site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In more "get woke, go broke?" news, the entertaining if incredible rumours circulating about Disney.

Disney, like all the other companies with streaming services, is facing the sharp decline since the days of the pandemic and having many subscribers cancel so they are losing revenue. It's not necessarily "get woke go broke" at work here, but Disney have been shooting themselves in the foot with the forced diversity remakes and mishandling the Star Wars franchise which should have been a reliable cash cow. Meanwhile, Universal Studios is coining it with the Super Mario movie and theme parks rides.

They're also, apparently, in a bind with Comcast, their co-owners of Hulu, who are gearing up to demand Disney buy them out. Comcast is valuing it at around $70 billion, Disney values it way lower (around $20 billion by one report).

The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!). The fifth Indiana Jones movie is being re-cut, re-shot, scrapbooked and everything including the kitchen sink thrown at it because of the bad reception at Cannes and the vital need for it to make at least a billion when finally released.

Now the rumours begin:

(1) Disney only has $200 million in liquidity. Comcast is looking for way more, so they're looking at more layoffs, cancellation of projects, and even selling off IP and - rumoured - some of the parks?

(2) George Lucas rumoured to want to buy back Lucas Films?

It is all rumour and insider gossip at the moment and who knows how much is true at all, if any of it, but it's fun to watch in the context of Disney's fight with DeSantis and all the progressive chatter online about how DeathSantis is an idiot for taking on a company with such high-class expensive lawyers and deep pockets to fight court cases.

Looks like those pockets may not be so deep after all!

I think it is just that theaters are dead, and we can blame the covid restrictions for killing theaters.

I went and saw The Machine a week ago. I looked through multiple times for the show. All the seats were empty. The movie is in no way "woke", its about a white male comedian / party animal. The action was good, the comedy was funny, and it had a bit of heart. The critics gave it 29% on rotten tomatoes, the audience gave it 87%.

I propose a simpler explanation for the underperformance of The Little Mermaid: It's a live action remake of a beloved animated show. Consider Dragonball Evolution, or The Last Airbender, or the Cowboy Bebop TV series, or Aladdin. I could do this all day! Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked? At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...

The problem seems to be (1) it's a remake (2) it's longer than the original (3) they've messed around with the plot and the songs (4) the CGI real animals fall into the uncanny valley of looking almost exactly like real animals, just a bit off, which means they're nowhere near as expressive as the cartoon versions (5) my own view, but going to the movies is very expensive and people are belt-tightening right now, so why not stick on the original cartoon version instead of spending however much to take the kids plus parents to the cinema?

They're trying to go for the "racist backlash" reason as to why it's not doing well, but unfortunately that then means calling China and Korea racists - which is a racist thing to do!

I'm way too old for either movie so I don't much care either way, but I do think if you're going to do "The Little Mermaid but black", why not have everyone in it black? Or at least an original design for Ariel instead of keeping the red hair and blue costume? Best of all would be creating a new movie and character based on African or Caribbean folklore but Disney want to eat the cake and have it, and instead they look like they've dropped the cake all over the floor.

As it is, we have black Ariel with a white (or Latino) father and multi-cultural sisters, white Ursula her aunt, white prince Eric with a black mother/grandmother as queen (I'm not sure what relation she is to him) so it's confusion all round.

They're trying to go for the "racist backlash" reason as to why it's not doing well, but unfortunately that then means calling China and Korea racists - which is a racist thing to do!

cnn's one step ahead of you - they got three asian lady writers to call chinese and korean audiences racist.

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):

  • (2014) Maleficent - $750M, budget $180M

  • (2016) The Jungle Book - $970M, budget $175M

  • (2017) Beauty and the Beast - $1.26B, budget $160M

  • (2019) Dumbo - $350M, budget $170M

  • (2019) Aladdin - $1.05B, budget $183M

  • (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.

No, Aladdin made back the money, which is what they were expecting The Little Mermaid to do as well, but it hasn't done it overseas (yet) and it doesn't seem to be doing it domestically either.

We'll have to wait until all the money - including tie-in merchandise and the rest of it - is counted, but it's not doing as well as they had hoped. Even Forbes, with its "virulent racist campaign!" messaging, is aware of the performance it needs to turn in to be that blockbuster hit.

There's also Peter Pan & Wendy, another live-action remake, if it can be called a remake, which goes way further - the Lost Boys are now girls as well as boys but still called the Lost Boys not the Lost Children so shut up! Released on Disney+ instead of getting a theatrical release, on Rotten Tomatoes the critics give it 62% but the audience 11%.

Speaking of Rotten Tomatoes reviews, for The Little Mermaid, you can see "verified" or "all" reviews:

All Critics - 67%

Top Critics - 50%

I don't know what the difference is with a Top Critic, but you can see that they like it much less.

Audience opinion?

Verified Audience - 94%

All Audience - 57%

So if you just look at the ratings as Rotten Tomatoes presents them, you'll think "oh, it's a hit, audiences love it!" with 94% but that's not the whole story. Amazon did much the same for Rings of Power, getting IMDb to hide or ignore reviews that were less than 3 stars and shutting down reviews on Prime altogether.

The point is that Disney needs big hits because of the financial situation right now, so if it doesn't make Aladdin-type money then it's a flop for all intents and purposes, even if it makes a profit.

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).

There are also some smaller ones

I was going to complain that you omitted Mulan, but then I realized I'd forgotten about Dumbo ... and apparently also Lady and the Tramp, and Pinocchio, and Cinderella, and Christopher Robin (though this one seems to be a new take more than a remake?), and Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan ...

Is the "insanely successful for disney" list just selection bias?

the creepy realistic animal friends.

Is it that bad this time around? They didn't keep all the animal friends in other movies (reviewers talked about how awful it was to replace Mulan's honor and cleverness with midichlorians or whatever, but my kids just didn't care to see it because they wanted Mushu), but the new Aladdin had its parrot and tiger and a slightly-homunculus-vibed CGI Abu and it still made a billion dollars.

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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322204733/http://deadline.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-sean-bailey-disney-emma-watson-1202047710/

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.

Is it that bad this time around? They didn't keep all the animal friends in other movies (reviewers talked about how awful it was to replace Mulan's honor and cleverness with midichlorians or whatever, but my kids just didn't care to see it because they wanted Mushu), but the new Aladdin had its parrot and tiger and a slightly-homunculus-vibed CGI Abu and it still made a billion dollars.

I haven't watched either remake, but IIRC Iago and Abu in the original Aladdin weren't as heavily stylized as Sebastian and Flounder in the original The Little Mermaid, and so a semi-realistic CGI version of them wouldn't be too jarring. On the other hand, the Sebastian in the live-action remake looked like a real crab with somewhat expressive eyes.

cinderella made $542 million, alice in wonderland made over a billion. were those considered unsuccessful?

lady and the tramp and pinocchio were disney+ exclusives. disney+ has kind of been a flop, so fair enough there.

the christopher robin movie was one of those 'kid character turns into jaded adult' movies like hook.

Mulan was a big flop, taking in $70 million on a $200 million budget.

There was no race swapping, but most people I know were turned off by the titular character gaining magical powers on top of being a girlboss.

Mulan was also the released at the height of the COVID pandemic, which probably had a larger impact on its revenue than the contents.

