4 ms·

Messaging isn't Disney's problem. Putting out content that's an absolute mess is the problem. Too much content is also part of the problem. The Star Wars sequel

by jzb 3y ago

Messaging isn't Disney's problem. Putting out content that's an absolute mess is the problem. Too much content is also part of the problem. The Star Wars sequels were just a freaking mess from start to finish. Their TV series around Star Wars have been hit and miss. The pacing for Ahsoka, for example, is just awful. Feels like they literally asked the actors to drag out the content. They were all over the place with the Boba Fett series. It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. Some of the movies since Endgame have been good, some OK, and some of the movies and TV shows have just been terrible. They managed, somehow, to make a series based around shape-shifting aliens starring Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle boring. It's astonishing, really. None of this has anything to do with the "messaging" Iger is hinting at to try to throw off the scent and appease the GOP. I'll grant that sometimes Disney is a bit hamfisted in checking off the boxes around diversity and so forth -- but none of that accounts for the fact that Disney just went for quantity of content over quality, with the assumption that the Star Wars and MCU franchises would sell no matter how bad the final product was. In the past, they'd have been right. Fans used to tolerate just about anything to get a taste of their favorite heroes or franchise on screen. Those days are in the past. Fans have gotten a glut of content and have seen just how good comic book and sci-fi live action could be, and a spritz of CGI isn't cutting it anymore.

