You might not watch something because you hate the thing they put in (and that could be a minority), but you might not watch something also because "you don't give a shit" about the thing they put in - and want more of what you do like.
I think the Ghostbusters remake is an example where people not hating woke ideologically, still dislike the movie, because they don't give a shit about the things the writers found so important...
I've heard someone said "i usually care when the communication departement goes way too political: it usually mean that that the story is bad . In this case it was about video games, but i feel like it can be extended to TV shows and movies.
There is a lot of good rather feminist TV shows who don't get touted as feminist (mostly YA and fantasy tbh). The one who tries to sold themselves on that though, are all bad.
But i think this is transitory. In the 60s, when "La nouvelle vague" started to include different, new stereotypes (of women mostly, but of men too), there wasn't a lot of really good success in the beginning (to my eyes at least, the stereotypes were too much). They also had less money and couldn't afford to go wrong that many time, and eventually Truffaut got it right imho. Hollywood il bust, probably a lot, lot more than La nouvelle vague, but will start to get it right. Hopefully.
OK, take Captain Marvel, which is part run-of-the-mill Marvel movie, part lecture. A lot of people tune out because of that.
Whereas they don't have any issue with a strong, feminist female lead like Ripley (were men are usually the laughing stock, and all die in the hands of the xenomorph due to incompetence).
Your point is that "stuff <10% of people will like" doesn't make up for a mediocre film, and studios are trying to capitalise on that rather than working on better stories.
No, your point is that unless I completely agree with you about some specific voting demographics that happens to be a pet theory of yours, then I'm wrong about something completely unrelated. Seems like you're knee deep in this shit and projecting your views in an entire country.
> Corporations “went Woke” because they misperceived that as having popular support while only 8-10% of people supported it — and the rest hate it.
> That misperception has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value, adding up just Disney, Warner, and Netflix.
How so? Do any of those companies have competitors who didn't "go woke," and are now profiting off their missteps? Those companies may have lost a ton of value, but I don't think it's because of that cause.
> Democrat politicians seem to have similarly misperceived — and now are facing widespread public backlash to their policy.
But that may not matter. They're also cultivating a backlash against Republicans, hoping that will counter any backlash against them. IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't even try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their respective activist bases.
This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
> This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
I'd say this has a deeper root cause - first past the post voting. Since merging your votes is a winning strategy, it just naturally tends towards a two party system. And once you have only two serious contenders on the ballot, you have to choose them somehow... And having that decided by a central committee, of which you have two, sounds like an even more slippery slope than primaries.
The most annoying bit is the two parties. You either religiously belong to a blue tribe or a red tribe, or you're resigned to picking which of your values to sacrifice to have representation aligned with the others.
STV seems to make things much better. Look at the current composition of Dáil Éireann - three large parties capturing a bit above 20% seats each, then almost as many independents, then a bunch of smaller parties. And every voter can truthfully say that their vote contributed to the elected candidate they liked most, not against a candidate they hated.
This seems like a good point. Also, did these companies lose value relative to the last couple of years when we were all hunkering down binge-watching TV or did they lose value relative to their pre-pandemic years. In the latter case, I would guess it has something to do with the absolutely abysmal quality of 99.9% of content on those platforms ("woke" being just one of many kinds of lazy, low quality content).
I was with you until the very end. Democracy as a whole is a poor system for doing just about anything. For example, free & open source software is not a democracy and it would never work if it was. We got here today explicitly via hierarchies, and with some participants being a lot more productive and "correct," than others. That's not an issue of economics or even politics; democracy as defined & even practiced today goes against the way human beings make progress.
The problem with the primary system is that it imposes significant guardrails upon intellectual debate, by making the partisans who coddle large vocal minorities appear to be the furthest you can go while still being successful. In fact, we have needed to think well outside even those boxes for many decades.