I am not sure I count the Lion King, given its CGI, but you're correct that the outcomes are much more mixed than I thought they were.

Can I point that all those remakes were not that good and maybe little mermaid is just chickens coming home to roost. If a horse dies while running it still has some inertia behind it to move forward while beating it.

Maleficent was original film. Beauty and the beast was mostly cashing on Emma Watson post HP, Aladdin had Will Smith, the lion king had - was Mufasa's death really that sad as I remember it (yes it was).

What is the point in watching the new little mermaid instead of the old one. That is the question that all of those remakes find really hard to answer since they are at best slightly inferior in any way.

Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked?

Detective Pikachu (if that counts, since it was actually based on a game, and it also included a lot of CG animation). Also the first Transformers live film, and maybe a couple of others in the series.

At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...

It's a symptom of a broader failure to be creative in entertainment nowadays. Studios are too scared to take risks with a new IP that might fail, so they (mistakenly) believe that the best course of action is to remake what already exists because "it should be a safe bet".

Is it fear, or is it just business sense? Toy Story was a hit in part because it used a setting and characters familiar to an American audience (suburban childhood life, old fashioned cowboy toy, newfangled spaceman toy, slinky, green army men, Mr potato head). Ghibli movies are universally loved it Japan because of all the very-Japanese details and cultural references woven into them (likely both intentionally and unintentionally) -- see Totoro, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, or My Neighbors The Yamadas. I think the term "love letter" is trite when describing a movie, but these films are love letters to the childhoods and shared experiences of their respective audiences. They target a specific culture and a specific slice of space and time.

Modern family films don't really seem to do that anymore. Everything is either engineered to appeal to the widest possible audience (gotta appeal to the East Asian market) or, when they do try to set a film in a specific culture, it's a theme park version created by outsiders (Coco, Moana, new Mulan) that is still designed to be widely palatable. In both cases the end product is sometimes entertaining but never beloved as it doesn't connect with our own memories or experiences on more than a superficial level.

If you're not convinced, try this -- imagine a 2024 Disney remake of Totoro, complete with the newfangled 3D animation, the gender roles updated, the clothing modernized, interiors of the homes genericized, still vaguely Japanese (in the way a Japanese-American from California might imagine "Japanese") but mostly just anodyne and inoffensive, Totoro's wood has been expanded to cover a huge expanse of land and Catbus has a new origin story, and now Mei has a cute comic relief Makurokurosuke sidekick that hangs out on her shoulder (merchandising!). It would probably make a good trailer or two and I bet it would make some money at the box office, but a lot of the themes, images, and dare I say SOVL would have been lost in the quest to broaden appeal.

Is this mistaken? Sure, the success rate with uncreative existing IP-parasitism may be low, but what about the success rate with creative films?

Tell me: why should I believe a single rumour from a guy who has been predicting Kathleen Kennedy's ouster every year for the past 5 (at least)? In fact, I've never heard of him being right about anything.

It's all just rumours, if you know better tell me!

‘Go woke, go broke’ doesn’t seem true. More like ‘push out a lot of bad product and people stop buying your new ones’.

I mean you can certainly argue that Disney’s wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products. I definitely think that’s part of the story. But they also seem to have not even tried to make a lot of their productions actually good, which I don’t think is because of wokeness. Sure, woke makes it hard to, say, write a classic princess story. But it seems like Disney just didn’t even try, they assumed that mouse ears or a lightsaber was a license to print money with any old Drek. As it turns out, they were too cynical.

I think you are radically underrating the "wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products" angle. Making a good woke movie for kids or teens seems nearly impossible. It imposes too many restraints on you that are restraints against good storytelling.

I mean, Brave was kinda woke and generally well received. So were a few marvel films.

I agree with you that woke probably makes it harder to make a good story- and makes certain categories of story effectively off limits as actually good and coherent- but I think you’re underrating the fact that a lot of these woke flops are using wokeness to polish a turd to begin with.

Never seen Brave, but all the successful Marvel movies traverse a similar hero story path. Black Panther, for all its magic black people stuff, is pretty much a classic heroes journey with a shit ton of masculinity thrown in your face.

“Woke” is about intersectionality or power-critical narratives or character arcs, usually pedantically or with a lecturing tone, not just progressive / feminist heroic viewpoints. Brave was about a Scottish princess beloved by her kingdom and family who used her existing but unrealized privilege to make choices in her romantic life; that’s standard modernist feminism.

Moana, on the other hand, was marketed as woke: “here’s a brave, strong Brown woman, isn’t she brave and strong for being Brown and a woman?” I didn’t see it until it hit the second-run theater for that reason alone; when I did, I was surprised it was just a fun, well-made, coming-of-age Disney film. She saw a problem, had an adventure, fixed the problem, and was rewarded for her leadership with more leadership. Sure, she had no romantic co-star, but that’s not woke, just feminist. It had a flamboyant-coded treasure-grubbing giant crab, which edged into wokeness, but it was a minuscule part of the film, and it fit the story. Again, modernist progressive, not woke.

Lightyear was woke because it was power-critical: the white man protagonist was constantly wrong, not heroic, throughout the film. At the end, his heroism consisted of being an ally to the family he accidentally helped, against Zurg, another white man who wanted to turn back the clock to when things were good for him and hide his mistakes from the people who determine his societal status. Postmodern “power was wrong” narrative plus fecund Black lesbian equals the triumph of queer family over the success of a highly privileged white man’s career ambitions

“It’s not a small or throwaway part of the movie. The climax hinges on Buzz deciding Alisha meeting her wife is more important than his primary objective for the entire movie, the lost years of his life, any possible better alternative path. He sacrifices everything for their love story and for the multi-generational positive impact of their love story. I was gobsmacked at how hard it swings not just for gay people being tolerable in “family-friendly” settings, but for gay people creating amazing families themselves.” - Autostraddle article

The article then goes on to point out how Pixar’s meta-narrative made queer acceptance itself travel back in time to make the Toy Story universe retroactively gayer, and thus better, then ours. Lightyear is woke, it’s a political point masquerading as a story, and it’s not satisfying entertainment.

It had a flamboyant-coded treasure-grubbing giant crab, which edged into wokeness

If anything this was edging into anti-woke, it was a simple play on stereotypes for laughs.

Yep.

I've adopted a rule of thumb regarding new media products: if the creators are heavily emphasizing the diversity, inclusion, and equality progressive bonafides of the product, they almost certainly are not prioritizing any factors that would lead to a high quality product. If quality were the goal, they'd emphasize other things.

If quality isn't a priority then they probably won't achieve high quality.

This rule has been at least 90% accurate since I implemented it.

Disney is by far the worst offender but it pops up just about everywhere else too.

It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.

This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.

I think there’s a lot to that. Makes me think of Brandon Sanderson. The Mormonism gives him somewhere to stand and serious (now also vaguely countercultural) principles to conjure with, but aren’t so restrictive that they force him to be dour and po-faced.

I have to admit, when I look at domestic box office numbers I mostly just see noise (a big factor imo is competing films entering the market), but to give some reference:

Disney's previous two big movies were Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.

Ant-Man started at $106M its first week, then dropped to $32M (70% drop) and $13M in the next two weeks.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 went from $118M to $62M (47% drop) to $32M.

