Even a flatworm can turn away from pain, and Asmongold (AKA ZackRawrr) offers a video in which studio executives reveal that ordinary American moviegoers have at long last inflicted enough pain on Hollywood studios over their attempting to shove wokeness down our throats that they’ve finally, finally gotten the message.
“Studios are assembling super fan focus groups to assess various materials for franchise projects to avoid social media backlash.” Well, at least they realize they have a problem. The problem is wokeness. If you work in Hollywood and think to yourself “Hey, can we put this ‘message’ for ‘modern audiences’ in a movie that’s in a beloved franchise,” the answer should always be “No, don’t do that.” Maybe Hollywood could hire me to be a focus group of one. Pay me an executive producer salary and run ideas by me, and I can tell you how not to ruin your bottom line doing stupid things. “No, Galadriel shouldn’t be a girlboss.” “No, you shouldn’t replace Indiana Jones with a young woman who does everything better than him.” “No, you shouldn’t make Superman gay.” It’s not rocket science. Drop me a line and I’ll help save you from your woke staffers (and yourself).
“Toxic fandoms have grown so powerful that talent executives and publicists privately bemoan the issue fear of triggering another backlash.” For “toxic fandoms,” read “ordinary fans tired of your woke bullshit.”
“‘They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.’ That’s exactly right. I’m glad they understand.” We don’t watch something based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to take in the vapid natterings of a pink-haired, 20-something gender studies major who thinks she can do a better job than the greatest fantasy writer of the 20th century. Go write your own books, you shallow snowflake loser. Leave ours alone. If you don’t love and respect Tolkien, don’t adapt Tolkien. If you don’t love and respect Star Wars, don’t write Star Wars. If you don’t like and respect existing D.C. and Marvel superheroes, don’t write them. See how this works? If you don’t respect the source material, we don’t care about your “spin.” Bugger off.
“The problem is that the fan base wants you to maintain what the original story was and not change the story.” That’s because we liked the original store and hate the woke garbage you’ve replaced it with.
“‘Fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story, even in the background.’ I think this is a good thing.” Damn straight. Screw up beloved franchises and fans will stay away in droves, and tell all their friends to stay away in droves. And not only will we stay away, we’ll actively hope that every social justice warrior working so hard to ruin the source material loses their jobs.
“We’re trying to put this agenda that we want to have in, like, this show. The fans don’t like it. Now the fans are the problem? No, you’re the problem for trying to force it into the show. You either meet the audience expectations, or you die.” Damn straight. The people that told you to should replace Jedi with lesbian space witches are the problem. They’re the ones that should be fired and never allowed to destroy your shareholder value ever again. The fans were the ones telling you not to set that giant pile of money on fire, and everyone in Kathleen Kennedy’s chain of command was going “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
“‘They’ll just tell us if you do that, the fans are going to retaliate.’ This is a good decision. You know what this shows? It shows that we’re winning. You don’t get to morally obligate an audience to buy your product. That’s not how the world works. Nobody has to do that.”
He points out early Sonic the Hedgehog footage feedback as an example of a non-political example of fans telling a studio they’re screwing up, and the studio listening. “They fixed it and they made it the way that people wanted, and now they’re making Sonic 3 with Keanu Reeves as Shadow.”
“If the companies are making products and people don’t like them, then they’re not going to sell. And that’s it. That’s the bottom line. Literally nothing else matters.”
Social Justice destroys everything it touches. Disney spent billions acquiring valuable cash cow franchises and then woke employees turned them into money losing failures. The woke insisting that Lightyear needed more gay lost Disney tons of money and goodwill. The staffers who kept wokeness out of Inside Out 2 made Disney a billion dollars. That and Deadpool and Wolverine proved that fans will still flock to theaters if you just stop trying to shove “The Message” down their throats and simply give them what they want.
Or you can keep trying wokeness and continue to enjoy the massive layoffs happening all across Hollywood.
