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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Disney has a major problem where it is unwilling or unable to constrain budgets on productions.

I think midlevel execs get an ego boost from writing big cheques. It makes them feel important and powerful.

My theory is that it's fear of commitment. They're delaying every single production decision to the last minute because technology now allows them to and they're afraid that the audience context will change at the last minute and sabotage any choice. And execs are too cowardly to take bets, so everything must be CGI and reshoots galore, which means ballooning budgets.

Ironically, this particular movie (on track to be the biggest bomb ever) proves them right, the bad buzz around the dwarves most likely made them go for CGI counterparts, but the political landscape changed so fast and so unpredictably that the entire premise of the movie is a hopelessly outdated tale of girlbossing coming out on the tail end of a Kamalastrophe. Wicked made money, why didn't his work?!

The world is indeed changing too fast for execs to make the right choices. But as anybody with good artistic sense knows this calls not for indecision and fingerpointing, but long term vision and decisive action, the supply of which is nonexistent in Hollywood at the moment.

This will probably continue until we get new new Hollywood figures. The next Lucas might already be around in the shadows.

My theory is that it's fear of commitment. They're delaying every single production decision to the last minute because technology now allows them to and they're afraid that the audience context will change at the last minute and sabotage any choice. And execs are too cowardly to take bets, so everything must be CGI and reshoots galore, which means ballooning budgets.

Part of it clearly seems to have been COVID breaking something because it's been significantly worse since.

But I don't think it's a coincidence that Marvel, which is notorious for fiddling, fired Victoria Alonso as the sacrificial lamb. And one of the complaints about her? She was infamous for pushing animators to their breaking point and making late changes.

Starting on Reddit, followed by a series of stories published across the internet, visual effects artists began to loudly complain about Marvel’s demanding post-production schedules. Complaints ranged from unrelenting overtime to chronic understaffing to the inability to avoid delivering substandard work due to constantly changing deadlines. Some singled out Alonso as a “kingmaker” who would blacklist artists who have “pissed her off in any way.”

One visual effects artist recently told Variety that the biggest issue for them was Marvel’s inability to provide clear guidelines.

“The show I was on really struggled because it was an established character whose powers they were reconceiving for the MCU,” the artist said on the condition of anonymity. Most complaints, they said, came down to one refrain: “Marvel doesn’t figure shit out beforehand.”

They were already notorious for marginalizing directors Maybe COVID revealed to them just how far they could go with it and they hit a Lucas-level of hubris about the tech. After all, who suffers from this indecisiveness except animators who need to work with Disney anyway?

I find this far more sympathetic with Marvel, which had to do something even comics struggled with before doubling its output.

There's little reason for this indecisiveness around Snow White.

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