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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!
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.
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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.
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