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Notes -
Disney is back where it started:
Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles
But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)
They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter
of Marsand so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.
The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?
So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."
And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.
Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.
That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)
But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.
I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).
Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.
There was a preteen movie when I was a kid- something like Big Liar- that my parents liked too(so I didn't just like it because I was a kid at the time) which was about an eighth grade boy who loses his creative writing assignment that by hilarious and unlikely coincidence is picked up by a hollywood director who proceeds to adapt it into a screenplay, and he engages in zany schemes and pranking with his plucky girl best friend to get credit for it. Very 2000's. But the concept that 'golly, these hollywood executives could have a random preteen come up with better movies than they do' isn't new.
Big Fat Liar (2002). Surprisingly good for a kid's film; the "Hungry Like the Wolf" pool scene is very memorable, as is the "I Wish" warehouse montage, and, of course, the "Right Here, Right Now" helicopter ride. And, yes, very 2000's; right up there with Shrek (2001) and Digimon: The Movie (2000).
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