Is Disney D.I.E.ing?
And Why Woke Hollywood Is Going to Make It Impossible To Make Any Big-Budget Movie With Anything But a White Male Lead

Kathleen Kennedy: "Why sure I could absolutely see us making more 'Indiana Jones' movies starring Human Hormone Blocker Phoebe Waller-Bridge."

Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy recently admitted that "it's entirely possible" that Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character, Helena Shaw, could take over the Indiana Jones franchise.

Kennedy spoke with Variety about the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny film, where she was asked if Disney and Lucasfilm see potential for Phoebe Waller-Bridge and her character, Helena Shaw, to carry on the franchise.

Kennedy informed the outlet that "it's entirely possible." However, she also added, "We're not having any of those conversations right now. We're just focused on finishing this with Harrison."

The leaks Doomcock got before the film's release -- which are 90% accurate -- said that the movie was a time-travel movie in which Indiana Jones is shot and killed in the past, thus, somehow, erasing him from history, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes hi hat and whip and in a quick montage, she is shown performing all the heroics Indiana Jones did in the first three (real) Indiana Jones movies.

And then the plan was to continue "Helena Shaws' Adventures" on Disney Minus.

Note "Helena Shaw" is almost (but not quite) a rhythmic sound-alike for Indiana Jones.

People screamed like hell at that plot leak. Although the current film does not feature Indiana Jones dying and Phoebe Waller-Bridge taking over for him, Indiana Jones is in fact shot in the chest and dying in 200 BC at the end of the movie. Then there's a hard cut-to-black after Waller-Bridge knocks Indiana Jones unconscious, and then he wakes up in his bed, apparently healed.

We know for a fact there were last minute reshoots, and this scene was almost certainly one of the scenes shot just months ago. Harrison Ford confirmed this, when he said that Karen Allen's cameo, which occurs in the Suddenly Back in Bed scene, was part of the last-minute reshoots.

So what I'm saying is: I think Doomcock was 100% right about the original intended ending, where Phoebe Waller-Bridge literally steps into Indiana Jones' skin and literally replaces him in history. They only changed that due to backlash.

So yeah, I think KK is still scheming to get her final Replacement of a Beloved Male Character With a Brunette of Very Average Sex Appeal. She literally wants to Self-Insert herself into every LucasFilm property she controls.

Plot details of the upcoming Star Wars movie have leaked. Or I should say "supposedly upcoming." Kathleen Kennedy leaks a lot of Star Wars projects that never get off the ground. And she has a backlog of 20 Star Wars movies, like Ryan Johnson's trilogy, which they claim are still "in development" even though everyone knows they've been shelved.

Anyway, the details are these: Rey will serve as Jedi master training two kids with force powers, a boy and a girl. Rey realizes the girl has force powers of such immense power as to never have been dreamed of before -- not even by Rey!

Whoa! Plot twist! You're saying that in a Kathleen Kennedy fanfic movie the girl is all-powerful, unstoppable, and, indeed, the Key to Everything?! I did not see that coming!

Now this All-Powerful Girlboss, Kathleen -- who do you have in mind for casting? Do you have in mind a brunette girl of very limited attractiveness? Maybe with a squint-eyed, needle-nosed ratface, by any chance?

I can't believe this font of e'er-flowing creative genius used to be paid just to fetch coffee and take notes!

So yes, Kathleen Kennedy is trying to make a movie in which her Unstoppable Girlboss Self-Insert trains an Even Moar Unstoppable Girlboss Self-Insert.

How does she do it? She's like the Beatles times Nicola Tesla times Leonardo DaVinci, but gender-swapped and given a British accent and drab haircut.

Disney allegedly "debunked" these plot leaks, by sending out word to their media shills that they are "largely inaccurate."

Well, that's as good as gold, then!

Even the leftwing shill critics have realized that Disney is too damaged to save, and are admitting that the new Secret Invasion show on Disney Minus is a cheap, incompetent bore.

The Telegraph:

Woke critics have been a crucial line of defense for Disney's bombs and misfires. If they lose the woke critics, then their movies will have to be judged on... quality and box office performance.

Ay! What a horror!

How much has Disney lost on its never-ending conveyor belt of woke content? Valliant Renegade ran the numbers, looking at the last eight Disney releases, Lightyear through Elemental. Including The Little Mermaid, Thor: Thud and Blunder, etc. All of them.

Based on reports, the movies cost $2.75 billion in total.

And how much did they produce in box office receipts? Well, Disney Obsessive and Pedophile "Juris" seems to think that every dollar made at the box office goes to Disney, but it doesn't; they have to split with the actual theaters showing the movies. That's why the theaters are even in business in the first place, to take a cut of the box office.

Domestically, Disney takes an average of 55% of ticket sales in the US. Internationally, except for China, they take 43%. China takes the biggest bite. Disney's (and other company's) deals with China are secret, but the best estimate is that China takes 75% of ticket sales, with the studio only getting 25%.

So, how much did the last eight Disney movies make, after splitting box office with the theaters?

$1.86 billion.

