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Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?
Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.
And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.
But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:
The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.
I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.
And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?
The depth of the spiritual rot is great enough to be noticed even by its proponents, but that doesn't mean it doesn't just get worse.
The underlying reasons for it are still there, the same talentless politicos are now entrenched in the production hierarchy and they're not giving up their seat.
There is some reason to be optimistic since the financial situation is now such that companies are habitually giving up on DEI and other nonsense aimed at courting activist investment.
I still think the most likely scenario is for some young upstart to poke at the whole rotten carcass of entertainment and collapse it with seemingly no effort. If young George Lucas was around today and managed to get some serious funding, he'd make bank. There's so much money on the table that institutions can't bring themselves to pick up.
What I'm seeing is that it started with (a) die-hard fans who would go see the latest "thing in franchise" no matter what and (b) progressives who would go see it to "own the chuds," and then give it critical acclaim and say that anyone who criticized it was just racist/sexist. But over time the right-wing chuds just stopped even bothering to complain, and the die-hard fans stopped watching. So there wasn't much for the progressive fans to do. It's not fun to watch a crappy movie and pretend you like it if you've got no righteous cause to fuel it.
Also kind of weird that Disney single-handedly controls so much IP. That should be a point of vulnerability. These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.
There are like 5 major countries that make interesting new IPs, The USA, Great Britain (which is so heavily tied with the US they may as well be one "block"), Japan South Korea and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media_franchises Though really it's mostly Japan and The USA with South korea and china playing second fiddle.
Japan is being hard carried by video games anyway, if we limit ourselves to just television https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/?ref_=nv_tvv_250&sort=num_votes%2Cdesc it's almost 90% american/british made stuff. There are a few japanese cartoons in there and a small handful of korean dramas but it's predominantly american made stuff.
How was this list generated? Anime is HUGE for young people but its very, very heavily pirated which may limit its appearances in some lists. It's also very often not of the best quality, even if beloved.
It's number of users who gave the show a rating.
Yeah anime's quality is pretty low overall, there's a reason there's a saying "this anime is trash and so am I". Look there aren't many what I'd consider "high class" anime. It's mostly wish fulfillment nonsense with little depth. At the same time you can find your wish fulfillment nonsense. Like me with the saga of tanya the evil and GATE thus the JSDF fought there.
Yeah some of (like barely any) is VERY VERY good, but Anime really hits for a lot of people and has huge cultural penetration.
The percentage of people under age 25 who know who Deku is is probably incredibly high, even in not very nerdy sub cultures, but if you aren't of that age or an anime fan.....not a blob of cultural relevance.
Yeah but for people over the age of 25, many would know about Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, and Yu-gi-oh. I suspect that many adults (maybe above 5% of americans) would know the name Light Yagami or Eren Yaeger. (I'd definitely bet above 2% and around 10% is probably pushing it).
Pokemon especially is the single largest media franchise on the planet,
Noticed Time had Pikachu and Eevee covers last week.
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