The Little Mermaid went from $96M to $41M (57% drop) (also this week isn't finished yet)

Can You Guess Why The Little Mermaid Is a Huge Hit But Not In China?

The backlash is due to Halle Bailey being chosen to portray main character Ariel.

...

According to Box Office Mojo, Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid has only grossed $3.6 million in mainland China since it opened there on May 26. The Chinese box office tracker Endata confirmed that the film made 19.5 million yuan ($2.7 million) in its first five days. In comparison, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse made 142 million yuan (nearly $20 million) in the first five days after its release.

Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.

Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.

Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK. Ariel in the original adaptation in 1989 was a ginger, and in the remake is black. So possibly Chinese audiences are rejecting the race-swapping of existing non-black characters to be black, rather than rejecting black characters in themselves. This rejection of such race-swapping is considered anti-black racism just as much as rejection of black characters in themselves by the "woke" ideology.

Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK.

This is disingenuous. Miles Morales is a race-swapped Spider Man, exactly like Ariel. The paper-thin excuse of "Umm ackshually we've not retconned him, he's, err, an alternate universe version" is obviously just that: a paper-thin excuse, to remove white heroes from their stories.

Miles Morales was developed by writer Brian Michael Bendis. No prizes for guessing what I found oh his Early Life section of Wikipedia.

Yeah, I think Miles Morales was definitely an early example of wokewashing, although not quite as blatant as in recent years. But when we're talking about movies there is one, rather important, distinction: Into The Spider-Verse was really, really, really, REALLY, REALLY good. (I haven't seen Across yet, but I have high hopes.) Frankly, if all these woke race swaps and girlboss Mary Sues and deconstructions of white male privilege were accompanied by movies that were even close to the quality of Into The Spider-Verse, I don't think I'd have such a problem with them!

This is disingenuous. Miles Morales is a race-swapped Spider Man, exactly like Ariel. The paper-thin excuse of "Umm ackshually we've not retconned him, he's, err, an alternate universe version" is obviously just that: a paper-thin excuse, to remove white heroes from their stories.

It's a lot more acceptable when Spiderman's comics history is absolutely littered with clones and alternate-universe spider-men.

I'm not all that familiar with the Spider-Man lore, but given how common alternate universes are in comic books, I would think it'd be normal to consider an alternate universe version who's black as a separate character unto himself. IIRC from the Into the Spider-Verse film from a few years back, the white Peter Parker was there as a character, along with many other versions of Spider-Man including a female one and a cartoon pig one. This is in contrast to The Little Mermaid remake which is presented as a straight-up remake showing a reimagined version of the characters from Disney's original adaptation. Halle Bailey's Ariel running into the original ginger one from the 1989 animated film while being separate characters like in Into the Spider-Verse isn't something that'd be within the realm of possibility in The Little Mermaid universe, I think.

A quick peek confirmed my suspicious: Chinese movie posters (and probably much of the advertsing) show Miles prominently mostly while masked.

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2Bu6z6asFL.SL500_AC_SS350.jpg

The film also has a big cast, including some Asian spider-people iirc.

Chinese Little Mermaid posters don't prominently feature Halle Bailey's ethnicity, though (which some on Twitter and elsewhere complained about).

the image link is broken, copypasting the whole thing works

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but on the topic of The Little Mermaid, I am extremely confused by the Rotten Tomatoes score. The "audience score" has been fixed at 95% since launch, which is insanely high. The critics score is a more-believable 67%. Note that the original 1989 cartoon - one of my favorite movies growing up, a gorgeous movie that kickstarted an era of Disney masterpieces - only has an 88% audience score. Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%. And recall that the first time Rotten Tomatoes changed their aggregation algorithm was actually in response to Captain Marvel's "review bombing", another important and controversial Disney movie.

If you click through to the "all audiences" score, it's in the 50% range. And metacritic's audience score is 2.2 out of 10. The justification I've heard in leftist spaces is that the movie's getting review bombed by people who haven't seen it. And there certainly is a wave of hatred for this movie (including from me, because the woke plot changes sound dreadful). How plausible is this? I haven't seen the movie myself, so it's possible that it actually is decent enough for the not-terminally-online normies to enjoy. But even using that explanation, how is 95% possible?

Right now I only see two possibilities:

  • Rotten Tomatoes has stopped caring about their long-term credibility, and they're happy to put their finger on the scale in a RIDICULOUSLY obvious way for movies that are important to the Hollywood machine. I should stop trusting them completely and go to Metacritic.

  • People like me who have become super sensitive to wokeness already knew they'd hate the movie and didn't see it; for the "verified" audience, TLM is actually VERY enjoyable, and the 95% rating is real.

But, to be honest, I would have put a low prior on BOTH of these possibilities before TLM came out. Is there a third that I'm missing?

We've had this discussion before and my personal take on it is that RT has decided that providing the right audience rating is more important than providing the actual audience rating. Woman King gets a 99% audience score? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. Same thing is happening here. It is more important that the plebs be informed about what a good (diverse, tells a cathedral approved story) movie is than it is that the plebs be able to decide what a good movie is.

Ah, perfect, thanks for the link. That looks like exactly the same thing; I completely missed it because I didn't care about Woman King in the slightest. 99% is as hilariously unbelievable as El Presidente winning an election with 105% of the votes. So, it really does look like RT is willing to just blatantly lie about certain - ahem - "culturally relevant" movies, and that casts doubt even on other scores that aren't obviously fake. Maybe I can keep clicking through to the "all audiences" score, but who knows how long they'll allow that? Looks like it's time to drop RT for good and go to Metacritic ... which also uses an opaque aggregation algorithm, but at least I haven't caught them in an obvious lie yet!

I think the steelman is this:

  1. We (the review site) know that audience trolls attempt to manipulate ratings in various ways. (Review bombing, stanning, reviewing without seeing the film).

  2. Either we let this stand, and users see audience-manipulated scores, or we attempt to correct for this and give a good idea of the real sentiment of good-faith reviewers.

  3. Time passes.

  4. We're already filtering out trolls who are review bombing because Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is the wrong shade of green, why not also filter out people who give bad reviews because the mermaid is the wrong colour?

  5. Some of the trolls have got wise to this, and give bad reviews for plausible reasons, even though actually they're racists who hate the film for having a black lead.

  6. People who criticise films with a black lead should be filtered out, even if (especially if!) they have legitimate points.

This is the same logic that has played out in every part of social media over the last 15 years.

This is coming close to being a quokka. You shouldn't be steelmanning to the point where attacks and bad faith actions can't be recognized as such. "Maybe my mother really is a whore, or at least, she could be dressing like one and speaking crudely, so it gives people the justified misimpression that my mother is a whore."

Oh, sure. But this is how Twitter / Facebook / Rotten Tomatoes and all the other ones talked themselves into their current policies, or got pushed into them, or justified them to skeptics. If I remember correctly, one of the big turning points was when social media companies realised that they were the linchpin of Isis recruitment efforts, complete with execution videos.

If you’re serious about building something which supports free speech, you therefore have to recognise that a fraction of your users are going to be trolls and bad actors. Another fraction will use the existence of the first faction to push their agenda, and you have to have countermeasures for both.

As countermeasures go, this site’s rules do pretty well, I think, with the caveat that it relies on the good will and restraint of a handful of mods to function.

I thought the "steelman" turning to rust was @Corvos's point.

