Gosh, it seems like only this morning that a PJ Media writer was offering some disparaging words about the Walt Disney Company.
Wait, I'm writing this on Tuesday evening, so it was only this morning that my friend Stephen Green had this to say about some of Disney's creative accounting.
Disney's eager embrace of wokeness and the subsequent travails that resulted from that have been well chronicled here. I haven't written anything about them because my colleagues have been doing such stellar work. Something came across the Kruiser Desk this afternoon that I read twice to make sure that I wasn't jumping to conclusions. When I realized that I wasn't, I knew I had to wring a column out of the story.
But before I get to that, let's go back and check out another VodkaPundit column, this one from last November:
As you're probably already aware, "The Marvels" just enjoyed the worst-ever opening for a Disney Marvel movie, crashing and burning on release. Disney has tried to cover up its mess as best it can, but there's no hiding the stink of yet another box office failure. Overall, Disney is estimated to have lost nearly ONE BILLION DOLLARS on four flops this year — and that's before "The Marvels" and its $300-plus-million budget.
As a result, and thank goodness for small mercies, we'll only get one new Marvel movie next year. The Hollywood Reporter's sources told the paper this week that Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) chief Kevin Feige and his team need "time to take stock of their theatrical tentpoles" and are temporarily shelving two of next year's three MCU releases.
Stephen's headline for that one said that Disney was "Finally Doing the Right Thing...Almost."
We can add extra helpings of "almost" to that now.
Marvel Studios co-president Louis D'Esposito admitted in a recent interview that some lessons had been learned from the brutal MCU box office performances of 2023. Either D'Esposito is being coy, or he still doesn't get it.
Despite these setbacks, D’Esposito is committed to seeing the glass half full. He told the publication that “if we just stayed on top, that would have been the worst thing that could have happened to us. We took a little hit, we’re coming back strong.”
“Maybe when you do too much, you dilute yourself a little bit,” D’Esposito added. “We’re not going to do that anymore. We learned our lesson. Maybe two to three films a year and one or two shows, as opposed to doing four films and four shows.”
D'Esposito went full lipstick on a pig by saying that they "took a little hit." As Mr. Green noted in his November column, it was a straight-up financial bloodbath.
Yes, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. That's useless, however, if you're not honest about what the problem is. If an alcoholic traces all of his problems to the office dress code, he's in for a world of cirrhosis.
Both Feige and D'Esposito seem to think that the financial shellacking that the MCU took last year was merely a by-product of being over extended and thusly having a diluted product.
SWING...and a miss.
Recent MCU movies and television shows may very well have suffered from the creative brain trust being spread way too thin. The real problem was that the brain trust and its executive overlords stopped reading the room and and went all-in on the kind of woke insanity that older corporate execs pretend to be on board with just to avoid having the twenty-somethings on Twitter/X say something mean about them.
Marvel content has been absolutely polluted with beat-the-fans-over-the-head woke messaging. It's as if all of the superheroes were renamed "Social Justice Warrior" and their only superpower was being so annoying that they almost destroyed the franchise. Watch 15 minutes of "She-Hulk" on Disney+ and you'll think that you accidentally enrolled in an online Women's Studies class.
We don't write these stories because we hate Disney — quite the opposite. My colleagues and I have been Disney and Marvel fans since we were kids. I'm not the youngest guy around and I grew up reading Marvel comics. We want Disney to get its you-know-what together.
As the culture wars rage on, many conservative writers point out that woke entertainment immediately alienates half of a potential audience. When it comes to the MCU, I would posit that it's well more than half. I mentioned reading the room earlier. I don't think you're going to find a lot of Iron Man or Avengers fans at the "Free Palestine" encampments.
If Feige and D'Esposito don't figure that out, simply slowing the flow of new MCU releases isn't going to be the cure for the franchise's financial ills.
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