Your choice.
It’s the woke that are toxic. It’s the fans that are trying to keep them from setting billions of dollars in shareholder value on fire.
I think y’all are a bit optimistic. To the Woke Hollywood Left, Wokeness is literally a religious tenet outweighing mere profit. They expect profit mind you, but when it does not come they consider the lack to be their penance for not being Woke enough. Until there are literal bankruptcies and empty executive suites, they will keep trying as an act of faith.
The thing that you have to wrap your head around is that these people that are doing these things in Hollywood are not living in even a variant of the real world; they’re living in their own heads.
I’ve been reading about the Fall of Singapore, of late: There are a bunch of rather unfortunate parallels to be seen with regards to a lot of the behaviors we’re seeing on the leftward side of things, these days. They’re morally certain that the Japanese are little near-sighted wogs with glasses on, and not “real fighting men”. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, the British Imperials in charge of things at Singapore and elsewhere decided that they needn’t send good officers and first-line equipment to the Far East; it could all be held with second-rate everything. Oh, and the Japanese would conform to expectation, and line up at sea outside the harbor for the shore defenses to batter into the briny deep…
As it turned out, the Japanese landed up-country in Malaysia and took all those lovely rubber plantation roads down to the rear behind Singapore’s defenses, and then knocked out all those second-rate fighters and ships, along with their second-rate pilots and ship commanders. Reality ensued.
Today’s left is full of people like the ones in the British hierarchy that created the conditions for Singapore to fall; they lived in their own heads, believed their own bullshit, and refused to allow reality to intrude. When it did, they died in job lots.
It’s not so much the positions they hold, but the error they won’t let go of. They’ve been told and taught that everything of the left is winning, that history has ended. The reality is that history hasn’t stopped, and that their BS isn’t working. Perhaps their supposed enemy’s BS isn’t working either, but that’s immaterial in the face of actual reality. Nobody is doing a good job in our government or our elite; they’re setting themselves up for a revolution because nobody is buying what they’re selling, these days. You lose your market? You lose your income, followed shortly thereafter by your power, because your audience and your money was what sustained you.
It’s already started. Where it ends? No idea; we’re watching the same sequence of events as when the Communists fell in the former Soviet Union; the true believers are all incompetent, demonstrate that fact on the daily, and everyone else has lost their willing suspension of disbelief.
They can’t even hear themselves, when Hillary says what she said the other day about “needing control”. They hear that, they think “She’s right…”, and everyone else hears the same words, then thinks “Those f*ckers are trying for total control… Best dust off the cartridge box…”
The root problem here is that people have been afraid to call the so-called “woke” on their insanity. For fear, of course, that the insane will shout them down.
This weakness will be what destroys far more than what the nutters manage. You acquiesce to the madness, you may as well be insane yourself. If you allow them to make the decisions for everyone because you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings? What earthly good are you?
This is why I’ve gradually lost my faith in the so-called “conservative” demographic in this country. They’re a bunch of pussies, mostly. Cowards, who will go along with anything, just because they don’t want anyone saying mean things about them. We’ve watched every single major fight with the leftoid morons be lost, just because the Republicans want to have their cake and eat it, retaining the adulation of the equally-mad press while fighting a losing battle against the rising tide of fiscal and social policy insanity.
Frankly, I’m about f*cking tired of it. The last fake-ass Republican came around to my door a few election cycles ago, I told him what I thought of him and his fellow-travelling carpet-bagging scum.
The day is going to come when the inherent contradictions in public life here in these formerly united states will become utterly obvious and equally utterly irreconcilable. When that happens, all of these political scumbags are going to rue their actions these last few generations, and maybe we’ll begin fixing things by decorating the capitals of our states and nation with some really nice dangling politicians and bureaucrats.
After fair trials, of course. I don’t doubt but that there are a few honest ones out there, but judging from what we’ve seen lately, they’re few and far between. Hanging all of them as traitors wouldn’t result in a huge number of “miscarriages of justice”, and might serve as a cautionary tale to future generations about losing sight of what’s right, when you’re entrusted with public office.