rapind 3y ago
> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. It's the same with my kids. They usually jump at the chance to go to the theatre (popcorn!), but they have no interest in recent MCU movies or any of the TV shows.
wharvle 3y ago
> The pacing for Ahsoka, for example, is just awful. Feels like they literally asked the actors to drag out the content. They were all over the place with the Boba Fett series. It’s so incredibly drawn out that the best version of Ahsoka is likely to be a fan edit currently in the works (by an editor with a good track record) who’s aiming to come in under 3 hours. It’ll assuredly be strictly an improvement. There have already been a couple attempts because the show’s so obviously and painfully bloated. The shortest is around two hours and reviews were positive. Obi Wan’s at least as bad. It could be half its length and nothing of (even under generous accounting) value would be lost. Most of the Disney Marvel shows also burn screen time like it’s free. Not that Netlix’s were any better about that, aside from one or two total seasons out of the entire effort. IDK if this is somehow cheaper for them, writing 3-5 episodes of content and streeeetching it to 8-10 episodes, or what. They still have to have stuff on screen, so I wouldn’t think it’d save them much.
- ctippett 3y ago
  It's worth mentioning the quality for fan-made edits can be, and often are, remarkably high. The only version of Obi-Wan I've seen is a fan edit by Kai Patterson (Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Patterson Cut [1]), which condensed the whole series into one 2.5h long episode/film. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi:_The_Patterson_Cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi:_The_Patterson_...
  - sotix 3y ago
    On this topic, is there a definitive fan edit for The Hobbit? That’s also too dragged out over 3 movies.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      There are several very good ones. The older ones like The Tolkein Edit were good early attempts, but the quality is bad (720p IIRC). My current favorite is the "M4 Book Edit" version. It's 1080p I think, and does some interesting things, such as editing the scene where the archer guy shoots Smaug with the killing arrow. In the original movies, he uses his son's shoulder to aim, which is cheesy and kills the suspension of disbelief; in the M4 Book Edit version, they actually edited the video to replace his son with a stone wall.
jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago
> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. Some of the movies since Endgame have been good, some OK, and some of the movies and TV shows have just been terrible. They managed, somehow, to make a series based around shape-shifting aliens starring Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle boring. It's astonishing, really. So much this. I was a comic book kid and a big fan of marvel's various properties. I am so very sick of superhero movies now. Iger wants to blame political sentiments he objects to, rather than looking at the basic reality that you can't just keep pumping out the same genre indefinitely while making money. Making movies isn't stamping widgets. Just look at how historically dominant genres have risen and fallen (westerns anyone?). Also A24 is over there showing that ambitious and original concepts can be financially successful. Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences.
- sircastor 3y ago
  I recall watching X-men on Saturday mornings as a kid and the only thing more overt was Star Trek having an episode where the half-white-half-black people hate the half-black-half-white people. It’s not messaging. It’s release pace. If their goal is quality movies then they need to make that the goal. But the goal is “make money”, so their incentives are misaligned.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences. He's an exec. He doesn't really need those things. He just needs to be smart enough to attract creative artists and gamble a little. He needs to know how to invest capital. Consider Zappa's take on out-of-touch music execs in the 60s who somehow presided over and profited from (and probably nurtured, really) a creative counterculture movement. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comm...
- QuantumGood 3y ago
  PR usually demands a mea culpa that obfuscates. Wokeness is the most obvious PR misdirection to avoid admission of diminished quality.
roenxi 3y ago
At a guess, there is probably a regress-to-the-mean problem where the people responsible for the scripts are pulling back to an ordinary level of understanding of nuance, motivation and whatnot. There are a couple of symptoms and people struggle to pick up when content lacks nuance - as far as I can tell it kinda feels wrong to them but they can't put a finger on why. I've been interpreting the "they're politicised!" chatter around Disney & friends to mean that they lack nuance. Political messages in art isn't new - but using art for ham-fisted messaging makes for a boring story. Great storytelling often looks like, say, Portal I by Valve. Noticing the thickly layered feminism in that game is pretty hard, but I suspect there are literally no male characters and it is likely most people playing the game don't notice. It was jarring vs Portal 2 where a more ordinary game plot was used. But that sailed completely under the radar of most criticism of both games because it was a rather subtle change.
TillE 3y ago
Ironically the most "message"-y Star Wars production is also widely considered the best thing Disney has done with the franchise. Andor is fantastic and it's not subtle about its politics.
Levitz 3y ago
Have you considered that it's a choice between the two? The script that goes full ESG is not the same script that is actually good.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  Is ESG why Marvel had 58 movies and shows in 15 years?
  - Levitz 3y ago
    No, that's because of greed, ESG simply enabled it. Black Panther, for an obvious example, was mediocre, but it had a degree of guaranteed success because of black pride. It seems that this is just an admission that Disney overplayed its hand in this regard.
jhanschoo 3y ago
The first key point in the article says > Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged his company has focused too much on movie messaging and not enough on quality storytelling. So Disney does actually agree with that its content is a mess. (insofar that you mean that its storytelling sucks, which seems to be your point)
- jzb 3y ago
  My point is that blaming "messaging" is pandering to a certain audience, and has nothing to do with the actual problems. Messaging, for example, didn't have anything to do with the pacing for Ahsoka. It didn't turn the Star Wars sequels into a train wreck. Iger is trying to score cheap points while deflecting responsibility for the actual problems.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    It had everything to do with Ahsoka's pacing problem. The ideological pandering problem - which literally everyone from Iger to South Park knows Disney have - is just a symptom of the relentless ideological capture of Disney's own executive staff. You think they just promote diversity hiring in their film's messages? Iger has spelled it out clearly here: when they faced a binary choice between "messaging" and making quality movies, they always picked messaging. What he's saying here is obvious to people who have observed the woke in action. People who would relentlessly pander to left wing ideology were hired and promoted over people who wanted to make good movies that appealed to everyone. You can't have both - the people with talent usually don't want to put forced propaganda before the story they want to tell. The problem is doubled up because when woke people find conservatives they immediately fire them, sideline them or make false accusations against them. Pick the propaganda people and you rapidly end up with anyone who cares about quality first being emptied out of the organization. Kathleen Kennedy is the most famous example of this, a woman who presided over a decade+ of box office disaster and divisive, hateful anti-men messaging (e.g. her famous "The Force Is Female" t-shirts), but who Disney cannot remove because she and her allies would immediately accuse the CEO of being sexist, and they'd rather crash the company than be accused of being mean by allies. She in turn ensures Star Wars scripts are all messaging-first, and if they suck as films then whatever, she doesn't actually intend them to entertain anyway because she has a higher purpose in mind.
nvm0n2 3y ago
Messaging is Disney's problem. Their writing quality has gone to hell because they systematically promote and protect executives/writers who see films as a mere vehicle for spreading their message, not for telling a good story.
piva00 3y ago
To me it feels Disney is just running algorithms to generate content. Some VP up in the ivory tower keeps telling the writers "add that joke that worked on the X movie", "make an action scene like that one in Y movie". Even the stories in Star Wars are rehashes of previous stories with different characters, the whole new trilogy of movies was just episodes IV, V, VI with a different cast and hollow characters. On MCU it seems that each movie is just the same formula, I haven't even watched "Endgame" because I got sick of the formula after the 4th repetition. Disney is just pumping content out, quality be damned, I have no idea who thought that completely oversaturating a cash cow market would be good... They killed it, and in its wake tarnished the reputation of Disney. I used to consider anything coming out of Disney to be at least of decent quality, entertaining enough to check out. Now I simply ignore what they do, it's trash.
- jzb 3y ago
  It's definitely formulaic, and I often feel like there's obvious plot beats, jokes, etc. that were inserted by committee or to match somebody's checklist. Looking back, the original Star Wars movies were clunky and had plot problems galore -- but they were fun and they had heart and something novel to offer visually and narratively. Lucas couldn't write dialog for shit, but the pacing, casting, story, and eye candy made up for it by a long shot. (BTW, I thought Endgame was pretty good. There's at least one bit that made me cheer out loud. Maybe I'm just easy, but Cap's big moment was worth the price of admission for me alone.)
friend_and_foe 3y ago
I'd argue "messaging" (more aptly referred to as "propaganda" in this context) has a lot to do with it. When you shoehorn ideology into entertainment you get a product that's less entertaining, doubly so when the ideology is mostly devoutly held by humorless people.