Indeed so :)

In general I'd expect any prominent review site (not just ones for movies) to be affected by Goodhart's Law. When millions of dollars (not to mention reputation) are potentially on the line, companies will try to game the scores, and whether or not they do it with the cooperation of the review site will depend on how principled the site's management is.

You're not the first to notice. It seems like IMDB already weighted scores because of review-bombing. On IMDB, even weighted, it's at 7.2. And metacritic's score of 2.2 seems more reflective of what review-bombing might look like, so I'd bet Rottentomatoes put in some extra protections against review-bombing, above and beyond just weighting the score like IMDB. It seems like Rottentomatoes user scores are like Wikipedia articles, if it's political I wouldn't trust it implicitly.

The problem then is, what is review-bombing versus this movie/show really does suck?

I feel like it's a lost cause at this point. Review-bombing is probably real, fake, and irrelevant all at the same time. I say irrelevant because once a review-bombing has been deemed to happen all reviews become tainted because let's assume it's all natural both ways, people will still counter-review bomb to say something is great for culture war reasons or pretend to be the enemy and strawman their position. I'm beginning to believe the latter is very likely, if not predestined, to happen in once a review-bomb starts.

This is just a problem for aggregation and numbers. There are still usually reviews by people who have valid criticisms and praise. The review bomb basically just renders the number meaningless and anything with too much negativity or praise becomes much harder to believe as real. So, maybe people just read reviewers whose opinions they already trust to not be contaminated by playing a culture war game with review scores. I'm sure some exist.

Yup, that's my dilemma. The whole point of these aggregation sites was to try to get a more objective measure of how good a movie actually is. But there's no paper trail for any of these sites' scores (it's not just RT), and it's become common practice to fudge the numbers with a special "algorithm". I guess I mostly just accepted this before, but TLM is such a ridiculous outlier that I'm starting to doubt whether there's any useful signal left.

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.

For example, The Black Stallion Returns, the very unnecessary 1983 sequel to the beloved 1979 original, holds a 20% critic score but a 73% audience score. Why the discrepancy? Critics correctly pointed out that this film followed basically the same storyline as the previous movie yet it didn't improve upon it in any way, so there was no reason for this movie to be made. Audiences seemed to like it for exactly the same reason: they loved the original and this is more of the same so why shouldn't they like it too?

You can also see this effect in the ratings for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, the sequel to the Disney classic, which practically copies the storyline and cast of characters from the original. It has 17% critic and 45% audience approval, and although both scores are low, again the audience seems to be way more forgiving than the critics.

The same applies to the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast which is more popular with audiences (80%) than critics (71%), despite starring notable feminist Emma Watson. (This movie was only mildly controversial because they'd made LeFou explicitly gay, which probably boosted critic reviews, and lowered audience scores.)

I can totally believe that for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, the verified audience (i.e., the people who paid money to go see the movie) are more positive about it than the critics. It seems to follow the same pattern as other Disney remakes: not a lot of innovation, but the fans seem to eat it up anyway.

So I think your second possibility is closer to the truth: the people most upset about the race-swapping probably didn't even watch the movie.

In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.

Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%.

Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Oh, good catch! I didn't even notice that (showing how insidious that "verified audience" marker is). For some reason I thought Peter Pan & Wendy was another theatrical release, but apparently it went straight to Disney+, so there are no verified reviews. So it's a lot less comparable to TLM than I thought.

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.

This could certainly explain some of the discrepancy, but 94% (that's the score I see right now on the site, with 100,000+ verified users) is a ridiculously high score that beggars belief. As the comment to which you're replying states, that's significantly higher than the score of the original which is almost universally considered a masterpiece and a classic.

In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.

I'm guessing this also plays a big factor, though I doubt it explains all of it. By all accounts, this film was bad even while ignoring all woke factors, and I doubt such an overwhelming majority of verified users are people that are sufficiently woke as to give a film good scores just to send a political message.

Speaking of apples to oranges comparisons.

Rottentomatoes critic scores before a certain era and for certain products are absolutely not useful because they have so few reviews compared to anything recent and until streaming there were very few serious about making reviews for direct-to-dvd movies. Black Stallion Returns has 5 critic reviews. The Little Mermaid II has 6 critic reviews (and one of them is a duplicate). I don't see how you can take the comparison between thousands of user reviews seriously with that discrepancy.

Not to mention the fact that reviews for older movies are almost never going to draw review-bombing, and almost always going to have people leaving a less critical review of something older because it was older, because their nostalgia, because if they thought it was middling they wouldn't care to make a review for it. Hype, marketing, cultural issues (warring or not) probably skew reviews for modern things in ways that I have a hard time believing are going to reflect accurately back when examining 40 year old movies or direct-to-dvd sequels that came out in 2000.

A better comparison would be to take a movie without controversy, to my knowledge that fits in a similar mold. Look at The Lion King(2019) 52% critic and 85% audience and Aladdin (2019) with a 48% critic and 95% audience which would seem to suggest along with Beauty and the Beast that verified audience percentages make disney movies review proof for audiences. Then again there's Dumbo (2019) 46% critic and 48% audience, Mulan (2020) 78% critic and 46% audience, Lady and the Tramp (2019) 66% critic, 50% audience and finally, Pinnochio (2022) 29% critic and 27% audience. If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe. Not impossible taking into account something like Aladdin, but still hard to believe.

If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.

Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).

What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.

Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:

You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.

Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you. But I was suggesting that they were secretly weighting the score which may seem conspiracy nutty but that's the entire point of looking at it and thinking "this seems strange, I don't buy it." I'm not going to say nobody believes that the score matches what the website shows but I believe most people who think things might be being manipulated think that a portion of negative reviews are being excluded outside of their own verification system because it's socially/politically in their interest to do so for any number of reasons. There's been so many instances of things being protected from false reviews in the past few years that I find it hard to believe without any hint of doubt that the 95% reflects reality.

Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days. In the same way that allowing people to talk about certain risque things or have certain opinions isn't allowed, saying "I didn't like this product because I don't like its political message" is only allowed in one direction and if it's the wrong direction (right slanted) then that is deemed bad and cracked down on in some way by changing how the reviews work (netflix), limiting reviews affecting scores when a lot of reviews happen at once (steam), verifying reviews in some way (rottentomatoes), all these things only exist because of review-bombing for political/culture war reasons. It's clear that review-bombing does happen by people who haven't consumed the media but even in cases where money is confirmed to have changed hands (steam) they still have protections for review-bombing because there are reasons for reviews that are deemed invalid. It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something even if it's been "verified" (I put a quotes because I don't know how their verification works). It's relatively conspiratorial and I don't necessarily believe it 100% but it doesn't strike me as crazy outlandish to do.

I also would find it easy to believe that a pr company would manufacture bad user reviews for something like metacritic to take a 5.0 down to a 2.0 and flood it with reviews specifically targeting the woke angle of something to completely erase the perceived value of user reviews that are bad or middling. I said in another post that I just don't trust rottentomatoes in the same way I don't trust wikipedia for anything political. Manipulation is just too easy even discounting RT doing it themselves. There are plenty of people that would give a 5/10 a 6/10 purely for culture war reasons and vice versa. But given the critic reviews, genre-fatigue (I guess live action remakes are maybe a genre), the baked-in culture war angle from both sides(I've seen three articles on deadline about how it sets a bad example for women, erases black slavery, and appropriates drag culture) I still find it hard to believe that it sits at 95%. I didn't say impossible, just hard to believe.

Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.

I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.

It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.

I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.

What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?

It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something

Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?

Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.

Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.

I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.

I have no idea why you've gone into multi-quote argument failure mode. I mostly agree with you and just think it's still not unlikely that they manipulated data because I'm biased that way and I've explained why.

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics.

unless the critics are giving it extra points because it is woke. Then the people's score is usually a lot lower.

The go woke get broke thing.

I’ve noticed for probably 5 years now I rarely enjoy something new. I don’t have much interest in going to the movies. I usually like watching things from hbo 20 years ago.

Maybe I’m just old and old people always just watch things from their prime. Or perhaps despite there being 10x as much media production it all sucks and I am not watching because they went woke and got broke and get unwatchable media.

It's been at 95% since before the film was released. I think that's a rating from a hand picked test audience.

Is there a third that I'm missing?

It's more of a variation of your first possibility, but RT could also be acting out of principal-agent problems, not at the behest of Hollywood executives. The explanations probably overlap. There's also the possibility that they care about their credibility every bit as much as they did in the past, but it's their credibility among tastemakers that's important, not the rabble.

I'm not sure why you'd put a low prior on the first, though. Particularly for high visibility productions, "everyone" knows to take politics into account when reading reviews. Positively weighting aligned reviews doesn't seem like an incredible step beyond that.

It's more of a variation of your first possibility, but RT could also be acting out of principal-agent problems, not at the behest of Hollywood executives. The explanations probably overlap. There's also the possibility that they care about their credibility every bit as much as they did in the past, but it's their credibility among tastemakers that's important, not the rabble.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if RT's review aggregation takes "marching orders" from any executives. In fact, I think RT is owned indirectly by Warner Bros., so if anything you'd expect they'd be "adjusting" Disney movies unfavorably. I like your explanation that RT's just sincerely trying to appease the Hollywood elite, rather than provide a useful signal to the masses. It fits.

I'm not sure why you'd put a low prior on the first, though. Particularly for high visibility productions, "everyone" knows to take politics into account when reading reviews. Positively weighting aligned reviews doesn't seem like an incredible step beyond that.

I knew to take that into account with the critics score, which I would usually ignore for the "woke" crap. But in the past I've generally found the audience score trustworthy. Maybe I was just naive, and it took a ridiculous outlier for me to finally notice that they have their fingers on every scale.

Rotten Tomatoes turned off reviewing unreleased movies just before Captain Marvel came out, but claim that they "definitely" didn't change the site to protect Captain Marvel. Given how much fudging of everything has happened in the world since then, I wouldn't be surprised if they are now willing to make up review scores to protect favored films.

The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!)

Of course they'd prefer the tale to be about racism. I've seen some articles from alleged news sites that might as well have been penned by Disney. Which seems to have contributed to the impression amongst normies that the movie actually opened well.

But the truth is that these movies are bankrupt. The race lift is just one attempt to make them distinct from the still-classic originals. The other being the CGI which is generally worse and less expressive and "fun" than the original animation. Then there's the added length for a kid's movie...

All these factors taken together, the movie's failure seems over-determined. The question is why did equally bad adaptations like Lion King succeed?

Lion King did better because it came first. Little Mermaid is doing worse because people are catching on. That's one possible explanation, at least.

Was hard for me to find explicit before/after online, so I'll paste the diff I stitched together here:

"Kiss the Girl" changes:

Yes, you want her.

Look at her, you know you do.

Possible she wants you, too.

There is one way to ask her.

Use your words, boy, and ask her

It don’t take a word. Not a single word.

If the time is right and the time is tonight

Go on and kiss the girl

In "Poor Unfortunate Souls" they simply remove the dialog about men liking women who don't talk:

Ursula: That's right! But, you'll have, your man. Life's full of tough choices, isn't it? Oh! And there is, one...more...thing! We haven't discussed the subject of payment...

You'll have your looks! Your pretty face!

And don't underestimate the importance of body language!

...

The men up there don't like a lot of blabber

They think a girl who gossips is a bore

...

It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man.

If I were a conspiracists an elite cabal of families were attempting to turn every other male as incapable of attracting a female so there asshole trust fund sons could have unlimited choices.

It’s almost the complete opposite of every romance story I got growing up where the man should be turned down a few hundred times before she finally accepts he can’t resist her and it’s true love.

the man should be turned down a few hundred times before she finally accepts he can’t resist her and it’s true love.

In fairness, this is almost equally bad and unrealistic advice. Simping your way through the friendzone is not a much more effective strategy.

The "Poor Unfortunate Souls" change is odd. Ursula is a villain, and it doesn't take any leaps of insight to realize that she's not someone to be emulated. If anything, it'd be a more effective feminist message if her anti-feminist advice was shown to be a counterproductive part of her cynical ploy.

The hypothesis that Hollywood types believe in the "mere exposure" effect causes a lot of scripting oddness to suddenly resolve into comprehensiblity. If you think that simply seeing/hearing a thing on a screen will stochastically cause some number of impressionable audience members to believe and/or copy it, then the total excision of taboo positions from even villains' mouths makes sense, as does cramming a massive overabundance of LGBTQ characters into every show.

Ursula's character is also deliberately modeled on a drag queen and very interested in corrupting young Ariel. I am surprised that I haven't seen anti-groomer culture warriors run with this.

Oh, the fun part there is that McCarthy got eaten for that - by the wokie side! Yes, if you're gonna boast that you're basing your character on drag queen (and original Ursula was based on Divine as well) then that is appropriation of drag culture and the makeup artist, at the bare minimum and very least, should be LGBT themselves! And the character should have been played by a drag queen anyway!

I have to say, I enjoyed that backlash (but of course, the media don't call it "backlash" when the progressives do it).

I didn't know new Ursula was based on a different one, I only know about the "Divine" connection.

Yeah but, by that logic it's a double reversal here. Not over-talking and refraining from gossip actually are admirable traits in anyone: women and men. So Ursela was actually giving good advice in the first movie - and explicitly worked out for Ariel. Her quiet shyness did endear her to Eric. And so removing that advice actually makes Ursula a worse person.

At the same time, under-talking can also be a thing. If you don't manage to convey your personality at all, it can be hard to get some sense of what you're like, which makes it less likely that people will take interest in you, I think. Bringing that up of course doesn't work in this context, though, and you are correct.

It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire). In the Disney case it's probably more complicated given that lots of people like the villains as characters, identify with them (often bundled up in reading Queer coding into many villains) and the whole genre of essentially fanfiction retellings of villains weren't the bad guy books/plays/movies (Grendel, Wicked, Maleficent) from very simple classic stories with black and white morality.

A fundamentalist Christian film is unlikely to portray a lot of casual sex and drug use.

If nothing else, pretending to be unwoke/sinful is bad for the actors' moral fibre.

Fundamentalist Christian works are not always well written, but they don’t generally shy away from portraying villains as or heavily implying them to be LGBT. Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers. Probably the better example is the fundamentalist Christian reluctance to portray blasphemy or (certain kinds of)profanity even from villains, because they believe portraying it to be sinful.

Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers.

Not sure what you mean here.