In the film “Network” the CEO chose his political message over the populist message of Howard Beale causing the Network to bleed money and lose audience share. The end result was an on air murder of the messenger. Literally killing the messenger because of the message he was delivering.
I think things are trending in the right direction, but until Kathleen Kennedy is completely gone from Lucasfilm, you can count on her directives to “Put a chick in in it!”, and “Make it gay and lame!”, will continue.
The sensational bombing of Joker 2 Jail Rape Boogaloo is another indication that Hollywood just isn’t getting it.
They should be consulting with Chris Gore and Alan Ng at FilmThreat.com
On Kirk’s point, yes, people were afraid, and rightfully so – inside the Hollywood production bubble. Stories abound of people speaking up and getting fired. One example: The set of Star Trek Discovery had production crew who had worked on Trek properties previously, and in the first season they respectfully brought up things in th scripts that were in direct contradiction of what Trek had established as the way things work – and they were fired for being “troublemakers”. There are lots of stories along these lines across Hollywood.
But when the “troublemakers” were completely representative fans who now have a venue to express themselves, it’s a bit harder to go to HR and have them fired for speaking up.
If the Old Ways are to be discarded in pursuit of the Worker’s Paradise, Social Justice is as good a means as any.
Shakespeare, Milton and Tolkien have created literary works of enduring value, primarily because they highlight the role sin and redemption play in man’s destiny.
In Paradise Lost, the cause of man’s earthly woes is sin, not poverty. Poverty is a consequence of sin. If sin were to be abolished, poverty would likewise vanish. Thus, the Lord admonishes his disciples by stating flatly, “The poor you have with you always.”
This is an affront to those who believe in the perfectibility of man, who put the blame for his shortcomings on his social/political/economic environment. Thus, for man to regain Paradise, ALL MUST CHANGE, man and society alike.
Speaking for myself, I much prefer the prospect of sipping an old Scotch whisky in front of a roaring ancient hearth while enjoying the company of an old book and the companionship of a good dog.
The world is worth saving but it’s redemption will not come through political intrigues.
What we’re seeing here is the aftermath of the “Old Ways” being discarded, and the “New Path Forward” discrediting itself.
Raw fact is, the theorists ideas about humanity’s nature being effectively changeable ignored the fact that it’s really, truly not all that mutable.
The Marxists and Communists all raved about creating the “New Soviet Man”, but discovered to their immense dismay that the “Old Russian Man”, alcoholic and corrupt as he was…? That was actually the default state, and you’re not getting significant social change out of that base without either entirely re-engineering the biology or using an actual effective incentive mechanism.
The idea here is that all these “new wise men” that come up with all the “New” are smarter and wiser than all that went before them, the primitive sorts who worked out society based on literal hundreds of thousands of years of ugly practical experience. What remains, and what made the modern world possible? That which worked.
And, these soi-disant geniuses think they can wave their hands and re-invent something better? All by themselves, ignoring the things we had to learn the hard way, coming up from the Neolithic?
The arrogance is mind-boggling. Little girls like to play with dolls, acting out “family”, while little boys like to run around making “pew-pew” noises, aping their elder male examples who defend the family and go out to bring home the meat… These are hard-wired cultural reflexes, because anything that isn’t “like that” doesn’t work for long-term survival.
Do note the fertility rates in our brave, new “diverse” world, and how many young people of both sexes are utterly ‘effing miserable trying to be that which they are not.
Experiment’s been run; the “New” don’t work. Pay attention, folks; the Gods of the Copybook Headings are all in the wings, warming up.
Hollywood writ large (Movies, TV, whatever) started treating fans the way French farmers treat geese destined to produce foie gras. They stuck a funnel into the collective mouth of fandome and tried to force down a load of unwanted stuff.