Do you see the problem, Juris? Disney' costs exceed its box office takings by $890 million. Almost a full billion, P3do.

By the way, Disney has also dropped the amount of money it makes from licensing these movies to other networks and streamers, because they make every Disney movie exclusive to Disney Minus. (Which is also losing a ton of money!)

And how much has Disney lost in what they could expect to license these eight movies to Netflix and other networks? About $125 million each, or about a billion all-in.

So even if they were licensing these movies to other outlets, they would still only make a "profit" (if you can call it that) of $110 million on eight "blockbuster" "tentpole" movies.

Tell me more about Captain Marvel, P3dophile.

An update to the "exit" of Disney's Chief Diversity Officer: According to one of the podcasts I listen to -- not sure which -- ousted Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton was also noisy about Chapek's initial decision to avoid the controversy around Ron DeSantis' Parental Rights in Education bill (now law). She was one of the people publicly criticizing his neutral stance, they say.

I actually can't find a print reference confirming that, though. Maybe they're wrong.

But in looking for that, I came across this: Disney has eliminated all "gendered language" in its parks. Staff can no longer say "ladies and gentlemen" or "boys and girls."

Karey Burke, president of Disney's General Entertainment Content, said the company must do more to make its content more inclusive in a company-wide Zoom call Monday that was later posted to Twitter.

"I'm here as a mother of two queer children, actually," Burke said on the call. "One transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader."

Burke said she supports featuring "many, many" characters who are LGBTQIA, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (or questioning), intersex, and asexual (or allies).

The call was part of Disney's "Reimagine Tomorrow" campaign, according to the video posted on Twitter Tuesday. Its website promises that 50 percent of regular and recurring characters across the Disney universe will come from "underrepresented groups."

The Disney honcho said she had been dismayed to learn from a colleague that the company only had a "handful" of queer lead characters in its content.

"And I went, 'What? That can't be true,'" Burke said. "And I realized it actually is true. We have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories and yet we don't have enough leads and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters and not have to be about gay stories."

During the same call Monday, another Disney employee noted how the company has also eliminated the use of gendered pronouns throughout its theme parks last summer as part of its inclusivity efforts.

"Last summer we removed all gendered greetings in relationship to our live spiels," Disney diversity and inclusion manager Vivian Ware said on the call. "So, we no longer say ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls ... It's hello everyone or hello friends."

The diversity plan comes amid Gov. DeSantis's new "Don't Say Gay" policy.
Disney's diversity plan comes amid the controversy over Florida's new "Don't Say Gay" law.

Disney is now in the process of changing recorded messages in parks to match the inclusivity push, Ware said.

"We no longer say ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," Ware continued. "We say dreamers of all ages."

I think there's another Disney executive who should "exit" the company to pursue her own "dream projects."

Fox News confirms that Elemental featured a non-binary character.

Pixar film "Elemental," which features the studio's first "non-binary" character, according to a voice actor for the film, earned only $29.5 million in its opening weekend.

It was the lowest opening weekend ever for Pixar, The New York Times reported Sunday. That was despite creative direction from Pixar, one of the most famous studios in the entertainment business, and support from Disney, which owns Pixar.

Outlets around the country took notice of the movie's dismal performance.

The movie "fell short of already-low expectations," Variety reported. "Pixar's 'Elemental' falls flat," The New York Times headlined Sunday. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the move was "iced by moviegoers" along with "The Flash," a superhero flick that has suffered from its leading actor, Ezra Miller, becoming the center of scandal in 2022 after he was arrested multiple times.

"Elemental" acquired some notoriety of its own after it featured the first non-binary character in its history, "Lake." The actor who voiced Lake, Kai Ava Hauser, posted about the role on Twitter.

It may seems strange that we only hear the character is non-binary from the actor playing they/them, rather than it being definitely announced in the movie itself, but this is the way Disney often plays its Gay Insertions -- with plausible deniability. The actor would be told the character is non-binary, and to play they/them that way, and Disney would leak the news to receptive media channels, like my friend Dave's friends at Pink News. Disney often sneaks gay material in, well, sneakily, making sure that the material can be denied or cut out entirely for foreign markets.

One of the complaints about Elemental is that it is specifically an immigrant story. Specifically. As in, it's so culturally specific to immigrants that if you're not an immigrant, you'll find it hard to relate.

I've heard even immigrants complaining that it was too specifically about immigrant families.

The former head of Marvel physical production, Victoria Alonso, IIRC, said that she didn't want "diversity" to merely consist of stories about women and minorities. She said that wasn't enough; she wanted their stories to be specifically about the experiences (read: complaints) of women and minorities.

Elemental is apparently hewing to that rule.

A Hollywood journalist at Puck pointed out that Disney had abandoned its old paradigm of "populist" entertainments featuring universal themes and aspirations in favor of highly culturally-specific offerings.

By making their films so determinedly specific to small groups of people, they are alienating and excluding the great majority of the population, who does not share these highly specific experiences.

And how's that working out for them?

