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Their primary motivation is profit and status, and for the money people behind the scenes, it's profit. They care a lot less about culture war than you do.
Hollywood looks the way it does because Hollywood has always been full of both "creatives" and studio execs who are actually very bad at their jobs and make bombs regularly. (And, in fairness, sometimes they just genuinely mistime or miscalculate the appeal of a film.) It's a very Current Year thing for you to read every box office failure as an intentional devious scheme by the studios to set money on fire just because they hate you.
Sometimes it seems pretty obvious from the outside that a given production is going to fail miserably: Borderlands, as another example. This conversation has me wondering if it always looks like a train wreck on the inside (reshoots, recutting, extra VFX) in ways that we just don't see as outsiders. Was the set of a great movie, say Jurassic Park, less chaotic in these ways than Waterworld? It's conceivably sampling bias to see the trainwrecks from the outside.
I recall hearing that the production of Aliens was a complete shitshow, with James Cameron allowing issues with his personal life to interfere with production in negative ways. Also, some of the best Mission Impossible films, including 4, 5, and 6, apparently had 3-page long scripts at beginning of filming, with just an overarching narrative and various ideas of scenes in Tom Cruise's head, requiring the scripts to be written the night before the actual filming of the individual scenes, along with a ton of work by the editors to actually piece together a coherent narrative (Chris McQuarrie, the current director of the movies, got that role in a large part due to being an uncredited script doctor for 4 who was apparently brought in to fix it up during shooting).
So certainly having the productions be trainwrecks from the inside doesn't guarantee that the film won't be one of the greatest films ever made, rather than a historical megaflop like Waterworld.
But I think with something like Borderlands or Joker 2 or any number of other recent flops like Madame Web, The Marvels, or on TV The Acolyte or Rings of Power is that the trainwrecks aren't on the production, but rather on the fundamental artwork that's being expressed, mainly the script and also perhaps the cast. E.g. for Borderlands, it should be obvious to any layman, and certainly to any studio exec, that it's not a winning move to cast 50+ year old dramatic actor Cate Blanchett as an action lead and famously short comedian Kevin Hart as a no-nonsense serious big tough-guy soldier in a movie based on a video game aimed at teenage boys and young men. Even if the production had gone completely smoothly, it was just fundamentally doomed from the start, unless they relied on some other gimmick, such as having outrageously good action scenes (this is sorta what the Mission Impossible films rely on, which has worked for films 4-6, but not so much for 7, IMHO). Likewise, any layman could've read the outline for the story of most of these films and immediately pointed out major problems that would lose the audience.
It seems to me that, to be blind to these glaring issues and obvious red flags - so blind that you're willing to place hundreds of millions of your company's dollars on a losing bet - requires a lot of motivated reasoning which results from elevating one's own ideological biases over one's love of profit.
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No, it's not some intentional devious scheme to set money on fire. And yes, Hollywood has always been full of decisionmakers who are very bad at their jobs. And setting money on fire in an effort to humiliate the audience they hate - and being surprised that that's the result - is how they're being bad in this instance and other recent instances. Holding onto the false, but genuine belief that they can make profit through releasing these awful products that overtly shit on things the audience is known to like is how they don't care about making profit. Instead of analyzing what the market wants in a way designed to make accurate predictions, they analyze it in a way filtered by their own biases shaped by their ideological bubbles, which leads them to believing that they can release these "humiliation rituals" or whatever and still make money. I can't honestly say that someone who behaves like that is someone who cares about profit more than they do about their ideology; part of caring about making profit - or about accomplishing anything, really - is making sure you get an accurate-enough lay of the land so as to navigate it in a way that allows you to accomplish your goal. If you allow your biases to get in the way of getting that accurate lay of the land, then you clearly care about your biases more than you care about profit.
And, of course, there's no need to posit any sort of conspiracy. You just need enough decisionmakers with enough power all being part of the same echo chambers and lacking enough self-awareness and love of money to overcome their own biases.
