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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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The Disney lawsuits are also a distraction for the left. I see a fair amount of online commentary about how DeSantis is an idiot for picking a fight with Disney which has the lawyers and money to crush him, and apart from the cognitive dissonance of lefties licking the boots of large capitalist organisations which exist to make profits, they're not following the news.

Disney doesn't have the deep pockets they imagine, right now. They're laying off thousands and need to make billions in cuts:

In February, Iger announced the media giant would axe roughly 7,000 employees from its global workforce in three waves before the start of summer, an undertaking aimed at saving $5.5 billion in costs. The labor cuts make up 30% of this figure, with another 50% coming from marketing operations and 20% from decreased spending on technology, procurement, and other expenses, the company said.

Disney+ streaming service pulled underperforming shows in what's been called a purge. They're losing subscribers, like all the streaming services. There's a whole internal power struggle going on with Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars (the Galactic Starcruiser hotel shut down after only two years primarily because it was way too pricey for the experience, but also in part because Kennedy insisted nothing from the original trilogy be included, but all her Rey Skywalker movies) and the need for the latest Indiana Jones movie to make a billion, which - going by the reviews after it was shown at Cannes - is going to be very difficult to achieve. Bob Iger, the CEO who came back, laid it all out in the earnings call:

It was a much more sober-minded Iger who took listeners through the existential challenges that Disney and its big media brethren face, proposing tough solutions as it looks to pay down debt amassed from a torrid period of M&A and a massive investment in streaming. His goal, he made clear, is to get Disney’s fiscal house in order. And that means cuts (Disney will shed 7,000 jobs or 3% of its workforce), along with a new emphasis on making money as opposed to just adding Disney+ customers. That new frugality will extend to the movies and shows that Disney creates.

“We are going to take a really hard look at the cost for everything that we make both across television and film because things in a very competitive world have just simply got more expensive,” Iger said.

“We want the quality on the screen, but we have to look at what that costs us,” he added at another point. Iger also suggested that Disney had spent too much money on advertising as it looked to grow its base of streaming viewers and that it might need to hike the cost of signing up to see the latest streaming Marvel show or Star Wars spinoff. “Are we pricing correctly?” he mused.

That’s certainly what investors want to see and hear. Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery and other media companies have seen their shares fall as the rubric for quarterly success has morphed from subscriber growth to more prosaic benchmarks like profits, revenues and liabilities. In its most recent quarter, Disney+ had its first subscriber loss, shedding 2.4 million customers, and yet Disney’s shares were up more than 5% in after-hours trading as the company pledged to tighten its belt.

The relocation to Florida being cancelled is being blamed on DeSantis and taken as a victory for Disney - Florida will lose out on all these jobs and money, thanks to the stupid Republicans! - but it's mostly due to the California staff not wanting to move, plus the need to drastically cut costs.

Disney is still big, rich and powerful, but it has a lot on its plate right now and the fight in Florida may not be as straightforward as the lefties hope.

because Kennedy insisted nothing from the original trilogy be included, but all her Rey Skywalker movies

I think there's good reason to not blame Kennedy for everything that went wrong (my understanding is that the original sin of rushing the Sequel trilogy without a set plan was a Disney mandate) but I honestly don't know how she a) was even allowed to make this call in the first place (the only thing the ST had going for it was nostalgia) and b) hasn't been fired for it.

I'm not able to keep up with the number of Star Wars movies by now, to be honest, but around the time J.J. Abrams got the gig I was very surprised, because they seemed to be jumping from one director to a different one for the next movie, and the new guy immediately started contradicting the stuff set up in the last movie, then the next movie contradicted that.

I think people like the original trilogy because (1) they grew up on it and (2) it's consistent. Luke and the Rebels are the Good Guys, Vader is redeemed in death, the Empire is the Bad Guys and at the end the Good Guys win. Simple, exciting, and no "and then they all turned into the Atreides family and started trying to murder each other".

  1. She's a woman

And 2) She must have some dirt on those in power in that corp or else she would have been fired about 2-3 movie trashfires ago.

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