Disney Executive: Morale at the Mouse Has Never Been Worse; Everyone Knows That Kathleen Kennedy Has to be Fired, But Bob Iger Doesn't Have the Stones to Do It

At the Bee, of course.

Via WDW_Pro, a "Disney lifer" reports to Puck news that morale at the company has never been lower.

Below, "WDAS" means "Walt Disney Animation Studios." This executive is also saying with both Disney's own Animation Studios and Pixar both run into the ground, and both with tattered brand value, it makes no sense to maintain them as separate expensive units. Time to merge these pieces-of-mouse-shit and fire all the non-performers.

A survey finds that more people disapprove, and disapprove strongly, of Disney's Not So Secret Gay Agenda than approve of it, though it's a closer split than one would hope.

Redfield & Wilton Strategies surveyed 1,500 people and asked for their opinions on a number of LGBTQ+ topics and their place in Disney movies. The results were published on June 25 and shared exclusively with Newsweek.

When asked, "To what extent, if at all, do you approve or disapprove of transgender characters being represented in Disney films?" 11 percent disapproved, while 25 percent strongly disapproved. In comparison, 14 percent approved while 20 percent strongly approved.

In summary, 36 percent disapproved in some form, 34 percent approved, while 31 percent neither approved nor disapproved, or didn't know how they felt.

I would say that most of the people strongly disapproving are actual parents with children, and that most of the people strongly approving are childless weirdoes who post on Twitter and TikTok all day about their pronouns.

As the premiere of Indiana Jones finally comes -- it's already in theaters, for so-called "Thursday previews" that start at noon, but will be counted as Friday night's takings -- certainty that the film will bomb grows.

Currently, Dial of Destiny is expected to open on $65 million domestically, and only $140 million worldwide. Considering the reported $295 budget of Indy's swansong, along with a heft marketing campaign, this puts the fifth and final Indiana Jones adventure on the same shaky ground as the likes of The Flash, which has been a massive underperformer in the last few weeks.

WDW_Pro points out that the $295 million budget is an error -- that's the cost they got from British tax disclosures, in British pounds, not dollars. The actual cost in dollars is about $332 million. (Whoops, million, not billion -- this isn't aid for Ukraine we're talking about!)

Also, that cost but only counts the (acknowledged, admitted) costs through December 31, 2022. There have been additional reshoots since then, an additional round of scoring including the costs of an orchestra to play it, and certainly there have been additional CGI costs.

And not only do you have to add the 2023 costs to that $332 million, but then there are also the costs marketing, prints, the hefty back-end that Harrison Ford is certainly receiving, etc., that were not included in that.

Of course there is always a chance that these projections could turn out to be off the mark, but probably not by too much. A $65 million domestic haul would put the film in the same area as the likes of Fast X and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, but a long way behind the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Little Mermaid and even Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which did not perform as well as expected. This makes Indy's final adventure as precarious in real life as in his own world.

While there are always discussions about who could be recast in popular roles, it seems that for now at least the Indiana Jones franchise will be ending with Dial of Destiny. When the movie was originally announced it came with a lot of rumors that the movie would act as a handover between Harrison Ford and the person who would be taking the franchise forward; Phoebe Waller-Bridge. In the last few months, Lucasfilm and Dial of Destiny director James Mangold have seemed to dampen down the idea of Waller-Bridge's Helena Shaw getting her own spin-off anytime soon.

Actually, both Kathleen Kennedy and Fleabag -- I'll call her Phloebag, for clarity -- recently popped of that Phloebag might be replacing Indiana Jones. But they can't possibly believe that. It's become a routine lie lately -- a grim joke -- that executives will attempt to make bombs sound like the studio has a lot of faith in them by announcing a sequel to the film before the film even debuts. They often announce a sequel just in time for opening weekend.

And then, after the film bombs, no one ever talks about that "sequel" again.

But at one time, Kathleen Kennedy certainly was planning a Raiders of the Lost Fleabag series.

Check out director James Mangold's reply as to whether he'd consider directing a Fleabag continuation movie or series:

"I'm not interested. I refuse. I just can't do it. The amount of lore and Easter eggs and fan service starts to become antithetical to any of this stuff at a certain point. It isn't storytelling anymore. It's large-scale advertising."

OMG dude did you just say that before your bomb even explodes?!?

You're supposed to say things like that years after the box office disaster, not on the eve of the film's release.

They keep lowering expectations for the looming disaster:

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" is projected to rake in $60 to $70 million during its opening weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter's tracking data. Deadline also projects the film to open with figures between $60 to $65 million domestically and $140 million worldwide.

This represents a sharp drop from the $81 to $111 million opening predicted by Box Office Pro in early June. Box Office Pro subsequently readjusted figures the next week, predicting the film would open to $68 to $102 million, according to Bounding Into Comics. On June 22, predictions hit $68 to $95 million.

I heard another YouTube commenter say that the low end for the Phloebiana Jones movie is only $55 million -- the same amount that They/Them Flash brought in. Disastrously.

Incidentally, Indiana Jones had a "fresh" rating only in the 40s after its poor reception at Cannes. They recently bumped that up to 62%, by inviting a lot of shill Rotten Tomatoes nobodies to screen the film and, wink-wink, "give it an unbiased review," wink-wink. Chris Gore and Paulie of "The Latino Slant" attended that screening, and say that LucasFilm paid for their dinner and for drinks -- they wanted them to have a nice free buzz for the movie. And both said they've never been literally "wined and dined" for a screening before.