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The problem for your theory is that a lot of the creatives gain status by parroting or reproducing the tenets of their side of the culture war. Look at things like Amandla Stenberg's victimhood complex because she's -half - black, or how entire works like Eternals are marketed on "diversity", or the asinine changes made to Snow White because Peter Dinklage decided other dwarves getting jobs was problematic.
If you're a mediocre creative on a mediocre show that was hired because of inclusion standards to a work that far predates you and is frankly beyond your competence, what do you have to sell but The Message^(tm)? You have to dance with the one that brung ya.
Sure. The odd bit is that what's happening now is that Hollywood is incredibly IP-heavy compared to the past and even IPs with a track record are suddenly bombing despite us knowing they can appeal to their audience.
Nobody spends time on theories about why Sony comic book movies suck. They suck cause Sony sucks. Nobody wonders why Coppola took a huge shot and failed with Megalopolis. It happens.
It is worth wondering why successful franchises like MCU and Star Wars seem to be going against their audience desires (and outright being hostile to their fans) and suffering though.
I wouldn't say that they're burning money just to Subvert Expectations cause they hate people. In fact, it's probably because they've been successful with these franchises that they think they can experiment with drawing in new audiences without their contempt for the legacy fanbase costing them.
The theory is that they don't have to choose. They can serve their diversity goals (both in front of and behind the camera) while also making more money because there's an untapped market of female nerds who want to push the MCU as far as it's gone with the male cast.
It's a weird sort of incumbent's arrogance that they can have it all, made worse by their ideological commitments.
Actually, let me push back on that: the MCU was not destined to print money forever if only the writers could keep from going off the rails. Every trend, no matter how hot and moneymaking, fades eventually. There is a parallel in their source material: comics in the late 80s and 90s were extremely hot for a hot minute, and everyone was opening a comic book shop, every publisher was printing sixteen variant Collector's Item #1 covers of each new Spiderman/Superman/Spawn reboot, and Wolverine was guest-starring in cross-over stories in every damn title in the Marvel Universe.
That ended. It ended partly because of burnout, partly because of boring economic reasons, and partly because you just can't keep people excited about Wolverine forever.
Hollywood is of course a deeply and ironically uncreative industry (but then so are comic books, and book publishers, and gaming). When they see a cash cow, they will try to milk it until it's dead and they are trying to squeeze milk out of leather.
Your mention of Coppola actually speaks to my point: people think Joker 2 failed because it is an anti-profit go-woke-go-broke studio project to insult white men. If Megalopolis failed because Coppola is a megalomaniac who made a bad movie, presumably they don't think Coppola knew it was bad and didn't care, or never wanted to make money from it (though he probably would have been willing to make it anyway even if he knew it would lose money, because this was a passion project). But Coppola used his own money. I guess a very woke Coppola might have made a passion project to say fuck you to white men, but most people are not that crazy. I think it's much more likely the studios thought Joker 2 would be successful, and if it pissed off a few incels that would be an added bonus.
I agree with your post, but I want to add:
Hollywood is a deeply uncreative industry in decline. Inflation adjusted, domestic US box office peaked in 2002. They're selling about as many tickets today as in 1995, despite an additional 70 million Americans. Some more stats: 61% of Americans saw zero movies in theaters, the average American who did see a movie saw just three and change, down from 30% of Americans seeing zero movies and an average close to seven in 2007.
2007 is seventeen years ago. That's, you know, a while, but Todd Phillips was already a working director then. Bob Iger was already CEO of Disney in 2007. A lot of these guys came up in a totally different industry than the one they're working in now. It's rare for dominant industries to disappear gracefully.
This decline has little to do with the movies being made, and more to do with changes to the media environment. The rise of streaming, the rise of the $500 70" TV has made going to the theater a less interesting thing to do.
There's a great scene from Mad Men where Don Draper, thinking about the rise of rock music and how kids are tying bands into their identities, asks "When did music become so important?" In the 60s, music suddenly mattered as part of identity formation and politics in a way it hadn't been for Don growing up. Now, I'm not sure Music does matter, music mattering may have been a brief period.
Movies have mattered from just after their invention to now. I'm not sure they really do anymore. And the industry is coming to terms with it.
