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