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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!
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?
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.
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