I think the rise of streaming certainly hurt movies, but I submit that it’s the poor quality of the films themselves that are killing the industry off completely. The writing is often boring and predictable, and the plots of most movies can be easily discernible by watching the trailers. The superhero movie is boring, nothing interesting happens in them, and so nobody gets excited to go see New Marvel or New DC because everyone knows the Brand and they know what the experience will be like long before they buy their (relatively expensive) tickets, popcorn and soda. The same can be true of other genres there’s just nothing interesting going on as movies converge on the same Save the Cat beat sheet with the same progressive philosophy and the same Joss Weaten “take nothing seriously” sensibility.
This comes about because of the insular nature of Hollywood. You want in, you have to attend film schools in one of maybe a dozen Big Name schools. You need a patron. You need to go to Hollywood where you get invited to the right parties. The expense and time sink necessary to make it pretty much precludes anyone who doesn’t come from money, and the constant need to network often accidentally on purpose weeds out anyone who isn’t on the liberal side of Woke Progressive. But since everyone involved comes from the same background with the same or similar life experiences, they cannot be creative. There’s nothing new brought in. You won’t ever hear the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one. You won’t hear anything authentic to a religious person. These writers have likely never had a ten minute conversation with someone like that.
It's a process, though I haven't seen a single comic book movie since the Toby Maguire Spiderman and the last Star Wars content I consumed was The Force Awakens so I'm hopelessly behind on the question of what exactly is so bad about modern Hollywood, I've checked out.
The decline of the industry begins with the technology. No one can reasonably argue that if only we got "the viewpoint of a mere middle class man, let alone a poor one, [or] anything authentic to a religious person" that the film industry would be doing a-ok.
The shitty things we all hate about the movie industry in this thread are mostly a response to the decline of the American box office. They're hemorrhaging ticket sales, in a model built on ticket sales that still considered home-viewing an afterthought. They still haven't yet totally figured out how to make home-viewing profitable without the box office ticket sales. They settled on the big franchises and comic book movies because they thought they would still bring people out to the theaters. For the most part, the non-franchise films do even worse in theaters! Because the technology only supports the spectacle comic book films: the gap between theater and home has narrowed to the point where there's almost zero value in seeing a comedy or romance in theaters, only the big spectacle benefits from the big screen.
The preening morality plays are a natural result of a culture of retreat and failure in the industry: "I'm producing this film in a way that I can explain in job interviews next fall". They know that the industry is sinking and a lot of the films they make will be, by any reasonable metric, failures; so they become more insular, more focused on getting one of the limited number of seats before the music stops. If you fail progressively, you have a narrative to latch onto as to why it wasn't your fault. If you fail boldly, trying something new, it's just on you.
How do you fix the streaming-old-movies-on-a-75-inch-TV problem for the film industry? The answer isn't going to be thoughtful Christian values films, if the people to make those even existed. But without a good answer, the film industry isn't going to suddenly change. That's what will alter the calculus.
My point is that a lot of what we're arguing about in the movie industry is this play. It's a terrible play that went horribly wrong immediately, but the odds of winning the game were already effectively zero, so criticizing the play design is kind of pointless.
I’m not going to deny the tech has a part. But I find the writing part to be a big turn off personally. No character in any story has any sort of real arc, the beats are nearly identical with only minor variations to accommodate the plot. I think part of what made the first Joker so interesting is that the character was different than the usual comic characters and rather than a story that plods along the usual tried and true beats of a superhero movie, it went in a different direction. Authentic and interesting characters, unique stories, and better dialogue I think would help a great deal. I think it would also help a great deal if the heroes of movies and their close associates didn’t have such strong plot armor. They just don’t feel like there are real stakes for a lot of reasons. Nobody gets hurt in a serious way that lasts. The characters aren’t personally invested in the outcome. It’s just watching CGI heroes do CGI stunts and I’m often left wondering why I care.
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I think that there are different failure modes - conceptual and execution. To me it seems that Megalopolis fails as execution whereas Joker 2 was doomed as conception - if they instead have decided to just make it Natural Born Killers: the musical with Harley and the Joker amplifying each other's descent into madness it would have worked.
