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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   30715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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They never seem to make the mistake of over-appealing to young males and thereby losing lots of money. So its pretty deliberate.

What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).

The counterfactual is some org taking an IP like Barbie and basically cutting the ending. The movie Barbie is accidentally based. Ken learns about the patriarchy, brings it to Barbieland and creates a utopia where everyone is happy except the weird Barbie. This is then destroyed by the MC and her new friend by a contrivance, but if you just left it at that and added some American flags and explosions, you'd have the counter.

Michael Bay kept trying, but it turns out that it's REALLY HARD to lose money that way. Burr Steers finally managed by adapting a Jane Austen parody, zombie horror flick "Pride + Prejudice + Zombies".

When I think of teenage boys, I certainly always think slipping in a Jane Austen reference will get their juices flowing.

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