by jzb 3y ago

rapind 3y ago

> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. It's the same with my kids. They usually jump at the chance to go to the theatre (popcorn!), but they have no interest in recent MCU movies or any of the TV shows.

wharvle 3y ago

> The pacing for Ahsoka, for example, is just awful. Feels like they literally asked the actors to drag out the content. They were all over the place with the Boba Fett series. It’s so incredibly drawn out that the best version of Ahsoka is likely to be a fan edit currently in the works (by an editor with a good track record) who’s aiming to come in under 3 hours. It’ll assuredly be strictly an improvement. There have already been a couple attempts because the show’s so obviously and painfully bloated. The shortest is around two hours and reviews were positive. Obi Wan’s at least as bad. It could be half its length and nothing of (even under generous accounting) value would be lost. Most of the Disney Marvel shows also burn screen time like it’s free. Not that Netlix’s were any better about that, aside from one or two total seasons out of the entire effort. IDK if this is somehow cheaper for them, writing 3-5 episodes of content and streeeetching it to 8-10 episodes, or what. They still have to have stuff on screen, so I wouldn’t think it’d save them much.

ctippett 3y ago
It's worth mentioning the quality for fan-made edits can be, and often are, remarkably high. The only version of Obi-Wan I've seen is a fan edit by Kai Patterson (Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Patterson Cut [1]), which condensed the whole series into one 2.5h long episode/film. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi:_The_Patterson_Cut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi:_The_Patterson_...
- sotix 3y ago
  On this topic, is there a definitive fan edit for The Hobbit? That’s also too dragged out over 3 movies.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    There are several very good ones. The older ones like The Tolkein Edit were good early attempts, but the quality is bad (720p IIRC). My current favorite is the "M4 Book Edit" version. It's 1080p I think, and does some interesting things, such as editing the scene where the archer guy shoots Smaug with the killing arrow. In the original movies, he uses his son's shoulder to aim, which is cheesy and kills the suspension of disbelief; in the M4 Book Edit version, they actually edited the video to replace his son with a stone wall.

jasonwatkinspdx 3y ago

> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. Some of the movies since Endgame have been good, some OK, and some of the movies and TV shows have just been terrible. They managed, somehow, to make a series based around shape-shifting aliens starring Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle boring. It's astonishing, really. So much this. I was a comic book kid and a big fan of marvel's various properties. I am so very sick of superhero movies now. Iger wants to blame political sentiments he objects to, rather than looking at the basic reality that you can't just keep pumping out the same genre indefinitely while making money. Making movies isn't stamping widgets. Just look at how historically dominant genres have risen and fallen (westerns anyone?). Also A24 is over there showing that ambitious and original concepts can be financially successful. Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences.

sircastor 3y ago
I recall watching X-men on Saturday mornings as a kid and the only thing more overt was Star Trek having an episode where the half-white-half-black people hate the half-black-half-white people. It’s not messaging. It’s release pace. If their goal is quality movies then they need to make that the goal. But the goal is “make money”, so their incentives are misaligned.
drewcoo 3y ago
> Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences. He's an exec. He doesn't really need those things. He just needs to be smart enough to attract creative artists and gamble a little. He needs to know how to invest capital. Consider Zappa's take on out-of-touch music execs in the 60s who somehow presided over and profited from (and probably nurtured, really) a creative counterculture movement. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comments-1987-video/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comm...
QuantumGood 3y ago
PR usually demands a mea culpa that obfuscates. Wokeness is the most obvious PR misdirection to avoid admission of diminished quality.

roenxi 3y ago

At a guess, there is probably a regress-to-the-mean problem where the people responsible for the scripts are pulling back to an ordinary level of understanding of nuance, motivation and whatnot. There are a couple of symptoms and people struggle to pick up when content lacks nuance - as far as I can tell it kinda feels wrong to them but they can't put a finger on why. I've been interpreting the "they're politicised!" chatter around Disney & friends to mean that they lack nuance. Political messages in art isn't new - but using art for ham-fisted messaging makes for a boring story. Great storytelling often looks like, say, Portal I by Valve. Noticing the thickly layered feminism in that game is pretty hard, but I suspect there are literally no male characters and it is likely most people playing the game don't notice. It was jarring vs Portal 2 where a more ordinary game plot was used. But that sailed completely under the radar of most criticism of both games because it was a rather subtle change.