Unluckily for them, fans are not captives the way geese are. They tried saying, “No, thank you. I don’t want any of that, let alone enough to engorge me.” And that didn’t work.
So now they’re saying, “I’m taking my money and spending it elsewhere. Good luck with what’s left of your LGBTQMIAPTSD audience.
I’m still waiting for someone to make gigantic piles of money turning the original universe Star Wars books into movies. There are, by some accounts, 68 “Legend” books. I read many of them. The story lines involving the Imperial Remnant and those involving the Yuuzhan Vong are well written and compelling. Luke’s eventual marriage to Maris Jade, who was previously the Emperor’s assassin (spoiler alert) and their kids, etc. Much more creative and better written than the garbage put out by Disney. Someone will have to buy the franchise from Disney first though, and then declare the Disney material anathema.
Kirk is onto something with his allusion to the millennia of accumulated knowledge and experience bound up in culture: biology is an incredibly powerful force, driven by the imperatives of survival and reproduction. In short, the gay and trans can exist only at the margins, operating parasitically on the main body of the culture. Once a parasite becomes large/powerful enough, the host dies or develops defenses to become less hospitable.
Sometimes, as with sickle cell disease (a mutation developed to combat malaria, if I remember correctly), the defenses themselves exact a price. But the revolt against woke entertainment and analogous revolt against trans ideology in the western world (the increasing hostility to puberty blockers and surgery to sterilize minors) are cultural defense mechanisms in action.
Our responsibility, as custodians of the culture we inherited, is to reinforce those defenses to preserve and strengthen our humanity.
Franchises, sequels, prequels…no wonder Hollywood is known as ‘the place where originality goes to die’.
I think y’all are a bit optimistic. To the Woke Hollywood Left, Wokeness is literally a religious tenet outweighing mere profit. They expect profit mind you, but when it does not come they consider the lack to be their penance for not being Woke enough. Until there are literal bankruptcies and empty executive suites, they will keep trying as an act of faith.
I’m with Subotai, here…
The thing that you have to wrap your head around is that these people that are doing these things in Hollywood are not living in even a variant of the real world; they’re living in their own heads.
I’ve been reading about the Fall of Singapore, of late: There are a bunch of rather unfortunate parallels to be seen with regards to a lot of the behaviors we’re seeing on the leftward side of things, these days. They’re morally certain that the Japanese are little near-sighted wogs with glasses on, and not “real fighting men”. Despite copious evidence to the contrary, the British Imperials in charge of things at Singapore and elsewhere decided that they needn’t send good officers and first-line equipment to the Far East; it could all be held with second-rate everything. Oh, and the Japanese would conform to expectation, and line up at sea outside the harbor for the shore defenses to batter into the briny deep…
As it turned out, the Japanese landed up-country in Malaysia and took all those lovely rubber plantation roads down to the rear behind Singapore’s defenses, and then knocked out all those second-rate fighters and ships, along with their second-rate pilots and ship commanders. Reality ensued.
Today’s left is full of people like the ones in the British hierarchy that created the conditions for Singapore to fall; they lived in their own heads, believed their own bullshit, and refused to allow reality to intrude. When it did, they died in job lots.
It’s not so much the positions they hold, but the error they won’t let go of. They’ve been told and taught that everything of the left is winning, that history has ended. The reality is that history hasn’t stopped, and that their BS isn’t working. Perhaps their supposed enemy’s BS isn’t working either, but that’s immaterial in the face of actual reality. Nobody is doing a good job in our government or our elite; they’re setting themselves up for a revolution because nobody is buying what they’re selling, these days. You lose your market? You lose your income, followed shortly thereafter by your power, because your audience and your money was what sustained you.
It’s already started. Where it ends? No idea; we’re watching the same sequence of events as when the Communists fell in the former Soviet Union; the true believers are all incompetent, demonstrate that fact on the daily, and everyone else has lost their willing suspension of disbelief.