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I would buy that the MCU is just suffering from a natural reversion if they hadn't also changed the recipe. Sure, a lot of it was Disney+ (and, in the case of Star Wars, pure mismanagement even before that). But I don't think it was purely that. They tried to grab a new audience and fell into similar behavior as other culture war fodder IPs (including battling and haranguing their own fanbase for not liking the change). Something like Rings of Power was based on an IP in hibernation since 2003 on the film side. There was no fatigue. Yet they did the same diversity stuff.
Yes, which means less oversight. Which means we wonder less why he was allowed to go up his own ass. It's easier to imagine one autocratic artist being fooled than a whole host of overseers with a track record.
These franchises are notorious for over-management.
Sure. I'm not one of those arguing it was purely spiteful behavior. I did say the theory was that they'd make more money. I guess I just give more weight to ideology/spite than you.
I think it's a convergence of self interest and ideology. But that doesn't mean that the ideology doesn't encourage somewhat contemptuous behavior towards the legacy audience as well. Or that it is a purely rational decision on profit. If you proved to them that catering to a whitebread or stereotypical "Real American" audience would play better I think it'd take them vastly longer to flip than it would if you argued that "diversity" really does pay more. Even if this is recognized, the personnel they have may not be able to help themselves because this is now SOP (there is some evidence this is changing)
A good example of this is NPR's ill-fated push for diversity which led to a bunch of cancelled progressive shows
There clearly seem to be principal-agent problems here and echochamber issues. It shouldn't be a surprise to NPR that catering to middle of the road white folx would play better than trying to explain who Saucy Santana is to grab a black audience. But staff and leadership seem to buy in (we saw this at Disney itself, when Chapek was forced by a revolt of some execs, aided by Iger, into an utterly irrational battle with DeSantis) so they have to waste a lot of the company's money before they come to their senses.
EDIT: And everyone has made every point in this post six times over, down to the same wording, by now lol.
Sorry, kind of hijacking your post to talk about LOTR.
It was in hibernation since 2014, if you consider The Hobbit part of the IP (and I would). I don't remember them doing the diversity stuff with that trilogy, and they did make money, despite making definitely lesser cultural artefacts than the LOTR movie trilogy and pissing off core fans. I could see them being worried about not being able to please the core fans no matter what they did with Rings of Power and so are trying to reach for new audiences and I wouldn't blame them.
Core LOTR fans (me included) would have gotten annoyed at any invention of the adaptation that's not from the books. Tolkien is hard to adapt, the 2000s movies were little miracles. The Hobbit could have been adapted properly, if it had been done BEFORE the LOTR, but then it was stuck and couldn't both please the studios and the fans because they couldn't possibly release something less hype-worthy than the previous trilogy, it had to at least match the spectacle of the LOTR, or exceed it. So they had to do the neat, short and sweet children's story great violence to turn it into something that was meant to feel like a step up from the LOTR. After that though, anything new would have to work off much less in-depth material than LOTR. Outside of a few short stories that don't really fit within the context of the existing material (and as such less interesting to adapt for producers that want to build on top of the popular IP they paid dearly for) the rest is written mostly like historical records than narrated fiction. That requires much more extrapolating to adapt.
For what it's worth, I've been watching RoP. It's not terribly woke the way it's been made out to be; it's got errr... multiracial fantasy races and girlboss warrior Galadriel, but other than that, it doesn't shove any woke messaging into its story. Its failings are more mundane. A paucity of likeable characters, not knowing what to do with some storylines. Season 2 just ended and it's remarkable how little happened in it compared to season 1, it felt like there's one story thread they wanted to advance and just juggled with all the others to keep them in place.
I guarantee that if I was given the same budget I'd be able to create something which pleases the core fans. Hell, I'd be able to do it on a quarter of the budget. It isn't exactly hard to do either - mostly you just have to avoid purposefully and deliberately insulting the people who liked the property you're working on, and treat it respectfully. Even Disney is capable of doing this - X-Men '97 didn't have many of these issues to the best of my knowledge.
