LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
11mo ago
Just noting, this line:
hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president
was referring to the foreign government looking to donate to the clinton campaign or maybe clinton foundation, not the FBI. Meanwhile in durham's reporting, apparently the FBI were intentionally 'tippy-toeing' based on the chance clinton would be the next president. So it's not quite as strong as you're describing. But an interesting takeaway from the Durham report regardless.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Oh yeah I think it's certainly going to end up being considered a massive flop, likely losing them upwards of a hundred million+. I put those production budget figures in for comparison's sake between the various movies, but making $450M on a $250M production budget would be a catastrophic loss, not a profit. Because there's also a huge marketing budget on top of that, and the box office revenue gets cut down by ~50% for the studio's share (the theaters get the other half).
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Here was the list I was using, pulling the comparable big-budget entries (although missed Alice in Wonderland from 2010 which I guess actually was the success that caused them to lean into this approach).
Mulan is a weird one that just can't be compared box-office-wise, because it was scheduled for March 2020 and went through a number of postponements until the theatrical release was simply scrapped and it was dumped on streaming.
The point is that for many people who haven't been paying as much attention, one might think that TLM is comparable to Cowboy Bebop or Dragonball and maybe people just don't like these. But we're a decade into this being one major pillar of disney's huge blockbuster release strategy (right up there with marvel & star wars) which had led to their box office domination high-point by 2019. The whole 'Walt Disney Pictures' division basically transformed into just making these, and up until the pandemic I don't think it could be described as anything other than an insane success. So now if it's starting to falter like star wars, marvel, pixar, and walt disney animation all are, that's definitely a possible culture-war hot spot.
Disney’s live-action division, which once struggled through an identity crisis and pricey flops like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, has found its sweet spot. The musical casts a light on an unsung part of the Disney moviemaking machine that has learned to lean in heavily on the live-action adaptations of beloved Disney-branded animated films. The label, which had two Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels in the billion-dollar club, notched its third with the Tim Burton-directed Johnny Depp-starrer Alice In Wonderland. It now seems a matter of time before Beauty And The Beast becomes its fourth. While a sequel to Alice failed — it was made even when Burton said no — The Jungle Book nearly cracked the billion-dollar mark with $966 million in global ticket sales.
Beauty And The Beast is just the latest example of a philosophical change within Disney’s most overshadowed silo. The baseball equivalent of Bailey’s mission statement is basically, be disciplined enough not to swing at bad pitches outside the strike zone. That wheelhouse has increasingly become about recapturing the animation library magic with live-action films, ideally supplying one or more of the three tentpole-sized annual films the division generates (supplemented by one or two films whose under $100 million budgets are far lower than the big pictures carry).
...
In a conversation Monday, Bailey credited the division’s escalating success rate to the silo system instituted by Disney chairman Bob Iger and managed by Alan Horn, the former longtime Warner Bros chief who stabilized a static operation and infused his own moral sensibilities on the slate. It is a program where each division stays in its own lane and isn’t pressured to make more movies than its marketing machine can handle, while maintaining quality controls. This differs from some studios that seem to be bent on filling a high number of films on a slate. Disney’s annual collective output usually doesn’t exceed a dozen. But eight of those Disney films are global blockbusters that suck all the oxygen out of the box office when they are released.
The collective results have turned Disney into the most consistently dominant studio Hollywood has seen in the modern era, to the point where it now dictates the release calendar, at least the most desirable summer and holiday corridors. Date a Pixar, Marvel superhero, Star Wars sequel/spinoff, Disney Animation or live-action animated film remake, and it is likely that other studios will then have to work around it.
Personally I think the only one of any of these I've seen is the Jungle Book, just because it was that strange situation where two different studios put out new jungle book adaptations at the same time.
Well this was the next in the line of huge-budget remakes of their mega classics on the level of these, which had actually been insanely successful for disney (including Aladdin's 1 billion which I'm surprised you describe as not working):
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(2014) Maleficent - $750M, budget $180M
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(2016) The Jungle Book - $970M, budget $175M
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(2017) Beauty and the Beast - $1.26B, budget $160M
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(2019) Dumbo - $350M, budget $170M
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(2019) Aladdin - $1.05B, budget $183M
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(2019) The Lion King - $1.66B, budget $260M
- (2023) The Little Mermaid - ~$400-550M (expected end result), budget $250M
There are also some smaller ones, and a maleficent sequel, but The Little Mermaid was expected to be on the Aladdin/Lion King/BatB level.
So it was definitely expected to be doing far better, and not at all the case that 'nobody wants' these. One argument is that peoples' appetite for these remakes has finally dried up, and that this movie's box office is paying for the lion king's sins of being weird looking. And that this was the first of these without major star power. But the negative/international feedback does seem to heavily center on the race-swap ('she doesn't look like ariel from my childhood') and on the creepy realistic animal friends.
At least as of about 10 years ago, the classic example (by commons/piracy advocates) of rights-holders starting to target propaganda to children was the MPAA working with the LA Boy Scouts to make an anti-piracy merit badge, the "Respect Copyrights Activity Patch" around 2005/2006.
