Disney Marvel Tells Its Shill Media Simps That It's "Recalibrating," Not-Quite-Admitting It Is Currently a Disaster On Par With Fani Willis' Dating Life

The Hollywood Reporter:

Just over a year ago, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was set to take Marvel Studios to the next level. A new villain was going to be introduced, setting the stage for several years' worth of storytelling. And the movie itself was a giant-sizing of a franchise that was previously modest in scope. Instead, the Peyton Reed-directed movie heralded a year's worth of missteps, box office blunders and PR nightmares. It was all uncharted territory for Marvel, which had steadily been generating box office gold for 15 years.

This is a Modified Limited Hangout. That's CIA-speak for the situation where an agent is captured by the enemy, and his cover story is disbelieved, so he offers a story that is slightly closer to the truth while still being a huge lie. For example, an agent may have to back off his cover story that he's just an oil executive, so he'll say he's really an oil executive, but a friend in the FBI did ask him to talk to someone in the enemy country. He still refuses to admit he's a CIA agent whose position at the oil company was arranged by the government.

Disney is offering the Modified Limited Hangout that these problems started with Ant-Man: Quantumania, the first film of "Phase 5." No, all of Phase 4 was a disaster, every movie and almost every TV show.

They're also trying to pretend this is just about an actor they hired without doing enough due diligence into his character.

But the Disney division is in the midst of a pretty darn good February, all things considered, despite the general gloom that surrounds the superhero genre as of late.

What? Everything they put out is a failure. Did you see Echo, dumped in January?

The Super Bowl trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine became the most watched trailer of all time, with 365 million views in 24 hours. Yes, Disney's math includes the 123 million people who tuned in for the game, which included just 30 seconds of the trailer, but Super Bowl fudging or not, the clip's reach was an encouraging number for a studio whose last movie, The Marvels, became the lowest-grossing in the MCU's 33-film run, hitting just $206 million globally.

Oh, the great news is about possible good news in the future. Which is just like Disney Marvel -- for a long time, they've gotten by on mediocre movies with interesting post-credit trailers. They kept on teasing viewers. "Okay, this movie was kinda crappy, but in the next movie, we're going to introduce Starfox and Pip! Aren't you crazy excited to see Starfox and Pip??!"

Why, no. No I am not.

Next came the Valentine's Day unveiling of the cast of Fantastic Four -- Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn, coupled with retro art teasing a 1960s setting for the movie...

Oh, more possible good news in the future.

Disney's shills in the shill media are now praising them for just casting a movie.

And oh wow, Pedro Pascal. How'd you get him? He's barely in any movies or tv shows. He's almost a fresh-faced ingenue.

A day later, Marvel launched the trailer for X-Men '97, a revival of the 1990s cartoon that debuts in March. The trailer set an internal Disney record as the biggest launch for an animated series on Disney+, ahead of other Marvel shows such as What If ...? and any animated Star Wars series.

Oh another future project. Starring (checks notes) a trans actor.

These public-facing moves come as studio boss Kevin Feige recalibrates the creative direction behind the scenes.

Just a teensy-tiny recalibration.

Early in February, the company completed reshoots for Agatha: Darkhold Diaries, the WandaVision spinoff starring Kathryn Hahn that is expected to hit Disney+ this fall. The company usually budgets five days of reshoots into the schedule, but the studio completed the work in just one, fueling a sunny outlook around the show internally, according to sources associated with the series.

Wow -- sources inside Disney and at the production itself say the show has "sunny prospects."

Is it too early in the year to award the Pulitzer to this reporter?

The studio also quietly hired Eric Pearson to polish the script for Fantastic Four, which will shoot this summer in London. Pearson is a company stalwart who worked on Thor: Ragnarok and Black Widow and has a reputation for taking projects over the finish line.

Wow, he got Black Widow over the finish line, huh? What a credit.

...

Marvel also hired Joanna Calo, the showrunner of acclaimed FX series The Bear, to work on the script for Thunderbolts, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

Oh great another female writer who knows nothing about comic books or action movies.

