Oh noooooooooooooooooo.

The magic of Lin Manuel Miranda!!

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2023 12:33 am The magic of Lin Manuel Miranda!!

"Just speak the words in an approximate rhythm."

Don't want to necessarily link to every Youtube upload of Doomcock's but he's dead on again -- even the good reviews aren't really good, and are mostly mixed/negative if you read closely enough. The kool aid drinking critics who think they're making a social statement by voting it "fresh" make their agenda more transparent than ever here.

Can't you just feel the Disney Magic in every frame...?

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sat May 27, 2023 11:56 amThe kool aid drinking critics who think they're making a social statement by voting it "fresh" make their agenda more transparent than ever here.

"See, see? I'm not one of those awful racists, I gave this terrible movie a 'positive' review...!"

Of course Lukas is saying that the movie is wildly bombing overseas due to racism, there's absolutely no other reasons no one likes it...!

https://www.lukaskendall.com/post/the-u ... stribution

It's not because the movie is a piece of s---t?

People inside the industry simply don't want to deal with reality apparently.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 4:10 pm It's not because the movie is a piece of s---t?

People inside the industry simply don't want to deal with reality apparently.

Only these aggressively woke movies continuing to have a box office decline will make Disney stop making them, and the fact that Little Mermaid is likely to finish around $600 million worldwide is gonna be a big black eye for the studio. If a remake of one of their biggest hits from the "Renaissance period" can't hit a billion, what chance does anything else have? No one's gonna storm the box office for Snow Brown.

This isn't just happening in the movie industry. My nephew works in gaming software. His company recently released a new version of a popular game featuring a "woke" character and it bombed.

He thinks the marketing guys became so caught up in thier Internet bubble that they didn't realize that it was a bad idea. He said the someone in the company probaby realized it was a bad idea at some point along the line, but by that time too much had been invested.

It's surprising that marketing analysis is so poor in this day and age. It sound like companies are trying to chase the latest fad and failing miserably. Is that a lack of talent?

In the meantime, I watch my Korean TV shows and don't even bother with American media. The Korean stuff is imaginative and entertaining. Mixed race casts are non-existant, although maybe I just not picking up on Asian ethnicities. Out of the dozens of Korean shows I've watched, one had a character of colour, in the show Itaewon Class.

There are quite a few white guy business tycoons/villiians though.

sprocket wrote: ↑Wed May 31, 2023 11:22 am It's surprising that marketing analysis is so poor in this day and age. It sound like companies are trying to chase the latest fad and failing miserably. Is that a lack of talent?

I don't know how much longer studios will put up with this when they're hemorrhaging money (Disney in particular), while studios that ignore the Twitterverse and make movies that are JUST FUN with zero socio-political bullsh!t (like Illumination/Universal with Minions 2 and Super Mario Bros.) have been raking in billions. I mean, Disney has been remaking their back catalogue since the 90s (Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians, The Parent Trap), but at least then they were still releasing plenty of ORIGINAL movies as well, and the remakes, quality aside, didn't ram homosexual and racial politics down the audiences' throats (while publicly chastising them as "ists" and "phobes" if they rejected them). This is one of the most depressing eras of popular culture I can think of, and - especially coming out of an economy-tanking Scamdemic - you'd think that studios would want movies that DON'T tell the viewer they're going to hell if they feel uncomfortable seeing two ladies kissing in a movie aimed at children, or if they resent seeing pre-existing white, straight characters literally getting "reskinned" for a happy, diverse world rather than creating NEW characters who are black, female, gay, handicapped or all four. It's no coincidence that Top Gun: Maverick went through the roof at the box office for months on end, because it had no "agenda" other than...to entertain the audience. What a novel idea...!

I'm a broken record but like we've said, it's all a race to the bottom. They get to remake old properties -- and not spend $$ on development presumably because they're rehashing something already in existence -- then pretend that it's something "fresh and new!" because the lead's sex has been changed or their skin color has been altered. But in reality, it's the same old thing you've seen, done worse because it's not being made by a writer or director, but a "writer's room" committee and their grab-bag ideas, being tossed into a computer and helmed by a director who doesn't have a "vision" but rather technical expertise to just give a board of executives what they want.

And here with THE LITTLE MERMAID they've done all that. There's no reason for this movie to exist outside of Disney generating revenue to hit stock expectations, but we'll mix it up with a) racially recast lead, b) elements of other pop culture like Lin Manuel Miranda and Aquafina being introduced, and c) loads of animation and FX, so much it's hardly even "live action"!

