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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   39539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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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 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.

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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.

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