So let’s talk about the Disney live-action Little Mermaid movie. I don’t care about it, not remotely, even though the animated movie was one of my favorite Disney movies of all time.
No, I want to talk about just how stupid the left is when it comes to the movie. It’s everywhere and it’s endless. How sad is that?
Before we start, let’s get this out of the way. The movie is absurdly woke. They purposely changed a lot of things from the original due to the woke ideology that Disney now has. I don’t care that they cast a black actress. I never did. I care that Halle Berry is a shit actress that couldn’t act her way out of a wet paper sack, but her skin color is irrelevant. Still, they changed her relationship with Eric, they changed some of the songs to reflect a “modern sensibility” and… okay, who the hell keeps letting Awkwafina anywhere remotely close to movies? The bitch has no talent.
Still, it’s Disney’s property, they can do whatever they want and I was never going to watch it regardless. That doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at the endless manufactured “controversy” that the far left engages in.
How bad, you might ask? Well, now they’re mad that the make-up artist that worked on Melissa McCarthy’s Ursula, it’s now a problem that he wasn’t gay.
Why? Because Ursula was supposed to be based on Divine and only a “gay artist” could possibly capture that look.
Fuck you.
The make-up artist in question is asking what difference it makes and the shrill mobs on the left keep screeching, but not actually coming up with any coherent answers. I guess that’s too much to ask.
Then, they’re mad that Prince Eric isn’t black. There isn’t ENOUGH diversity in their diversity-heavy movie. No, they want an entirely black cast. I guess the only way to have enough diversity is to eliminate diversity entirely.
The last one is the worst though. Some left-wing nutball has decided that, in his words, “it looked like it took place in the 1800s” and therefore, Disney should have made the entire movie about anti-slavery! The fact that a children’s movie, based incredibly loosely on a Hans Christian Anderson story, should now be all about fighting imaginary slavery, is complete lunacy.
Yet I’m not at all surprised. Are you?
Hollywood is a complete cesspool today, as if it’s been any better for years. The sad part is watching people proclaim victory without understanding what they’re talking about.
The first weekend of this movie, it took in $117 million domestically. It completely fell off a bridge overseas. Then, it had a 61% drop off for the second week. This movie is a bomb.
Still, the people who are running around calling it a success, they don’t know how the box office works. It’s funny that Disney, who is trying to make it look better than it is, they’re proclaiming that the movie *WILL* make millions in streaming and DVD sales, which may or may not be true, but it’s not something you can count on. They’re also counting $100 million that they are paying themselves to show the movie on Disney+. Shuffling money around doesn’t mean anything.
Yet I’ve had a lot of conversations these days with people who clearly don’t know what money is or how Hollywood works. This goes beyond Little Mermaid, but we’ll stick there for a while regardless. The movie cost $250 million to make. Then, you tack on another $140 million in marketing. There are all kinds of associated costs involved there, but let’s ignore that for the moment. That’s nearly $400 million that Disney is in the hole. It means that the movie needs to bring in a billion dollars or more to even break even, much less make a profit.
Why? Because Disney doesn’t make all of the box office receipts. On average, they get 50% of the take, if that. The rest goes to the theaters and all of the associated and ancillary businesses along the way. Just to play easy on the numbers, that means the movie has to make at least $800 million, just for Disney to break even.
It’s not even going to get close.
Just to keep it going, since I’m not going to be able to talk about this here, probably, I was having another discussion over the new Spider-Man animated movie. “Oh, it made more than the first Spider-Man movie!” Um… are you taking inflation into account? Of course not!
The reason this is important is because, even if it did make more money, it is still possible that it’ll be seen by fewer people. It’s the same reason why, when Disney started trumpeting how well Thor: Love and Thunder was doing, they didn’t want to talk about adjusted numbers or actual ticket sales. It would just embarrass them. Yet unless you’re willing to do that, you don’t have a fair comparison, do you?
This is going to be yet another flop for Disney, but they’ll never admit to it. Instead, they’ll just trim costs elsewhere and look for anything they can to get tax credits. They are not making money, not anymore.
Yet they persist. Instead of admitting that they have problems, which clearly they do, they just point and call everyone else racists. They are no longer in the entertainment business. They are in the left-wing agenda business.
Maybe it’s time they and their followers grew the hell up and rented a clue. Wouldn’t that be nice?
re: Still, it’s Disney’s property, they can do whatever they want.
It’s the shareholders property and they have an obligation to maximize shareholder value or face shareholder lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty.
. . . Above All That , we’re stuck in these times, between the coming downfall of organized religion and the rise of woke stupidity. Both of these appear, after much study, as entirely faith-based positions and faith doesn’t get you to the truth. “I feel Jesus lives in my heart” vs “I feel as if I am a Unicorn or an Elf trapped in this body.”
What’s the difference? All feels no demonstrable reals. Wokeism and Religion -What is commendable about believing things on completely insufficient evidence?
I mean, I’m a shareholder. When it comes time to vote, I always vote against Disney’s woke bullshit. It is up to the shareholders to do something about it, but they have enough people on the inside who have significant holdings that nothing is going to change.
You’re right, individual shareholders, generally they don’t have enough voting power to get anything done. They just need to sell their shares if they don’t like what’s going on, but Institutional Investors (Colorado Employees Retirement System; Florida State Board of Administration; CalPERS; CalSTERS, et.al.) they will get involved and try to stop things if they see their shareholder value being destroyed -generally speaking. They will run for board seats. They will get insiders thrown out of the company if there’s too much destruction in shareholder value. They can’t sell all their shares without moving the share price by a lot so that’s the route they take. That said, if collectively, too many large block shareholders like the woke strategy then nothing’s going to change. Large block Institutional Investors know how to change a company, if and only if, they want to.
Yet if you look at what’s happened to Disney stock in the past year or two, it’s tanked. Everything they have done has failed, yet the idiots in charge are still in charge, right? Nobody has fired Kevin Feige, even though he’s single-handedly destroyed the MCU. Nobody cares anymore. I just vote as a protest. I don’t really care how Disney does anymore. All of my meaningful investments are elsewhere.
re: Nobody cares anymore.
Yes, I’m sure that’s the biggest factor. There has to be a catalyst for institutional investors to move against the company and make all kinds of changes. They’ve done it plenty of times in the past to all kinds of companies but maybe with Disney they truly just don’t care. Many company boards are just groupthink and maybe some institutional investment boards are afraid of going against woke initiatives, even ones that burn the company and destroy shareholder value.
re: Elon Musk says Target can expect shareholder lawsuits soon as retailer’s woes mount – Tesla CEO weighs in amid Target’s Pride merchandising controversy.
I’m not sure why nobody has sued Anheuser-Busch yet, given how they’ve tanked the entire company. Then again, maybe they are, I don’t really keep up. I don’t drink beer.
I don’t drink (beer or anything else) either but yeah, Anheuser-Busch has not only shareholder lawsuits but federal civil rights complaints for systemic and discriminatory hiring, promotion, and job-training employment practices. Under the cloak of “equity,” these woke companies like Anheuser-Busch are proudly discriminating based on race, color, national origin, and sex in their employment practices. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has launched multiple investigations. Woke governance *has* sent profits spiraling at Anheuser-Busch, Target, et.al. and they all have shareholder lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty.
Looks like Activision went down that road too and now, their Call of Duty franchise is tanking. I have no idea if they’ve broken the law, probably not, but they’re going to feel it in their pocket books. I can’t participate because I never played their crappy games, but lots of people did.