Fundamentalist Writers don’t have casual sex, don’t do drugs, so they don’t write about it because it doesn’t occur to them as things people do. Just like how few sitcoms portray characters going to the range for male bonding, even with red coded protagonists, that’s because it doesn’t occur to the writers to portray.

If they read the Bible, they'll be aware of casual sex as things that sinners do.

More comments

MPAA R ratings are not going to be a winning move for that target demo. Very heavily implied alcohol abuse is not uncommon for certain stock character types.

True, it's interesting how some sins (excessive alcohol use, violence as long as it's not too graphic) are more acceptable to many people than sex or drug use.

To many people, drug use and certain categories of sex are unacceptable at all. Alcohol and violence are unacceptable in excess.

Makes sense.

It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire).

I don’t think that’s difficult to understand. Putting it out there and arguing against it (implicitly by associating with villainy) shows that the perspective can be contested. Better to remove the logical syntax from the zeitgeist so that it can’t even be thought.

Of course, I don’t think it’s particularly effective in this case…

Precisely. If you try to associate an idea with villainy, you run the risk that the audience keeps the idea and rejects the attempted association. If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedWrongness

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire

If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

This has a lot of the same energy as the stereotype (rooted in truth? Everyone says it is, but I have my doubts) about sheltered Catholic schoolgirls discovering sex in the outside world and becoming absolute freaks, presumably due in large part due to their lack of exposure to it in their upbringing. If you can count on having absolute totalitarian control over a child's life, the sheltered approach can work, but you have to be just about perfect, and the lack of preparation makes a single miscue potentially disastrous. In the context of these disapproved ideas, one would need close to totalitarian control over things people say to each other in public discourse which certainly seems to be the goal, though the odds of it actually succeeding seems rather low at this point.

Yes, it has to be near-hegemonic to work. It can, though, I think. All the stories I’ve heard indicate that people really were much more sexually sheltered in the 30s, or even the 60s, compared to now. It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution spread through society in the late 60s that knowing a lot about sex became the default rather than the exception.

I am reminded of Stormfront from The Boys. In a show that revels in trashy awfulness, and really wishes to impress on you the irredeemable bigotry of her character, its remarkable which areas the creators refuse to go. When we have the flashback to her horrific murder of an innocent black man, they can't even muster the bravery to have the N word (or anything similar) leave her mouth. Instead you get childlike utterances like "you black piece of shit" and whatnot. As if her lines were written by a teenager that really really wants an uber-racist villainess, but is mindful to not cross the line and get scolded by his teachers.

I suddenly realized that this show - despite all its outward appearances - does not have any balls.

Well, murder may be a little excessive, but profane language? Never in this house shall such utterance cross our lips! 🤣

I'm sure Amazon wouldn't let them use the N-word or anything similar.

My default assumption, but I can also see current-day writers avoiding it because "I feel icky just even writing the word". Part and parcel of modern writing being unble to write anything outside of its own perspective, and coming up with ridiculous (yet strangely gimped) caricatures when it attempts to.

Harrison Ford is 80 years old, who on earth thought he should star in an action movie? He was already too old in Crystal Skull in 2008. Couldn't believe it when I saw the trailer yesterday.

Outside of the obvious problems with it (Harrison Ford's age and following up on a train wreck of a movie that bifurcated the lore in a detrimental direction), Indiana Jones can't be remade or followed up on succesfully because Indiana Jones is a throwback to pulp adventure stories/comic books almost no one remembers now. I think the last thing to succesfully tap into nostagia for that that was The Mummy in... 1999. Now, Indiana Jones IS the reference. There's only so much you can achieve by referencing two/three beloved movies (opinions are mixed on #2).

This is a broader problem with remake/sequel culture, succesful pop culture franchises were built by drawing heavily from preceding pop culture but in a new way; a remix. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back built a franchise through heavy inspiration from pulp sci-fi and samurai(/western) movies; mix them together, you get Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and more strongly the sequel trilogy's inspiration is... Star Wars. No significant additional inspiration was added to it, they just remixed a remix. Nothing new is created, they're just diluting the original signal. Of course, the fans would probably be disappointed if they did anything else; the prequel trilogy was mostly rejected because it was different. (Rejecting it because it wasn't very good is fine; rejecting it because it doesn't feel like Star Wars is a case of "careful what you wish for" that we can all appreciate in hindsight with the sequel trilogy).

So anyway, sorry for the meandering post to come to the shocking conclusion that remake and belated sequels are creatively bankrupt, but I just had to take the opportunity reflecting on the new Indiana Jones movie to work through why it is creatively bankrupt.

Again, it's all rumours, but this was apparently meant to be - at the start anyway - as a "handing over the baton" movie; Indy sits back in his rocking-chair and hands it all over to his goddaugher (the character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and one of the original versions seems to really have dragged Indy's character down, even rumoured to have the time travel McGuffin used to go back in time and wipe him out of the timeline completely so the only Indy would be new girlboss Indy. As you can imagine, that went down swell at test screenings 🙄

The version at Cannes seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with the critics, even when Disney scrubbed a ton of the indignities heaped on Indy, and some critics were pretty savage about it.

Even on Rotten Tomatoes, where there are critics saying it's good, the score stands (so far) at 50%:

The good news is that it’s not as poor as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The bad news is that it’s not much better.

Mostly, it's to wrap up the series (presumably while Ford is still alive and can still act the part). There's sort of on-off talk about maybe doing a TV show, who knows, but that's down the line. Even in the movie, they seem to have used CGI to de-age Indy for the opening bits set in the past, so perhaps that's the future, if AI gets off the ground: Number XIX in the Indiana Jones franchise with all (or mostly) AI-generated actors! Even if your star has been dead for thirty years, we can make them look eternally 35 years old for a limitless number of features!

who on earth thought he should star in an action movie?

Probably Harrison Ford? By all accounts he actually loves the character, as opposed to Han Solo where he required a dump truck of money to do an obligatory film and then close the book forever by being killed off.

When I last saw pictures of him promoting the movie he looked as if he regretted not managing to kill himself in his last plane accident.

Harrison Ford is 80 years old, who on earth thought he should star in an action movie?

The audiences, apparently. Most of what Hollywood produces these days are either remakes or sequels. There's something to be said here about lack of cultural vitality. I suspect the movie will be a hit simply on account of nostalgia and sentimental buying.

The only real action franchise worth anything that has emerged in the last decade was probably John Wick. I also like the Taken series but the main protagonist is quite old now. Frankly, so is Reeves.

Yeah, Keanu Reeves (John Wick) is 58, Vin Diesel (Fast X) is 55 and Tom Cruise (MI) is 60. These are fun action franchises, but where are the fun action franchises with up-and-comers who are 20-30? I sure hope Ezra Miller isn't representative of the future of Hollywood "stars"...

The best part of the Flash trailer was Michael Keaton as Batman. I imagine they've sunk too much money into it to scrap the movie, but surely Ezra Miller hasn't much of a future career, given their, um, colourful recent activities? We probably are stuck in a trough where the action leads are getting too old, but the new stars aren't there yet or are in different genres.

TBH you could distill Keanu Reeves in liquid form and I'd be lining up every day for my dose straight to the veins.