How woke is it?

This woke: here are two sample dialogues from the movie.

Indiana Jones: You stole it!

Dr. Voller: You stole it!

Phloebag: Then I stole it! It's called capitalism.

That's in the trailers. They're super-proud of that line.

Stephen Greene says this is also in the movie -- though it sounds like a parody.

Indiana Jones: I fought the Nazis you know!


Phloebag: And you stole from indigenous people, too!

Oh wow. I heard Chris Gore talking about a line like that but I thought he was joking.

LucasFilm has a cheesy way to increase Indiana Jones' "ticket sales" -- giving away free tickets at Applebee's. If you spend $35 at Applebee's, you get one free ticket, if you spend $70, you get two. Note that it's pretty hard not to spend that much on dinner. So these are just free tickets.

In fairness, Applebee's ran a similar promotion with Top Gun: Maverick.

I don't think Phloebiana Jones is on track for a Maverick-style success.

Finally, there's Disney Minus' new woke series, Secret Invasion. The comic book was about an invasion by alien shapeshifters who had secretly replaced some major Marvel characters for years; the Disney Minus TV show is about old black racists bitterly complaining that white men didn't promote them fast enough.

Chris Gore discusses a scene between Nick Fury and Rhodie, two black men, in which Nick Fury says that they're not the kind of men who got jobs because of who their daddies were, and that they had to take jobs of "mediocre men who didn't look like us." That is, white men (spit).

Chris Gore also notes that Fury says "spooks like us" won the Cold War, suggesting that he means that as a racial slur. I don't think so. He is a spook -- meaning, covert operative. It's actually wrong to call James Bond a spy; a spy is the citizen of the target country recruited to provide intelligence to the spook. Maybe the Marvel show means this as a racial double-entendre. I don't know, I'm not watching it.

Update: Methos corrects me -- it's definitely intended as a racial double-entendre.

Gore is talking about an exchange between Fury and the white chick from How I met Your Mother, in which he talks about being a spook and she says "You can't say that any more," and he responds "No, YOU can't say that any more."

Right. So they're definitely hitting the black-slur usage of "spook."

Just what we all wanted in our Alien Invasion Comic Book show.

So how's the newest woke sermon working out for Disney Minus?

Well, even the Disney Shill Critics who Disney previously counted on to claim its woke disasters were Askhually Very Good, Racist are now ripping their latest Amber Heard level bed-turd.

The first reviews for Marvel's Secret Invasion just dropped, and they've certainly lowered our expectations. ...

Daniel Feinberg at The Hollywood Reporter calls Secret Invasion "middling" and "a disappointment." He also notes "Unfortunately, the action in Secret Invasion peaks with [its] first scene," before saying "A third of the way through the series, though, Secret Invasion is less Cold War and more Generally Tepid Kerfuffle."

Meghan O'Keefe, at Decider, notes that one of Secret Invasion's early "fumbles" comes in "pacing, over-emphasizing how Fury is off his game with repetitive scenes. A fun drinking game would be to take a shot anytime someone tells Fury he hasn't been the same since the Blip. You would soon be too hammered to catch any of Secret Invasion's many Marvel Easter eggs."

More damningly, Meghan writes "The scripts are flabby, the visuals uninspired. Five years ago, Secret Invasion would have been top-tier genre entertainment. Now it feels, like Fury, a few important steps behind the competition."

Ben Travers, of IndieWire, dryly slaps Secret Invasion's lack of ambition, writing "if "Secret Invasion" had any ambitions beyond fulfilling Disney's content demands, the six-episode limited series could speak to plenty of relevant, real-world issues." He also condemns the series, echoing Feinberg as he writes "Nine shows into Marvel's streaming experiment, we know what we're getting, and "Secret Invasion" is nearly as disappointing as its predecessors -- even when taken from a modified perspective."

It has the second-lowest ratings of any Disney Marvel content, beating out only the lowly, woke Ms. Marvel.

The viewership numbers for Secret Invasion's premiere episode have been released, and they are one of the worst among Marvel Studios' Disney+ projects. Inspired by one of the most expansive storylines in Marvel Comics, the latest MCU TV series sees Nick Fury return to Earth as he deals with the growing concern over Skrulls slowly taking over Earth. Despite being spearheaded by one of the most beloved characters in the franchise, it doesn't seem like Secret Invasion has quite resonated with its target audience yet.

"Yet."

Meanwhile, the Disney Minus show Secret Invasion has such a low budget they've risked the ire of the artistic community and used AI to create their opening credits sequence.

Visual artists hate AI, because it's cheaply automating the creation of art and putting them out of jobs.

But Disney Minus' budget for their content is so low, they did it anyway.

As Breitbart News reported, Disney engendered backlash among industry insiders this week upon revelations that the studio employed AI to create the opening credits for its new Disney+ Marvel series Secret Invasion.

The backlash hit on Wednesday after video of the show's intro went viral on social media, generating conversations about the future of artists in the industry that has since come to a standstill due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, AI being chief among their concerns. Take a look:

posted by Ace at 04:40 PM

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