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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?
Then that's kind of lame. What's the point of bringing up the reactive nature of something, if proving it's not actually reactive won't change your mind in any significant way?
They don't have to be representative to be right about why Disney's stuff fails to resonate with wider audiences.
This is all fine, except, as you noted, it's just a claim. You shouldn't get call disagreement with this claim "ridiculous", and your portrayal of yourself as the more moderate and gracious, further down the chain, is in especially poor taste given your behavior.
This would be the crux of the disagreement. If this was true, we would routinely be seeing them sacrificing wokeness, for money, not the other way around. Sure, they need money, and there's a boundary on how much losses they can tolerate, but they're clearly willing to tolerate monetary losses, if it means more wokeness.
There might be an element of incompetence, in that they underestimate how much a given movie release will cost them, but the lack of significant colourse correction shows that they're not too bothered about it, this showing that they don't necessarily like to make money more that they like being woke.
Yeah, but they think that what makes it good is the wokeness. And while I can't tell what's going on in their minds, my guess is that even when they think it's good, they are aware it's not going to be that popular, or a moneymaker.
I already contradicted enough of the points you raised, that you should know that it isn't.
I already pointed out that "Oh, you liked that movie? Fuck you." is just one of the possibilities, and "made with little or no thought to profit" is a return to the kind of binary thinking I already criticized.
Whether these money men exist in the way you are implying, and if they do, do they have all that much influence over the creative process, is an open question.
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If that were true there wouldn't have been a rural purge of television programs in the 70's. In view of this, I don't think you can or know how to model the mindset of the "really important people, the people who make money decisions" and I posit that it's in your best interest to update your priors to the more reasonable takes expressed in the thread.
At least offer your own arguments rather than pretending you didn't just crib off of Dean. The rural purge of TV stations is not the same as these "reasonable takes" you are seal-clapping for, which do not appear reasonable or even attempting to engage with any other take to me, merely kneejerk Grand Unified Theories of Wokeness.
mhh, someone is angy now (sorry if it's babying you, but you are better than whatever pissy personality you are adopting here). The rural purge was due to ideology and almost everyone raking you over the coals is saying it: the sequel is due to ideology with varying degrees of conspiracy mixed in; you are one of the few ones here aserting that it is due to money with nothing to show for it. At least on this side of the argument we have a really prominent historic example.
I subscribe to the principal agent problem myself, thank you very much. And it perfectly explains everything it is happening right now with respect to wokeness, you will notice that private companies like valve suffer much less than public companies like Ubisoft or Blizzard.
"You mad bro" is not a compelling argument, it's just an attempt to assert a dunk by projecting your own emotions. I am not angry, I'm annoyed at poor argumentation and boo outgroup, but I moderate my own disdain because I have to be the more charitable and gracious one.
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Wait, we are talking about two separate claims here. One is the desire to punish incels. You can want to punish incels and still want to make money. Losing money is not a necessary condition for the existence of that motivation. A movie can be a humiliation ritual even when it makes bank.
However, deliberately choosing a strategy that they must know by now is at least suboptimal at making money is an indication that the motivation is to a large degree ideological. It's a revealed preference, in addition to the stated preference about not wanting to make movies for a specific audience, and a costly one at that.
They are buying something, their preferred ideological messaging, and they are paying for it in terms of foregone sales. There is really no other explanation than consistently shouting over and over again that they do not care for a segment of their potential audience. Are they underestimating the price or are they fully aware of it but do not care due to a misalignment of their incentives with the studio's?
Sure, and I said I don't doubt they might take shots at their ideological enemies in a movie they expect to be successful. What I don't find plausible is the claim some are making here that they will make a movie for the purpose of taking shots at their ideological enemies, with making money a secondary or non-consideration.
This is the part I also doubt. Lots of would-be experts think they "know" whether or not a movie will be good and that it's obvious (always in hindsight) that it will be a bomb, and thus conclude the makers of the film knew they were making a bomb and didn't care. I doubt very much that anyone deliberately chooses a suboptimal strategy. I think a lot of people are just high on their own supply and/or bad at actually making good films and knowing what will be well-received.
I remember muttering before the first Black Panther movie came out that it would be a woke disaster. All the usual suspects were pretty sure that this movie about a C-list black superhero was going to bomb. If it had bombed, the same folks here would be proclaiming that it was obvious it was going to fail but Hollywood didn't care because woke. @Jiro would have confidently asserted that nobody puts a black man on the screen unless you're trying to be woke.
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