The film will begin shooting in March in Atlanta. Her hiring adds a flair of prestige to the project...

That's what Disney Marvel is lacking -- more insider-Hollywood DEI "prestige." It's been working like gangbusters through Phases 4 and 5.

When a government agency fails, they never affix blame to any actual people or to the ideology that caused the failure. They always scramble to blame the failure on process-type stuff.

Here, Disney Marvel says the problem with their TV shows isn't the writing or the neverending DEI messaging -- it's just that they didn't have Show Czars (aka showrunners) overseeing the productions

On the TV side, Marvel has been reorganizing its operations to allow for greater control from showrunners, a move made after the critical failure of the expensive Samuel L. Jackson spy series Secret Invasion, which sidelined executive producer Kyle Bradstreet after a year, with various creative factions vying for influence in his wake. The show had about 2.5 billion minutes of viewing over its six-week run, per Nielsen, in the bottom third of Marvel's live-action Disney+ offerings so far.

"The focus is internal this year," says one insider of all the tinkering going on behind the scenes.

Execs are not calling it a reboot, not even a soft one, but more of a creative retooling.

LOL.

"Some of our studios lost a little focus. So the first step that we've taken is that we've reduced volume," Iger said on a Feb. 7 earnings call. "We've reduced output, particularly at Marvel," in order to ensure "the films you're making can be even better."

Meanwhile, in the Sony branch of the M-She-U, Madame Web bombed so disastrously that Amazon, which commissioned another female-centric Spider-Man-adjacent disaster, reportedly has fired its entire writing room and given the order to shift the focus for a superhero show to, get this, be male-skewing instead of female-skewing.

Amazon has reportedly fired the entire writer's room for Silk: Spider Society and nearly everyone else involved in the project other than the showrunner, Angela Kang, and one executive producer just a day after the disastrous opening of Madame Web.

Firing the female writers, but keeping the female showrunner, huh?

Silk: Spider Society is going to be the first show from Sony set within their Spider-Man Universe and was put on hold during the writer's strike last year. Originally, the writers for Silk were supposed to reconvene in January, but as of Friday, they've all been removed. With the statement that the show is seeking to target a mostly male audience, the reasons could not be any clearer.

Reacher and Terminal List are both Amazon original shows that were heavily geared toward men and saw massive success. It appears that Amazon is realizing that comic book shows and movies' primary audience is, and always has been, men.

Why does Amazon produce DEI Pageants and Girlboss Exhibitions like Rings of Power and Wheel of Time while also producing male-skewing, quality shows like Reacher and The Terminal List?

The answer is -- according to an unconfirmed claim by someone claiming to be an insider -- that Amazon does not demand that every show be Full DEI, just that their average score for all shows be acceptably DEI.

So that means that so long as We Had Rangz is super-DEI, then Amazon can afford make Reacher for men and hire non-DEI incompetents to write and crew it:

As a result of Amazon choosing to "average out" their DEI accounting across all of their shows over the course of the year, they are able to greenlight a number of lower-budget projects that technically fail to meet the required DEI grade but still contribute to their overall content slate.

Think of it in terms of a typical high-school class: as long as most of the students pass, the overall average grade can absorb a couple of delinquents who fail out. Ironically, it's these lower-profile "DEI-failures" that manage to attract a substantial audience due to their broader appeal.

To sum it up, Amazon has been straddling both sides of the fence when it comes to DEI: on the one hand loudly showing-off its virtue by producing expensive bombs while on the other hand quietly slipping through enough "problematic" content to offset their losses.

While DEI policies can be successful, it seems that Amazon has not yet found the winning formula to do so, and must keep choosing between either having DEI initiatives or commercial success, but not both.

Why has Hollwood been churning out one incompetently written bomb after another?

Who knows, who can say. It's a stone-cold mystery.

But one thing we can definitely say is not to blame is Diversity, and hiring "diverse" people over skilled people.

Because Diversity is Our Strength.

Add amazon silk

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 04:25 PM

| Access Comments