Kind of a shower thought, but could it be that it's just really hard to write an interesting, unique badass hero nowadays without being excoriated for toxic masculinity and being retrograde? Indiana Jones and Han Solo get grandfathered in as endearing classics of a bygone age, so you get a pass if you recycle them (although you probably have to pay some tribute to wokeness in the form of retcons and script changes).

Perhaps also there's also a suspension of disbelief problem. Millennials and zoomers are permanently on seven layers of irony and have grown up on endless trope subversion. How could you write a straight action hero who would appeal to such an audience?

That's something I noticed too. It seems like the answer is Die Hard. Your action star is completely self effacing about his remarkable skills, he gets forced into saving the day by the bad guys, and he perserveres through great hardship to do so. John Wick, Nobody, Olympus has Fallen, White House Down, Taken, The Nice Guys, probably others I've forgotten, they've all been pretty popular doing this.

Tom Holland has done some non-marvel action/action-adjacent work. The kind of schlocky things that wouldn't be that out of place for an 80s action star.

It's funny since Crystal Skull was clearly set up to have Shia LeBoeuf take over for a continuation series (that you could even have completely different writers and directors since it should be somewhat tonally shifted) but for various reasons it just didn't work out. So they're doing another Indy is old, should be able to retire and there's a young one to take the reins movie but this time with modern sensibilities.

It's probably taken this long for audiences to forget how bad Crystal Skull was.

I'm pretty sure that Ford and Le Boeuf were never filmed together, probably at Ford's insistence. I haven't watched the whole thing, but every scene I watched had negative chemistry and gave of vibes of independent performances composited together.

I think it had plenty of good ideas with an on-paper plot/beat structure that could have worked but with some serious execution issues especially in terms of directing actors, dialog writing and CGI (very similar to StarWars prequels). The whole Aliens thing was apparently a George Lucas idea he really wanted to put in and there's no accounting for taste.

I watched the entire series for the first time a few years back and without the nostalgia or leaning on the cultural context of Sean Connery, I found each movie dramatically worse that the previous one, and about evenly. I thought the difference between 3 and 4 was about equal to the distance between 3 and 2, and then 2 and 1, quality wise.

Interesting, the 1 > 2 > 3 is a ranking that I've never encountered from anyone. Most people place 2 below 1 and 3, with a surprisingly high amount of people ranking 3 above 1. 4 seems to be universally far below any of the 1st 3 for most.

I'm one of the few people who loves 2 and thinks it's easily on par with 1 and 3, and I honestly can't rank-order them; they're all masterpieces in their own way, and I lack the ability to judge one as being better than another (I haven't seen 4 so can't comment on that one).

It's certainly a rare view, but I was quite disappointed with and bored by 3. A good deal of what makes it work is the subversion of Connery from his usual expectations, and that is very cultural moment in time referential that degrades the further away you are. I also generally don't like the 'old-timer' tagging along or the adult man reconnects with distanced dad plots so, the whole team up weighed it down for me, and the Holy Grail bit with associated deadly magic was just derivative at this point.

2 was quite surprising at the quality and tone downgrade from 1, but once you accepted and adjusted I thought it was a fine and unique movie that really only suffered from following up on 1. It being more of a bottle made it comparatively worse than 1's globe-trotting but better than being a shallow derivative, which 3 and 4 and likely 5 all are.

  1. Almost brilliant, only weighed down by the fact that Indy doesn't actually have any agency over the plot. IIRC, Nazis get the arc and die from opening it in a timeline where he didn't exist. (9/10)

  2. A fun romp. (7/10)

  3. Boring, derivative action movie with a few timeless visuals, but overall better left in the 80s (5/10)

  4. Bad reboot with a has-been protagonist, with some watchable bits and some cringe bits in equal parts. (3/10)

  5. ... Flaming Garbage? (1/10)?

IIRC, Nazis get the arc and die from opening it in a timeline where he didn't exist.

I think the difference he makes is that without him, the Nazis would keep possession of the Ark after the first group opened it and died. Instead, Jones was able to get it to the Americans somehow, who turned it over to their Top Men.

More comments

I have a slightly different view, but pretty similar: 1 is brilliant, 2 is bad, 3 is good, 4 was almost unwatchable. I think I would quite like 3 even without Sean Connery, though it would be only "average". 2 was saved from being terrible for me only by some memorable action scenes (like the bridge stuff at the end) and some great set design.

I didn't need to forget it. Didn't watch it in the first place.

Watching Midnight's Edge, Nerdrotic and Doomcock bag on Disney is what I do when I'm not reading this forum. Nice to see I'm not the only one.

I stumbled onto their channels when I was suffering with Rings of Power and needed to find reviewers who weren't "this show is amazing and the only reason you might dislike it is because you're a sexist racist homophobe transphobe white supremacist fascist!" This also brought me to Critical Drinker and The Little Platoon and others.

I even got into Eric Kain because he came around after his first, way too sunnily optimistic take on the show and is now down here in the Pit of Despair with the rest of us trolls and undesirables that it's a steaming godawful mess. Though he likes the new Little Mermaid!

Anyway, if we get Season Two Rings of Power, it will be much more bearable to know that there will be other people watching and reviewing it to shreds. At this stage, I only expect to watch it to see how bad they can get, and how they're going to mess up canon this time round.

Yeah, I was in a group of 10+ people watching the first season which was a lot of fun just to talk about how bad it was, and only contributes 1 view to their stats, which made it worth it to us. I wouldn't have watched it alone.

Stop consooming.

If you reward them with your attention, of course they will make more. Just read the books again. Or buy a used copy of the Peter Jackson films and watch those.

Things that are true:

  • They stretched their balance sheet to by 20th Century Fox, raising their debt to $45 billion to close the transaction. They have quite a bit of breathing room on the maturity and they obtained it under quite low rates, but that's a lot of debt.

  • They have to buy out Comcast from Hulu, making the payment in 2024, but the price is subject to debate. Still this is likely to be a substantial cost in the $15-20 billion range.

  • The Little Mermaid is posting dissapointing numbers especially internationally. Compare the box office to date to the Lion King at similar points which grossed $1 billion outside the US.

  • Nelson Peltz is an activist investor whose position is strengthened by these struggles and should he succeed will get more cash for shareholders from the company.

Now onto judgment calls:

  • Net working capital (the source of the $200 million) isn't the best tool for judging liquidity.

  • Acid test ratio (the ratio of just cash and liquid current assets over liabilities) isn't great, at 0.3 but most big businesses use current liabilities to fund a lot more than intended. This isn't as solid a measure as it once was.

  • More concerning is Altman's Z score which is a loose prdictor of bankruptcy at 1.94 that's pretty poor for a major company (compare Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta in the double digits where over 3 is good). It's not the worst in their industry (AT&T which bought TimeWarner recently is much worse at about 0.4).

  • All of these do indicate that Disney is going to have some very tight belts for a while especially if their tentpoles underperform (especially given the expectations that the new Indy film is unlikely to outperfrom).

Hearing Peltz health is in serious decline. So probably eases up on them a lot.

Is there any source for indiana jones reshoots beyond just this guy? The movie comes out on June 30 - They premiered it at Cannes on May 18. I have no idea how this would possibly work - the Writers Strike (ongoing since May 2) means you can't actually rewrite anything AFAIK, organizing actors, travelling, shooting, and doing post-production in that short amount of time? I can't find anything in the trades about it either, surely someone would have spotted Harrison Ford or Phoebe Waller Bridge or someone on a plane or out and about.