They can’t even hear themselves, when Hillary says what she said the other day about “needing control”. They hear that, they think “She’s right…”, and everyone else hears the same words, then thinks “Those f*ckers are trying for total control… Best dust off the cartridge box…”
This is one your best columns.
The root problem here is that people have been afraid to call the so-called “woke” on their insanity. For fear, of course, that the insane will shout them down.
This weakness will be what destroys far more than what the nutters manage. You acquiesce to the madness, you may as well be insane yourself. If you allow them to make the decisions for everyone because you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings? What earthly good are you?
This is why I’ve gradually lost my faith in the so-called “conservative” demographic in this country. They’re a bunch of pussies, mostly. Cowards, who will go along with anything, just because they don’t want anyone saying mean things about them. We’ve watched every single major fight with the leftoid morons be lost, just because the Republicans want to have their cake and eat it, retaining the adulation of the equally-mad press while fighting a losing battle against the rising tide of fiscal and social policy insanity.
Frankly, I’m about f*cking tired of it. The last fake-ass Republican came around to my door a few election cycles ago, I told him what I thought of him and his fellow-travelling carpet-bagging scum.
The day is going to come when the inherent contradictions in public life here in these formerly united states will become utterly obvious and equally utterly irreconcilable. When that happens, all of these political scumbags are going to rue their actions these last few generations, and maybe we’ll begin fixing things by decorating the capitals of our states and nation with some really nice dangling politicians and bureaucrats.
After fair trials, of course. I don’t doubt but that there are a few honest ones out there, but judging from what we’ve seen lately, they’re few and far between. Hanging all of them as traitors wouldn’t result in a huge number of “miscarriages of justice”, and might serve as a cautionary tale to future generations about losing sight of what’s right, when you’re entrusted with public office.
In the film “Network” the CEO chose his political message over the populist message of Howard Beale causing the Network to bleed money and lose audience share. The end result was an on air murder of the messenger. Literally killing the messenger because of the message he was delivering.
I think things are trending in the right direction, but until Kathleen Kennedy is completely gone from Lucasfilm, you can count on her directives to “Put a chick in in it!”, and “Make it gay and lame!”, will continue.
The sensational bombing of Joker 2 Jail Rape Boogaloo is another indication that Hollywood just isn’t getting it.
They should be consulting with Chris Gore and Alan Ng at FilmThreat.com
On Kirk’s point, yes, people were afraid, and rightfully so – inside the Hollywood production bubble. Stories abound of people speaking up and getting fired. One example: The set of Star Trek Discovery had production crew who had worked on Trek properties previously, and in the first season they respectfully brought up things in th scripts that were in direct contradiction of what Trek had established as the way things work – and they were fired for being “troublemakers”. There are lots of stories along these lines across Hollywood.
But when the “troublemakers” were completely representative fans who now have a venue to express themselves, it’s a bit harder to go to HR and have them fired for speaking up.
“Social Justice destroys everything it touches.”
If the Old Ways are to be discarded in pursuit of the Worker’s Paradise, Social Justice is as good a means as any.
Shakespeare, Milton and Tolkien have created literary works of enduring value, primarily because they highlight the role sin and redemption play in man’s destiny.
In Paradise Lost, the cause of man’s earthly woes is sin, not poverty. Poverty is a consequence of sin. If sin were to be abolished, poverty would likewise vanish. Thus, the Lord admonishes his disciples by stating flatly, “The poor you have with you always.”
This is an affront to those who believe in the perfectibility of man, who put the blame for his shortcomings on his social/political/economic environment. Thus, for man to regain Paradise, ALL MUST CHANGE, man and society alike.
Speaking for myself, I much prefer the prospect of sipping an old Scotch whisky in front of a roaring ancient hearth while enjoying the company of an old book and the companionship of a good dog.
The world is worth saving but it’s redemption will not come through political intrigues.
“If you got a message, send it by Western Union,” said Sam Goldwyn (probably).