I haven't really followed the arguments in some time, but definitely noticed the same shift in younger normies on reddit over the years. It's hard to imagine that dorky propaganda was so effective, but I'd guess it makes a difference what you're hearing from a young age.
edit: And almost surely the huge victory was successfully getting people to lump copyright/patent/trademark law together under the name "Intellectual Property" since the nineties, which completely does change how you think of these. Thinking of 'property' gives people an intuition about stealing, whereas 'temporary government-granted monopoly publishing rights' doesn't. Seems like when broken down, most people strongly favor trademarks, strongly disfavor patents, and have mixed feelings about copyright.
As an aside, having multiple of my first 10 comments on this site related to Richard Stallman...well that was unexpected.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Not an apocalypse for anybody with a skill set that can exist completely independent of the internet
Basically claiming that anyone who relies on the Internet is gonna get fukt, and they should cry about it.
Just pointing out, your interpretation there doesn't quite check out logically. It would only be a motte/bailey when mischaracterized like that.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Yep that one, plus the Soulja Boy one with the great video id: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pube5Aynsls . He's surprisingly nimble on his feet.
Bonus is the 2008 /r/programming post of it, which has the bizarre comment at the bottom (from 6 months ago somehow): "This post was made on the day i was born LMFAO"
LateMechanic
1yr ago
I couldn't avoid searching 'richard stallman dancing' after reading that, and wasn't disappointed.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Nah it really must be more ideological, or something else like that. To the extent any journalist or economist was speculating that the Fed wants to avoid paying interest on excess reserves, they would be flatly incorrect. Central bank reserves are a closed system, so to the extent that a narrow bank is attracting them, that's just a flow from other banks where they were beforehand. The central bank is paying the same interest out either way. Other non-depository institutions (who aren't eligible for IOR) using reverse-repos to get (nearly) the base interest rate is just a workaround to help smooth out the system (ineligible because of congressional rules; the central bank would almost certainly prefer to pay it out in as simple a fashion as possible).
And the central bank is not trying to avoid paying out interest -- it's a policy choice in the first place to pay IOR (that's the whole rate maintenance regime now: instead of using open-market-operations to maintain a positive interest rate, they simply flood the system with excess reserves and pay interest on them directly, which is way simpler). It sounds like the Fed had been narrowing the gap between ceiling and floor rates anyway, because they never were using that lower rate to try to really save money or whatever.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
Yeah that's exactly it I think. The OP redditor's main mistake was being under the impression that FwB is a normal thing in modern dating, and that it's the casual next-step after flirty friendship (before taking the much bigger step of committing to a real monogamous relationship). There's almost no way this guy internalized that the mythical social media 'FwB' status was a prize final destination that he was just entitled to waltz right into.
So that's why summing it up as the guy 'essentially' asking "hey, wanna fuck?" / "Hey, wanna be my fuck buddy?" like many are doing here is a borderline strawman. With really minimal charity, it looks like confusion about the modern landscape way more than crassness. He likely already knew he was in trouble when she said "what's that?" and found himself trying to explain it.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
The nights were pregnant with pre-millennium tension; we ran riot because we had been promised a new century to become adults in, because we were sold on a vision of rebirth through numerology, and we knew what came next would be better than everything that had come before. It turned out that that was untrue, and we never got over it.
Go look around at the way the world looked in 2002. Everything looked like shit. The fashion was worse. The music was worse. The country was worse.
A lot of people are mentioning 9/11 as the main material event that must have been what changed the overall feel and marks the end of the broad 90s. But I think there's something to what Freddie says here about goofy numerology putting something in the air that a lot of people felt. Even if we know rationally that it's arbitrary, it feels interesting psychologically being the last decade of the millennium, about to tick over to triple-zeroes and something new, Y2K. When that passed without incident (as it was bound to), some magic feeling was lost, and we just continued on with boy bands, survivor / american idol reality tv, frosted-tips, whatever.
I think the last faint echo of something like this mass psychology was in the run up to 2012, with the mayan calendar ending doomsday stuff, on the heels of the financial crisis and great recession, occupy wallstreet, the last of peak-oil doomerism before fracking, etc. People could indulge in some more dark fantasies of living in interesting end-times that are about to transition to something different, until january 2013 when it was time to go back to mundane reality.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?
One other nudge is that basically every year, 5% more males are born than females, and by early twenties, there are still ~4% more 'excess males' (funny word choice in that PDF, with different contexts). By age 40 it's down to more like 2% more men still alive than women.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
And on the other side, there's all sorts of evidence of other countries & currencies which also set 0% interest rates, that didn't experience any of the same kind of supposed wealth effects / asset bubble frenzy. 'Cheap money' is an attractive concept for building narrative explanations, but there just isn't such a slam dunk case for interest rate policy impact.
LateMechanic
1yr ago
So the promiscuous woman is scorned, not primarily by men, but by other women.
This always made sense to me and seemed to match what I encountered and saw in the world. That is, until gen-z men started to become visible to me on the internet about 5 years ago, who seemed to be the ones lashing out at women with shaming language about 'thots' and 'thirst-traps' (any women publicly using their good looks on youtube/twitch/etc). By my priors, I would have expected men to be quite fine with women dominating instagram/streaming/asmr/whatever, while some women would be trying to enforce against the defectors with various levels of slut-shaming. And by my reading, the young men aren't simply playing catch-up with new norms and trying to signal their new virtues -- it's more like: "damn you for tempting me to donate my hard earned money!" Am I misreading this as a phenomenon?
Just noting, something in the last day or so broke that collapse/uncollapse functionality on this waterfox classic browser (both the +/- signs and the vertical bars)
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