With a "living" IP, I would agree, but I think the main problem with LOTR is that its core fans consider it to be "dead" IP. JRR Tolkien was the writer, and outside of reorganizing and cleaning up his notes and drafts for publishing, fans don't (well, I don't, and I assume most others are like me) think anyone is allowed to fill more than the the tiniest gaps in JRR Tolkien's writing. LOTR was verbose enough that the gaps that were filled by the movies were small enough to not feel insulting. The Hobbit could have been a nice single movie with very little filling in required, but they HAD to stretch it to 3 movies and so HAD to stretch the gaps and fill them in, which fans hated. But the material Rings of Power is adapting is a couple of pages written at the zoom level of a history textbook. Making anything substantial out of it, let alone tens of hours of television, requires filling in a lot. Especially if you consider the studio needs to bring in recognizable characters from the movies to keep interested those who didn't read Tolkien but liked the movies.
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I'm more suspicious of Hollywood's activities lately than you are, but I'll grant that the money men are likely signing off on wokeness and subversion under the hilarously wrong belief that there is a Modern Audience waiting to be tapped like a goldmine. It's what looks like doubling down in the face of failures that raises my eyebrow. But we'll see how that shakes out soon enough given the time delays inherently baked into producing a work.
I'll also throw in that it looks like there is a schism/rebellion between the bean-counting side and the creatives - or even creative Leads and their subordinates. From another sphere: If the CEO of Ubisoft really wants to assuage concerns about political messaging in his products and deny that's their intent, he will reliably face mini-revolts and public shaming from his very own employees that are dead set on 'doing the right thing'. I very much believe that the latter does not care about profit (at least as much) and is comfortable failing sideways out of the company's carcass to other dev houses where they can repeat it all again while barely losing any skin, if at all. And to boot, they do very much hate me from what I can tell.
If those people largely comprise the tools we have to work with, it may not actually matter what an executive's intentions are.
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If you're going to say that there are (at least) two primary motivations, I don't think you should get to act like people claiming one of them has greater primacy than the other are being ridiculous.
I'd expect far more people figuratively flying out office windows, if that was the case.
I don't think I care about it enough to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over it, they do.
Is it ok if I just read the ones explicitly advertised as "this movie wasn't made for chuds like you!" as it? (Not sure if Joker 2 would qualify, since I checked out from Hollyeood a while ago).
I think money is the greater motivator, and when I say status, I mean the status that comes from producing a moneymaker and award winner. If you think the "status" they seek is the status of winning the approval of their woke friends who think it's great that they produced a massively expensive disaster just to raised a middle finger to their enemies, yes, I will act like the people claiming that are being ridiculous.
A lot of actors, directors, and producers have had their careers crippled with a massive failure. Comebacks happen, but so does being consigned to the wilderness of low budget direct-to-video releases.
Yes, but an actor or writer throwing a fit on Twitter over criticism and saying things like that is not the same as explicitly advertising a movie as "Not for you."
A lot of people point at things like Amandla Stenberg saying "White people crying was the goal." Obviously a bad look and a shitty thing to say, and Amandla Stenberg probably would be happy to burn millions of dollars of (someone else's) money to make white people cry. But she's just an actress whose career will probably last five minutes after Star Wars, and she was being snarky on the Daily Show. She is not a studio spokeswoman and I am very confident that the producers of The Acolyte did not have "Make white people cry (and lose money)" as their goal.
That's fine, it's dismissing other possibilities as ridiculous that I'm taking an issue with (also pretty sure it's in violation of a rule or two, but whatever).
As others pointed out, awards are handed out internally by the industry itself.
Cool, so tell me how would the world look different if you were wrong about this?
I'm saying we'd be seeing even more of that. We'd also be seeing very different types of it. For example it would take a lot more to fire someone like Gina Carano, and a lot less to fire someone like Kathleen Kennedy.
I don't think these sort of declarations tend to be made after the movie has bombed.
Based on what? Why do you get to be "very confident" on absolutely no evidence, while declaring anybody who disagrees with you is ridiculous?