I propose a new term for this: Inclusion by Exclusion.

When I was a kid, we had some kind of reading material called "SRAs." Don't ask me what that stood for. I don't remember. But they were these cards upon which were printed short stories. You'd have to read so many in a week.

Some of the stories were very universal. One was about a boy getting lost in the woods, and having to figure out how to get to the highway.

Another story was a first-contact science fiction story where a ship with room for only three astronauts discovers a dying alien on a barren asteroid. Rather than leaving the alien to die on the planet, the captain tells his men to take the alien aboard and get him to earth, while he volunteers to remain on the rock and die. (There's no hope of another ship coming by before his oxygen runs out.)

He lays on the asteroid and watches his ship fly away as his oxygen reaches critical level, and he thinks:

To die is not the worst thing that can happen to a man.

Then mixed in with those kind of stories, there were the ethnic ones. And they were boring.

One was about a Jewish family. It was about, hand to God, gefilte fish and potato pancakes. (The latter I have since learned are tasty.)

Another was about a Latinx girl, call her Juanita, and su abeula. Juanita's abuela explains how to make plantains and about how the specific plantain recipe was invented on, I think, Puerto Rico.

Those last two are extremely boring stories with no appeal to anyone outside the targeted ethnic groups.

Who the fuck cares about plantains? I don't even think Hispanic people want to read a "story" literally about plantains.

Obviously I read the first couple stories a lot, and only read the latter two when I was forced to. And they kept showing up year after year. These cards were ranked in grade levels, but the ranking would be like "third to fifth grade," so these tedious ethnic cultural explainers would show up year after year like boring pennies.

The stories about the boy in the woods and the astronauts discovering a dying alien never specified the race or cultural backgrounds of the characters. They were interesting for what they were doing now, not because of the specific details of their Racial Backstories.

There's nothing wrong with female or minority leads. But Woke Hollywood is determined to make every movie with a female or minority lead very culturally specific to women or the targeted minority, alienating anyone outside of those demographics.

Usually the cultural specificity comes in the form of airing gender or racial grievances.

In Captain Marvel, a man tells Carl Manvers to smile more, and she uses her alien-augmented super-strength to beat him up and steal his leather jacket.

Charlie's Angels was nothing but 100 minutes of Superior Girlbosses humiliating physically and mentally inferior white men. (Spit.)

In Black Panther, Shuri -- another of Marvel's infinite number of teenage girl scientific geniuses -- calls a white man who is acting as her ally (and in fact acting with such devotion to Wakanda that he's a traitor to his actual country, America) a "colonizer," and we're supposed to think that's charming and cute.

Oh look, what an adorably precocious little racist! I love characters who stereotype me and insult me based upon my skin color! Doesn't everybody?!

In the upcoming Blue Beetle move from DC's House of Bombs, a racist Latino uncle calls Batman a "fascist."

And on. And on. And on. And on.

In what movie led by a white male would any of these expressions of hostility to women or people of other races be thought acceptable? Let alone "charming" or "cute."

The Wokies are actually destroying any chance of for women and minorities to lead more movies, because what they are teaching the audience is: If the movie stars a woman or a minority, it will be made only for women or minorities, and they will stuff it with boring culturally-specific filler as well as straight-up insults towards anyone outside of the groups they're pandering to.

Whereas if they just cast a woman or minority as the lead and then made a film about universal themes and aspirations, without toxic insults to white people and men, people might actually like those movies and say, "Give me more of that."

But no; if Hollywood makes a movie with a female lead, it must be about the more toxic aspects of fourth-wave feminism; and if Hollywood makes a movie with a minority lead, it must be about racial resentments about whites.

Why would men or whites show up for that kind of a movie?

I'm not saying there's no room for culturally-specific movie. There's always an audience for movies like Yentl, or My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or even a gay "rom-com" like Bros.

But they're not big audiences. They're not blockbuster audiences, they're not $200 million tentpole summer release audiences.

These are independent-type movies, passion-project movies, and should have the budget to match.

But Hollywood keeps spending $200-300 million on culturally divisive niche films and then wondering: Why aren't we making a billion dollars? I don't get it! I'm confuzzulated!

Hollywood thinks they're promoting women and minorities. In fact, they're destroying their ability to carry films. You can only make an alleged "blockbuster" focusing on divisive, exclusionary grievances and cultural tropes before people will start thinking, "I don't know if I want to see a Hispanic-led 'blockbuster.' The last three times I paid money to see a Hispanic-led blockbuster, it was all about grievances against the gringos. And plantains."

And then they'll just stop going to see would-be "blockbusters" starring Hispanics. And then, the financing for Hispanic-led blockbusters will dry up.

If they want to reach all "four quadrants" of the movie-viewing public, if they want to make true blockbusters which appeal to practically everyone, they can feature women and minority leads.

But they're going to have to give up the divisive political grievance-mongering and the alienating cultural specificity that have become the norm with women and minority led films.

Which, unfortunately for them, goes against their ethos of Identity Politics All The Time.

posted by Ace at 03:40 PM

| Access Comments