We need the citizenry to hold more radical political views. Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts, things which today very few people with a voice actually have. I don't care if you want to be a communist, a libertarian, or even a fascist authoritarian. As long as we stop having dull, ridiculous conversations comfortably within the tiny ring of globalist technocracy. That is what's literally killing the civilized world.
> Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts...
It can. Or it can indicate a very distorted understanding, based on badly flawed assumptions. Within that distorted worldview, the most bizarre proposals can seem perfectly reasonable, even "scientific".
There are radicals of several different flavors. They can't all have a (working) understanding of political concepts.
It's easier to talk somebody down from an insane point of view that is meaningless, than one that fits within the index card of allowable opinion yet is nonetheless very dangerous.
My point is, everybody's got a point of view where their position is within their index card of allowable options. (And maybe one where the sane viewpoints are not on it...)
Yes — imported and independent media have done well over that same period.
They’re literally setting records.
You can also compare within a single studio, such as Prime Video: why did Reacher and Terminal List succeed where Wheel of Time and Rings of Power did not?
Edit:
> IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't event try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their activist bases.
"Why did two military thriller TV series succeed when two fantasy TV series (one of which isn't even out yet) did not?". Seems like a lot of competing factors here chief!
Just wanted to point out that Wheel of Time is one of Amazon’s most popular shows ever and Rings of Power isn’t out yet. Struck me as an odd comparison.
> has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value
Who gives a shit about useless thieves with no ability to actually produce or do anything worthwhile??! Fuck the 'shareholders value'. We need to do more for and pay the PEOPLE better, who get things done. Ya know, the actual workers. All that a 'shareholder' does is extract money/value from other peoples hard work.
My in-law told us they were boycotting Disney for political reasons. A few months later we wanted to respect their choices so we asked her what our nephew would like for his birthday and she told us he's into The Mandalorian and Marvel.
Disney lost value because it's mismanaged by a horrible CEO, and hasn't produced anything meaningful outside of Marvel and Star Wars since forever. Add to that a struggling parks business in general, combined with epic mismanagement around "maybe we should just target people who want $5K hotel rooms and $2K drinks", and... here we are.
Netflix, similarly, suffers from self-inflicted wounds. Their struggling attempts to monetize account sharing are a much too late financial attempt to paper over the fact that their auth system is... not so good. Mildly put. Their content content has taken a deep turn towards "reality" schlock after they so brilliantly ousted Cindy Holland (who was responsible for bringing good content) while elevating Bela Bajaria (the king of garbage shows). Those shows play well on social media, but they do shit all for the bottom line.
It's not "went woke", it's "leaned into incompetence".
The same holds true on the political side. A large chunk of the recession rests firmly on politicians who completely and utterly fucked up the handling of the pandemic. Republicans and Democrats both. Different flavors of incompetence, but... it was a shit show either way.
Yes and the parent comment’s point, as I interpret it, was that not even the brand power of Marvel and Star Wars could save the company from itself as it moved to the Woke Side with its content generally
Sure, you can draw a line from the point five years ago to the point right now, and the line is slightly down, but... that doesn't mean a thing. For one, the graph makes it rather blatantly clear it's not a continuous decline.
For two, even if it were consistently down over five years - what bearing has this on the discussion?
Even if each Marvel movie had yields like Dr. Strange - it's not enough to justify a $200B market cap. Disney has a P/E of 74 right now. That'd be on extremely high end for pure tech plays during the tech boom heydays, and it's completely unsustainable for a media company.
Reminder, Netflix, which is also considered "in trouble" has a P/E of 20.
You cannot sustain on the backs of those two alone. (But also: Given that they're the most profitable franchises of all time, maybe the woke scolding is misplaced. Clearly, people still love the fare. There just isn't enough)
Which is why they're not doing as well as they should be, rather than literally crashing and burning. At their size having two great franchises isn't good enough if everything else is absolute shit (not that I'm saying it is all shit, just that those two alone can't carry the stock market's expectation of more than just those two succeeding).
