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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!
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.
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 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.
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)
A fun romp. (7/10)
Boring, derivative action movie with a few timeless visuals, but overall better left in the 80s (5/10)
Bad reboot with a has-been protagonist, with some watchable bits and some cringe bits in equal parts. (3/10)
... Flaming Garbage? (1/10)?
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.
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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.
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