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be." I am saying you are not wrong that wokeness is a pervasive influence in Hollywood; I am saying you are hyperbolic and irrational about the degree to which every single person top-down prioritizes petty vengeance against their ideological enemies over profits or even production quality. I suspect this is projection, because it's what a lot of the people being so shrill about this would do if they were in charge: fuck money, let's rub the hottest culture war we can in our enemies' faces. It's not a rational way to view the world, but it's emotionally satisfying.
When you get to the level of big Hollywood moneymaking, you care more about money than whether you pissed off some incels on Twitter.
They replaced Captain America with a black man. I don't think he's supposed to be gay, but surely it counts as a woke replacement.
Sam Wilson has been part of the Marvel Universe since the 1960s, and he (and several other people) have taken turns as Captain America repeatedly in the comics.
There is woke race-casting, but not every case of a black person taking on a role is it.
The two characters drastically differ in how recognizeable they are to the general public. I don't believe for a moment that the replacement was done mainly because someone wanted to copy something from a comic.
Of course you don't, it doesn't fit your priors and it's not conflict theory, and you never bother to familiarize yourself with a topic before offering the most superficial and uncharitable conflict theory projection. However, if you've actually been tracking either the Marvel comic book universe or the MCU, you'd be aware that copying things from the comics, including obscure characters and plotlines that only those deeply into the comics lore would recognize, is something the MCU does quite frequently. Sam Wilson (originally The Falcon) is probably second only to Black Panther as the most recognizable black character in the Marvel universe. This isn't some arbitrary "Make Captain America black" racecasting stunt, it's a very predictable storyline based on everything that happened in the latest cycle.
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Captain America is done. He got his happy ending. If they want to replace him, it has to be a different character.
Who should have been newCap? Well, who was his closest analogue, sidekick, or friend? I can only think of Falcon and Winter Soldier, and Falcon isn't a formerly mind-controlled mass murderer. Although, Winter Soldier got the super steroids and Falcon didn't, ... whatever
It's fully possible that wokies said "who's the nearest non-pale stale male" and saw Falcon, and it just happened to end the same as my line of reasoning.
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I'd say that if you think that "throwing all their money into a bonfire and basking at the flames as it all burns" is not only a reasonable standard, but apparently the bare minimum, for the claim "they are not primarily motivated by profit", I think you are the one being hyperbolic and irrational, which makes your claims of projection extra-ironic.
Is there any field where you hold yourself to this standard? To me it looks like the same type of argument as "trans women aren't winning at every competition, so it's not a problem they're competing with women" that Darwin used on you once.
This claim is trotted out regularly as if it's evidence in itself, but it has literally no backing.
Obviously I do not think anyone literally burns money (I dunno, is making cigars out of $100 bills still a thing)? I do think your claim amounts to people willing to knowingly and intentionally waste millions of dollars in their industry making a shit product just to piss off people they don't like. Your evidence that this is a common practice - standard procedure in Hollywood even - is some actors and writers saying snarky things when told their product is shit.
I can't help you when you make wild and ridiculous leaps of logic like this. Can you show me one unambiguous example of what you are claiming? That is, a major production that was made (by the admission of someone big enough to be credibly responsible) for the purposes of saying fuck you to the fans and without any consideration for being monetarily successful?
I cannot prove what is in the hearts of Hollywood producers. Neither can you. So we can both only guess, and my claim is based on what motivates most normal human beings (especially amoral and greedy ones); your claim is based on assuming that they are alien-like caricatures.
And I'm obviously not accusing you of it, but you did say anything short of Hollywood going 100% "damn the money, fuck the chuds" will not convince you of being wrong. And if you were also figurative with "we'd see nothing but woke replacements" then you just haven't answered my question.
I'm not making a claim on what exactly is their higher goal. Maybe it's "pissing off people they don't like" or maybe it's "fighting fascisism / racism / toxic masculinity", maybe they think they're educating the backwards hicks in the public and helping them become more advanced... it could be a ton of different things other than maximizing profit.
You keep claiming they're saying these things only in response to be told their product is shit, is this an important part for your argument, or are you just trying to portray me as unreasonable? I'm not exactly keeping a catalogue of these things, but I'm pretty sure I could find at least a few of these kind of statements made before a movie was even released.