TillE 3y ago

Ironically the most "message"-y Star Wars production is also widely considered the best thing Disney has done with the franchise. Andor is fantastic and it's not subtle about its politics.

Levitz 3y ago

Have you considered that it's a choice between the two? The script that goes full ESG is not the same script that is actually good.

pseudalopex 3y ago
Is ESG why Marvel had 58 movies and shows in 15 years?
- Levitz 3y ago
  No, that's because of greed, ESG simply enabled it. Black Panther, for an obvious example, was mediocre, but it had a degree of guaranteed success because of black pride. It seems that this is just an admission that Disney overplayed its hand in this regard.

jhanschoo 3y ago

The first key point in the article says > Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged his company has focused too much on movie messaging and not enough on quality storytelling. So Disney does actually agree with that its content is a mess. (insofar that you mean that its storytelling sucks, which seems to be your point)

jzb 3y ago
My point is that blaming "messaging" is pandering to a certain audience, and has nothing to do with the actual problems. Messaging, for example, didn't have anything to do with the pacing for Ahsoka. It didn't turn the Star Wars sequels into a train wreck. Iger is trying to score cheap points while deflecting responsibility for the actual problems.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  It had everything to do with Ahsoka's pacing problem. The ideological pandering problem - which literally everyone from Iger to South Park knows Disney have - is just a symptom of the relentless ideological capture of Disney's own executive staff. You think they just promote diversity hiring in their film's messages? Iger has spelled it out clearly here: when they faced a binary choice between "messaging" and making quality movies, they always picked messaging. What he's saying here is obvious to people who have observed the woke in action. People who would relentlessly pander to left wing ideology were hired and promoted over people who wanted to make good movies that appealed to everyone. You can't have both - the people with talent usually don't want to put forced propaganda before the story they want to tell. The problem is doubled up because when woke people find conservatives they immediately fire them, sideline them or make false accusations against them. Pick the propaganda people and you rapidly end up with anyone who cares about quality first being emptied out of the organization. Kathleen Kennedy is the most famous example of this, a woman who presided over a decade+ of box office disaster and divisive, hateful anti-men messaging (e.g. her famous "The Force Is Female" t-shirts), but who Disney cannot remove because she and her allies would immediately accuse the CEO of being sexist, and they'd rather crash the company than be accused of being mean by allies. She in turn ensures Star Wars scripts are all messaging-first, and if they suck as films then whatever, she doesn't actually intend them to entertain anyway because she has a higher purpose in mind.

nvm0n2 3y ago

Messaging is Disney's problem. Their writing quality has gone to hell because they systematically promote and protect executives/writers who see films as a mere vehicle for spreading their message, not for telling a good story.

piva00 3y ago

To me it feels Disney is just running algorithms to generate content. Some VP up in the ivory tower keeps telling the writers "add that joke that worked on the X movie", "make an action scene like that one in Y movie". Even the stories in Star Wars are rehashes of previous stories with different characters, the whole new trilogy of movies was just episodes IV, V, VI with a different cast and hollow characters. On MCU it seems that each movie is just the same formula, I haven't even watched "Endgame" because I got sick of the formula after the 4th repetition. Disney is just pumping content out, quality be damned, I have no idea who thought that completely oversaturating a cash cow market would be good... They killed it, and in its wake tarnished the reputation of Disney. I used to consider anything coming out of Disney to be at least of decent quality, entertaining enough to check out. Now I simply ignore what they do, it's trash.

jzb 3y ago
It's definitely formulaic, and I often feel like there's obvious plot beats, jokes, etc. that were inserted by committee or to match somebody's checklist. Looking back, the original Star Wars movies were clunky and had plot problems galore -- but they were fun and they had heart and something novel to offer visually and narratively. Lucas couldn't write dialog for shit, but the pacing, casting, story, and eye candy made up for it by a long shot. (BTW, I thought Endgame was pretty good. There's at least one bit that made me cheer out loud. Maybe I'm just easy, but Cap's big moment was worth the price of admission for me alone.)

friend_and_foe 3y ago

I'd argue "messaging" (more aptly referred to as "propaganda" in this context) has a lot to do with it. When you shoehorn ideology into entertainment you get a product that's less entertaining, doubly so when the ideology is mostly devoutly held by humorless people.