The reshoots were earlier this year.

Right, the way OP phrased it suggested the reshoots were because of the reception at Cannes which struck me as impossible. I figured there were probably standard post production reshoots last year as with a lot of these types of movies

Yeah, sorry. It does seem that they showed a cleaned-up version (much less scornful of Indy) at Cannes and that didn't wow the audience as expected, so there is still talk about what changes, if any, will be made before it gets into theatres near you.

I doubt Lucas has the money to buy back Star Wars. IP line that is worth way more today than the prices back then.

Agree on his fight with Disney. Too many places are assuming he’s f$cked and bound to lose which dominates most message boards. Personally I think he has a strong case and this is going the way of every Trump prosecution where the “bad” guy wins.

What mechanism, other than perhaps sheer monetary inflation, is supposed to make the Star Wars IP value go up since Disney bought it?

  1. They have invested in the franchise. There’s a lot more IP now. Maybe nothing as valuable as the initial.

  2. I just think assets that can’t be replaced - which I put Star Wars in that bucket - have appreciated. Things like sports teams rights have surged. Truly unique content of id call it Americana has done well.

  1. Spamming content does not make line go up. If anyone wanted too see the sequel to the Rey Skywalker saga you'd have a point, but they don't. Anyone buying the franchise would probably be better off doing to the Disney content what Disney did to the EU.

  2. Uhhh... maybe? Seems hard to prove one way or the other.

Maybe. Think my main reason is platforms trade at much higher valuations today than platforms traded when Stars Wars was bought.

Activision Blizzard traded for $68.7 billion. I don’t think any of there assets are as iconic as Star Wars or Indiana Jones but perhaps video game studies are more valuable that individual IP.

They have invested in the franchise. There’s a lot more IP now. Maybe nothing as valuable as the initial.

There is a lot less ip now. The extended universe was huge.

All of which is still owned by Lucasfilm, and some of it is still getting published.

It's not like the new owner couldn't reverse the decision, and throw the Disney content into the trash instead.

They can kick off the next trilogy by having Luke wake up and realise it was all a bad dream. And then he spends the rest of the movie bitching about it to his padawans - "and then she called herself Skywalker and tried to lay claim to my uncle Owen's farm, it was truly a nightmare."

Movies and shows made

Assuming he got a decent valuation for it initially, I don't really see how the IP could have appreciated faster than him just parking it in a standard investment portfolio. TBH, Disney would have done better buying T-Bills compared to what they've done with Star Wars.

I doubt Lucas has the money to buy back Star Wars. IP line that is worth way more today than the prices back then.

I donno. Disney spent $4.1B on it, and the viewership has consistently shrunk since they bought it. A strong argument could be made they have enormously devalued the IP. First by scrapping the entire EU, second by deciding Star Wars is now for girls, third by having different directors retconning back and forth on the movies, fourth by flooding the IP with garbage on Disney+. They're already shutting down the Star Wars Hotel they spent fabulous sums constructing. It was only open from March 2022 to Sept 2023.

In my perfect world, Lucas would offer to buy it back for $2B when they need the cash.

They're already shutting down the Star Wars Hotel they spent fabulous sums constructing. It was only open from March 2022 to Sept 2023.

Just looked this up. They themed it off of the SEQUEL trilogy. Are they retarded? The sequel trilogy ended with Rise of Skywalker in December 2019. Nobody cares about Rey or Kylo or The First Order anymore. I know Disney is all about marketing synergy, but that only goes so far. You can use banked-up nostalgia to sell subpar movie tickets for $15 each, but you can't then use those subpar movies to sell $6,000 themed vacations.

Are they retarded?

No comment, but it seems (according to the rumours on such reviewer channels) that Kathleen Kennedy insisted the sequel characters be the ones used. Even a fool like me knows people want to cosplay/see actors dressed up as Luke and Vader and Chewie etc. not Rey and Kylo (maybe Finn and Poe get a pass). Even Darth Maul has probably dropped off in popularity since the first set of sequel movies. When people think of Star Wars, the original three movies are the ones they think of.

I know that to make the property continually profitable, you need to have successor characters for new movies, but Rey ain't it.

Disney seems to have this odd idea they can make people are about the new movies as much as the original trilogy through sheer force of will.

deleted

Plus according some reddit trip reports it was poorly executed. The service was bad, the little game rooms they send you through kept breaking and the actors weren't into it. Sounds out of character for Disney really. For $2000/night in Florida I would expect top quality everything.

The price was too high, but more significant than that was the fact that there was no presence of the actual characters I care about, like Han and Luke and Leia. Or that guy. I’ll take goddamn that guy, just give me someone I know.

The fact that Kennedy or anyone even suggested this and wasn't fired immediately explains everything about where Disney Star Wars is.

An enemy company could not have come up with a more malicious suggestion to slip into the box.

And for what? It's not like the Sequel Trilogy has its own unique character. They could have had both OT characters and newer stuff.

Is it really just a "I want my thing to be the Thing?"

As fast as they pivoted I wonder if there's a rights issue around the old characters.

I heard that given as a reason they wiped the old EU but then they did bring back Thrawn and co.

Oh yeah, definitely - Lucas gets a cut of anything with the old casts on it, and Disney didn't want to have to pay him anything. So they cooked the golden goose.

I'll believe it when I see it.

But it does tickle my pickle watching Disney increasingly flounder in the global market. Allegedly. While sure, there are nonsensical BLM protest in the UK and elsewhere, and an argument can be made that our identity politics are being exported globally, it may perhaps just be Western Europe. Russia doesn't care, China doesn't care, India doesn't care, South America doesn't care, the Middle East doesn't care. I'm not even sure Africa cares. You might be able to extract money out of the PMC types who want to be Party members in good standing. But most everywhere else in the world looks at you like you have 3 heads when you shove a black Ariel in their face and the songs have been rewritten to be about respecting waman instead of romance.

I'm reminded of Tucker's debut twitter monologue, where he talks about how Americans are profoundly ignorant about what the world thinks of us, or what it's even like at all, because our information diet is so rigorously controlled. And while it's marginally difficult to believe a massive global corporation like Disney is as blind as the rest of us rubes, maybe they do believe their own bullshit a bit more than I thought. Editing black people out of their Chinese releases not withstanding.

this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!

I also recall that the Last Jedi did poorly in China because the actors weren't attractive.

I heard that about Shang-Chi too (couldn't be that the Chinese - who, unlike black Americans, have their own whole industry - don't really care about a "groundbreaking" Chinese-American superhero?)

It's amazing, we've never been more connected yet the weirdest stories come out of China and just proliferate as if they're urban legends about Japan in the 80s or something.

It's amazing, we've never been more connected yet the weirdest stories come out of China and just proliferate as if they're urban legends about Japan in the 80s or something.

I mean... it goes both ways.

I had tremendous fun using Pepe as a racist shibboleth and then when anyone called me out on my racist shibbolething, I show them that he's the mascot of Hong Kong democracy.

Hell, in the murky waters of philosophical semiotics, I'm not even sure my bad-faith arguments were even wrong.

True. Real time AI translation can't come fast enough I guess.

deleted

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats