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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27520 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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despite obviously having a female lead.

Nobody has a problem with "a female lead". Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley were anchoring movies before I was born. Nobody had a problem with Black Widow. Nobody was annoyed by the original Charlie's Angels movies, even if they hated the recent woke abomination

I would say the problem of "wokeness" is beyond that now. Things like Rachel Zegler's comments on Snow White or the replacing of the dwarves had nothing to do with the mere presence of women in a fairy tale about a woman. It often just feels hostile to the existing IPs, general beloved tropes and stories and even the legacy audience (which matters since they drive hype)

That sort of wokeness applies in two ways here: Brie Larson is seen in a similar light as Zegler by the sorts of males who love this shit and (more importantly) the original movie was "woke" in the sense that Larson's character was so bland (most of her struggle being essentially against social forces telling her she's not good, fitting wokeness) that there's nothing to be loyal to. Middle class people will go watch that movie when they're told it's The First , and it's right before Endgame. But they don't love the character the way people love Stark or even Black Widow and so they have no reason to stick with her when the MCU's brand is collapsing.

Besides that, the problems are:

  1. This "phase" is dead so there's nothing to be excited for. Between Ant-Man fumbling Kang and Johnathan Majors allegedly beating women right around the time two movies of him being an intimidating boxer were in theaters it's clearly going to have to be rejiggered. So what's there to be excited about?
  2. Too much Disney+ material fatigues people.
  3. Audiences know they can get mediocre Marvel movies on Disney+ eventually, especially since they're no longer event movies due to the first two points.
  4. Feige clearly seems stretched thin by all that extra material he needs to produce, and Marvel's ad hoc style (decide after we film) apparently doesn't work if someone doesn't have their hands around everything.

I would say the problem of "wokeness" is beyond that now.

"Woke" is them not making the movie you want, but the movie they think a better person would want, on the theory that their audience will live up to their expectations.

Nobody had a problem with Black Widow.

Black Widow - Clumsy, Dumb and Disappointing

Black Widow is AWFUL | Marvel's Second-Worst Movie

Black Widow: An Unbridled Catastrophe

Nobody had a problem with Black Widow in the original run of the MCU. Her movie was quite woke and legitimately awful.

Fair enough. I spoke too strongly. Let me correct...a Black Widow led movie wasn't that controversial as a concept.

The problems with the film we got was that it was too late , it was derivative (the ending was basically The Winter Soldier) and it frankly sucked beyond the actors' charisma.

I only watched the first link to conclusion and The Critical Drinker, who is one of those anti-woke guys, basically says as much: it's disappointing because he actually wanted a good movie. Not true for a lot of "woke" stuff that crosses his path. I'm inclined to believe him because his reaction to the trailer was negative, but a lot of that was because of the tardiness

Too much Disney+ material fatigues people.

It's clear Loki and the Wanda thing should have been full feature films, I guess they had to "degrade them" into being tv shows due to covid?

Marvel plans it's films/movies five years out. These were effectively finished pieces before Covid happened.

Worth noting this same general timeline is abused to make it seem that Bob Chapek is responsible for the Disney flops that were well underway when Iger was still in his first run as CEO.

I think at least Loki was always planned to be a show. A lot of content was mandated to get Disney+ going as a Netflix competitor. Why not go with Loki, who is one of the second-stringers with a fanbase?

They overestimated Disney+, something I was pretty sure of at the time. It flattens out Disney's product line putting classic Cinderella on par with Brandy's Cinderella or Little Mermaid with Little Mermaid 2-4. There's no distinction between television, direct to DVD and big budget film projects. They screwed the pooch on planning and execution and IIRC, this is mostly under Bob Iger's leadership.

It's insane that Iger caused a huge mess, ducked out for a break during COVID and is now coming back as savior.

He's also to blame for the entire Star Wars fuck-up.

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