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Good Fortune? Or Bad Omens
The next great survey is about to begin. As with all meaningful social opinions, it will be measured in money. The film Good Fortune will be on us tomorrow and soon we shall know if America is ready to be willing to be seen with Aziz Ansari publicly after finding out how bad he is at sex.
My leaning was weak financial performance but decent enough, even at a net loss to the studio, to let Ansari continue awkwardly sidling back into our homes. After the Riyadh Comedy Festival, I've downgraded my forecast to a bomb.
I also predict that Ansari is going to be the last of the non-incarcerated tranche of MeToo celebrities to be fully acceptable in far blue society. People involved in worse will do better. Women won't like getting close enough to risk touching the ick field Ansari is coated in and, while funny and obviously well connected, he can't make something essential enough to overcome that reaction.
What say you, entertainment industry financial forecast specialists?
I barely remember who this guy is, does it really mean anything if his project tanks?
I argue yes. This is the Culture War and who gets to make cultural artifacts with massive amounts of money involved is a major front.
It's my assertion that Ansari is a good measuring stick precisely because his offense was relatively trivial. If the film succeeds, MeToo in the mainstream narrative is effectively dead. If it fails, at a minimum Ansari is the new line. The film itself is allegedly around average, underperformance is likely a strong signal from the distributed voting mechanism that is ticket sales that doing as Aziz does is still verboten. Doing better than bad would also be a signal. Producers and distributors react accordingly. The media environment changes.
See, even in the Culture War thread hardly anyone remembers this guy.
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I just don't think the guy was ever relevant enough to be this kind of barometer, and I question whether anyone who doesn't partake in threads like this even remembers this story.
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