / what they are: lawyer, criminal, LGBTQ, people of color... And nobody is without flaws. Grey's Anatomy on the other hand... well it was great early on, had some up and downs, hit a rock during amd just before Covid, then recovered is now a little bit too on the nose regarding certain issues. Yes, send a pro-Choice message. Yes, highlight the hard reality of strict anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion laws. Or racism, or the obesity pandemic. But please, don't turn it into a lecture, entertainment is not the right format for the that. A lecture is.
- pm24601 3y agoTell me you don't know the meaning of a word without telling me.
- FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago[flagged]
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- zerocrates 3y agoI'm not sure what you're referring to for Disney. Bud Light in particular hardly did anything in the first place, a microscopic marketing deal with one trans influencer, and they tossed Mulvaney overboard almost immediately, to no avail. Target was doing more or less the same Pride stuff they've been doing for a long time, though some widely-spread misinformation has muddied the waters there. I'm pretty sure I have a solid handle on who's responding to "manufactured outrage" in these situations.
- zmgsabst 3y ago[flagged]
- DoughnutHole 3y agoWhat specific merchandise of Target’s promoted violence? And please provide a source that said product was a major source of the outrage.
- zmgsabst 3y agoAmong their many items were those that included guillotines and skulls with messages promoting violence. Those were the ones that I saw in memes about the issue promoting a boycott; but Discord being what it is, I’m having trouble finding them now.
- DoughnutHole 3y agoA cursory google of “target guillotine” reveals a shirt that was never even sold at Target, but was a past creation of a designer that later designed some Target products. Devious “promotion of violence” on Target’s part. This strikes me as a meagre attempt to post-hoc justify the outrage after the viral story that triggered the initial moral panic (targeting “tuck-friendly” swimsuits at children) turned out to be completely fabricated. It’s outrage laundering - you have a story that could outrage a neutral observer but it’s predicated on bullshit. So in order to make keep the outrage alive its proponents need to fill the air with more bullshit that takes more time to debunk than it does to spew.
- MrMan 3y ago[dead]
- AlexandrB 3y agoI hear a lot of complaining about "woke content" and I think the real problem is shitty writing. There was plenty of "woke" messaging in movies and TV shows in the 90s (just look at Star Trek TNG), but the writers has the good sense to provide a layer of abstraction through allegory or metaphor. Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. I can imagine how fucking annoying it is to see if you have a different worldview. It also doesn't help that the veil of mystery around a writer's or director's intention is often intentionally removed by endless interviews, teasers, and press junkets. Again, the "woke" media of the 90s did not suffer from this nearly as much. What the author intended was often a mystery and up to the viewer's interpretation. Combined with the aforementioned allegory or metaphor, it made it possible to enjoy media made by someone whose views you would 100% disagree with.
- pjc50 3y ago> Transposing 2023 American social problems 1:1 into a fictional universe, as many productions do today, has the effect of breaking suspension of disbelief completely. It's not interesting or insightful. To someone like myself who actually agrees with this stuff it comes off as cheap pandering. Yes. It's just not very well thought out. And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer. Doing "wokeness" by box-ticking also has counterproductive effects when writers try to get too many things into one film, resulting in lots of one-dimensional characters. It works a lot better when the diversity originates from somewhere slightly outside the system but intrinsic to the film, such as Everything Everywhere All At Once.
- AlexandrB 3y ago> And unfortunately the "critical" ecosystem on youtube and social media makes this even worse, when films are torn apart by people who can't read subtext and misinterpret the views of a character for the views of a writer. Or worse, confuse the character as-written with the actor performing that role. I'm sure this happened before the internet, but people couldn't reach out and send vitriol towards the actor quite as easily. I still remember when Anna Gunn got a bunch of hate mail for "being mean to Walt". It's a miracle that good movies/TV shows still manage to get made in this environment.