Hollywood has run itself into the ground and has nobody but themselves to blame. They started this business model of swinging for $1 billion grossers by necessitating "worldwide appeal" in these "products" (which they are-- they're barely even "movies" in my mind), which of course mitigates things like dialogue and character development. What appeals in the US may not appeal in Japan or China and vice versa -- except for loud, endless action scenes with no dialogue.

Disney's movies have long been made "by committee" but they've set the modern standard for these behemoths and it's choking out the industry. You cannot -- CANNOT -- keep an industry alive solely by recycling old product. It will be the end of the cinema, pure and simple.

When there's nothing new to see at the movies -- people will stop going. It used to be an activity people did before the internet every week to get out of the house -- now they can do a million other things including staying home and watching something with a more direct dramatic line to their own tastes, which the big screen isn't providing. I mean what's coming this summer...another TRANSFORMERS, another INDIANA JONES, another MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, another Spider-Man/Spider Verse (yes it's well reviewed but it's another sequel in an endless series)...and what's NEW is something like Pixar's ELEMENTAL which apparently sucks.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Wed May 31, 2023 12:29 pm Disney's movies have long been made "by committee" but they've set the modern standard for these behemoths and it's choking out the industry. You cannot -- CANNOT -- keep an industry alive solely by recycling old product. It will be the end of the cinema, pure and simple.

Back in our day, movies that were throwbacks to stuff that the creators grew up on were ORIGINAL movies that evoked the style of genre films from decades past, rejuvenated with state-of-the-art F/X, good storytelling and engaging characters. This is why these movies are still being picked over with sequels and remakes to this day. What are the forty and fiftysomethings of 2053 gonna look back on fondly as their "formative" cinematic experiences? Today's kids are growing up on a steady diet of the sloppy seconds of OUR generation, and it's depressing as hell. I mean, I get sharing the movies you grew up on with your children. This is a good thing. But seeing your childhood hero limping through a new adventure as a decrepit old man (accompanied by a younger female/gay/black sidekick who does nothing but chide them for being old and for all the knuckle-dragging bad thoughts they had in their youths) is borderline elder abuse. The closest thing to a "legacy sequel" we got in the 80s was probably The Color Of Money, and I don't recall Tom Cruise spending that entire movie giving Paul Newman crap. The old franchises have been propped up long enough, it's time to let them DIE and start cultivating some new ones. But what do I know, we're getting a Hunger Games prequel only eight years after that series ended this fall.

The reality is there won't be a hungry audience for the next remake in 2053. Nobody even remembers THE JUNGLE BOOK or ALADDIN's live action remakes regardless of how much money they made just a few years ago. It's a world of diminishing returns, but it's what corporate movie making has become -- short-sighted and financially driven with no thought to the industry's well being as a whole or its future.

Movies become "IPs" they can continuously mine and exploit. The days of someone like George Lucas not making a STAR WARS movie for the 16 years between JEDI and PHANTOM MENACE -- because he didn't feel any creative need -- are over. It's not about creativity -- it's entirely and only about the money now, which is sad, because even though there weren't movies, STAR WARS kept going as a "brand" through books, video games, etc. etc. He kept it going without raping audiences and oversaturating a world with meaningless stories just to keep making money -- which is, of course, ENTIRELY what Disney has done since they bought it.

Oh no those overseas racists have doomed THE LITTLE MERMAID!

Little Mermaid’ Swimming Against Strong Tides At Overseas Box Office, Leaving Break-Even In Question

https://deadline.com/2023/05/little-mer ... 235383099/

At that level, per finance sources, off a reported $250M production cost and $140M global marketing spend, The Little Mermaid could very well break-even. However, anything in the low $400M global threshold and this fish is apt to be sinking to a loss of around $20M.

“Not a huge disappointment, but a disappointment, nonetheless,” one film finance insider told Deadline, given the blockbuster streak often associated with Disney. The studio’s summer slate remains in a precarious position after it boldly world premiered two major titles in Cannes to lackluster reviews: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (49% Rotten Tomatoes) and Pixar’s Elemental (58% Rotten, $40M projected U.S. opening).

Don't know if this reflects a national trend, but my local Alamo Drafthouse is moving The Little Mermaid to a single auditorium, the small kind with only four rows. The large auditoriums are getting the Spider-Verse movie.