What we’re seeing here is the aftermath of the “Old Ways” being discarded, and the “New Path Forward” discrediting itself.
Raw fact is, the theorists ideas about humanity’s nature being effectively changeable ignored the fact that it’s really, truly not all that mutable.
The Marxists and Communists all raved about creating the “New Soviet Man”, but discovered to their immense dismay that the “Old Russian Man”, alcoholic and corrupt as he was…? That was actually the default state, and you’re not getting significant social change out of that base without either entirely re-engineering the biology or using an actual effective incentive mechanism.
The idea here is that all these “new wise men” that come up with all the “New” are smarter and wiser than all that went before them, the primitive sorts who worked out society based on literal hundreds of thousands of years of ugly practical experience. What remains, and what made the modern world possible? That which worked.
And, these soi-disant geniuses think they can wave their hands and re-invent something better? All by themselves, ignoring the things we had to learn the hard way, coming up from the Neolithic?
The arrogance is mind-boggling. Little girls like to play with dolls, acting out “family”, while little boys like to run around making “pew-pew” noises, aping their elder male examples who defend the family and go out to bring home the meat… These are hard-wired cultural reflexes, because anything that isn’t “like that” doesn’t work for long-term survival.
Do note the fertility rates in our brave, new “diverse” world, and how many young people of both sexes are utterly ‘effing miserable trying to be that which they are not.
Experiment’s been run; the “New” don’t work. Pay attention, folks; the Gods of the Copybook Headings are all in the wings, warming up.
[…] HOLLYWOOD: Wokeness Or Profit. Choose One. “Social Justice destroys everything it touches. Disney spent billions acquiring valuable cash […]
Hollywood writ large (Movies, TV, whatever) started treating fans the way French farmers treat geese destined to produce foie gras. They stuck a funnel into the collective mouth of fandome and tried to force down a load of unwanted stuff.
Unluckily for them, fans are not captives the way geese are. They tried saying, “No, thank you. I don’t want any of that, let alone enough to engorge me.” And that didn’t work.
So now they’re saying, “I’m taking my money and spending it elsewhere. Good luck with what’s left of your LGBTQMIAPTSD audience.
I’m still waiting for someone to make gigantic piles of money turning the original universe Star Wars books into movies. There are, by some accounts, 68 “Legend” books. I read many of them. The story lines involving the Imperial Remnant and those involving the Yuuzhan Vong are well written and compelling. Luke’s eventual marriage to Maris Jade, who was previously the Emperor’s assassin (spoiler alert) and their kids, etc. Much more creative and better written than the garbage put out by Disney. Someone will have to buy the franchise from Disney first though, and then declare the Disney material anathema.
Kirk is onto something with his allusion to the millennia of accumulated knowledge and experience bound up in culture: biology is an incredibly powerful force, driven by the imperatives of survival and reproduction. In short, the gay and trans can exist only at the margins, operating parasitically on the main body of the culture. Once a parasite becomes large/powerful enough, the host dies or develops defenses to become less hospitable.
Sometimes, as with sickle cell disease (a mutation developed to combat malaria, if I remember correctly), the defenses themselves exact a price. But the revolt against woke entertainment and analogous revolt against trans ideology in the western world (the increasing hostility to puberty blockers and surgery to sterilize minors) are cultural defense mechanisms in action.
Our responsibility, as custodians of the culture we inherited, is to reinforce those defenses to preserve and strengthen our humanity.
For “toxic fandoms,” read “ordinary fans tired of your woke bullshit.”
I’ve got a heuristic, but it’s damn close to a rule:
Anyone who says toxic fandom” non-ironically needs to be fired.
That “fandom” is 99% of your customer base. The people who are “toxic” are “anyone who pisses them off”.
If you don’t grasp that, you need to be fired, and replaced by someone who does.
And if that means that 90% of new college graduates can’t get jobs, that’s their problem, not ours