The other part of the evidence is the doubling-, trippling-, and quadroupling-down on a failing strategy. If Hollywood was following the business strategy of throwing spaghetti at the wall, and seeing what sticks, you could say they are interested in profits, but unsuccessful in generating them. But what they're doing instead is taking stuff that already was successful, and subverting it to the purposes of their ideology. If this was primarily about money, you'd think they'd try something different out of sheer frustration.
I would like to once again ask why you think it's ok to for you to call anyone that disagrees with you "ridiculous", while providing zero evidence yourself?
Can you answer my question before asking I answer yours?
Well again, "fuck you to the fans and without any consideration for being monetarily successful" is not a claim I made, it's your portrayal of my views for the purpose of making me look ridiculous. In any case I could probably satisfy the first part of the requirement, but the latter one will admittedly be trickier. However, I don't the latter requirement is reasonable. It's like saying only confessing attempted murderers should be convicted.
Ok, good! We can start a reasonable conversation from here.
... oh ...
Ok. Well, no. I do not think they are alien-like caricatures, and if I wanted to, I could make your portrayal of them look just as unreasonable, but I don't think it would be very productive.
I think I only said that once? No, it's not an important part of my argument, though I think reactiveness does describe a lot of these incidents. They get screamed at by fans angry at space lesbians or black hobbits, and react by saying "Fuck you, maybe you aren't the audience for this." I have never denied there are a lot of woke Hollywood people and they do like to troll and antagonize "deplorable" fans; I don't think they actually consider those people to be a significant part of their fanbase (and indeed, the people screaming about "Woke Disney" probably aren't).
Since we keep going back and forth about exactly what the other person is claiming, here's my claim:
Hollywood is very woke. They like to make woke movies. They also like to make money. I submit they like to make money more than they like being woke (at least the really important people, the people who make money decisions, do). Will they choose to make a woke movie if they think it will make money? Absolutely. Will they choose to give a middle finger to fans they consider deplorable, if they think they will still make money? Maybe (but I think the Big Men in Hollywood are less woke than the frontline people, the writers and actors popping off on Twitter). Will they intentionally create a product they know is bad, just to shit on deplorable fans? I do not think so. Will they make a shitty product aimed at fans they don't like, which they actually don't expect to be profitable, and not care, because it pleases them so much that it will piss off the right people? No. I think that's ridiculous. This goes directly back to the OP, and the claim that Joker 2 is a "humiliation ritual." That is, the entire production chain created this movie, knowing it was crap, not expecting it to be profitable, just to "punish" a bunch of incels who supposedly were the primary fans of the first movie. Just to say "Oh, you liked that movie? Fuck you." It is ridiculous.
Additionally, I think most of the people involved in making these things genuinely believe they are making a good product. I think the writers of The Acolyte and the Rings of Power, and so on, probably think their stories are great! Maybe some of them are hacks who don't care, but it does not fit my mental model of incentive-driven human beings, even woke ones, that anyone is deliberately choosing to tell a bad story they expect to be unpopular and lose ratings just because they want to add lesbians or black elves.
If I understand you correctly, you believe that they do this, and they do it regularly, and that every "woke" product in recent years that has (arguably) failed, from Joker 2 to Star Wars to Star Trek to Rings of Power to the latest MCU offerings, fell into this category: products that were made with little or no thought to profit, only to whether they would send the right (virtue) signals. And that the money men signed off on this, because they were okay with shitty virtue-signaling that doesn't make money.
Is that correct?
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Awards are dolled out by movie creator's peers, there is no external oversight evaluating movies, and with Holywood is heavily skewed towards the left (so much so, that there are several movies decrying the Red Scare, but 0 about the Roosevelt (D)'s camps, despite the former affecting much less people much less severely), members of AMPAS will naturally identify with and understand leftist messaging.
You know, it is surprising that, say, Farewell to Manzanar doesn't have a movie adaptation. Are there really none? I certainly can't think of any.
There was a made-for-TV movie in 1976
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