Marvel Studios, which is owned by the modern-day Evil Empire known as Disney, is allegedly putting its television division through a major restructuring following one failure after another on Disney+, the company’s streaming platform, coupled with the new deal cut with the Writers Guild of America following the lengthy strike that lasted the entire summer.
Despite the overall success of Marvel films during the course of the previous decade, the material that started to be produced following “Avengers: Endgame” failed to live up to the epic scale of storytelling audiences had come to expect from the brand, with each successive television show and film hemorrhaging viewers.
The watershed moment seems to be when Disney and Marvel released the She-Hulk series, heavy on woke feminism and extremely light on likable characters and an interesting story hook. Ever since then, every series that has graced the streaming service has been a critical failure, going largely unwatched by audiences that previously gobbled up every single entry the studio put out.
American viewers are fairly sick and tired of seeing studios like Disney and Marvel producing content based mostly on ideology, rather than focusing on stories that promote healthy values and hiring actors, writers, and producers who are actually the best individuals suited for the job and not diversity hires.
According to a report from “Bounding Into Comics,” Script Doctor, a screenwriter, explained how the new deal from the WGA would eliminate diversity hires during an interview conducted with the “Midnight’s Edge in the Morning” program.
“So basically what we are seeing here from the youngins is there’s going to be less, possibly less opportunities for them especially in something like the pre-greenlit or mini rooms. And that comes down to two factors that I can think of right now,” he explained during the show.
“The first one is that the current MBA clearly defines that a showrunner has to be a union writer,” he stated. “So it can’t be an internal executive producer like a Kevin Feige. It also gives them a bit more power in to who they select for the writing positions in the minimum staffing mini rooms and it also says that whoever they select has to be approved by the company or the showrunner has to argue for them to be involved.”
“Now, with regards to those rooms, you have showrunners that would only– a real showrunner, a good showrunner is only going to hire writers that they are going to get value out of in their room. Which means that if you are diversity hire and that’s all you’ve got going on you are of no value to a showrunner which means you are not going to get your ‘guaranteed hire’ over there. And I think that’s a good thing,” Script Doctor added during his appearance on the show.
Further explaining his second point, Script Doctor commented, “The other aspect with regards to the contract pertaining to mini rooms is that the compelled hiring has now increased– the compelled hiring and the extended timeframe for which they have to work on the show, which is like the minimum of 10 weeks.”
“That essentially turns the mini room into something more expensive than the traditional model of developing a pilot, producing the pilot to be screened before an audience test to see whether or not it’s actually going to be good, and then giving it the greenlight to go into an actual series order. The mini room basically tries to force a hit show within a six episode, or eight episode, or ten episode structure, get it all written before any of it is filmed, and then push it out there,” the entertainment expert said.The Script Doctor also stated that when those kind of orders exist and programs and studios place showrunners in charge of a new series who have the authority to pick which writers they want to work with, you give them a basis for creating arguments for why they need a specific person to write the story or character from a certain perspective for the sake of the show and you end up excluding excellent writers who might not see things the same way you do.
Something that is going to go a long, long way toward reducing the amount of garbage content pumped out by Marvel and Disney is their total discarding of the pre-greenlit model. This is when studios give a whole series approval and produce it in full without actually making a pilot episode and testing it with audiences to see if anyone even wants to watch the project.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kitt said, “Showrunners will write pilots and show bibles. The days of Marvel shooting an entire series, from ‘She-Hulk’ to ‘Secret Invasion,’ then looking at what’s working and what’s not, are done.”
The studio has also announced plans to hire experienced television executives — you know, people who actually know what the heck they are doing — to run their shows instead of just mix and matching with individuals from the film side of things.
The ultimate fix to this whole situation is really simple. Stop focusing on creating content that promotes woke propaganda. That’s it. I’m not saying creators should not include themes and principles they believe in as part of the art they make. Weave it into the subtext rather than making it the focus of the project at the expensive of storytelling.
That’s it.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member