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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!
Again, it's all rumours, but this was apparently meant to be - at the start anyway - as a "handing over the baton" movie; Indy sits back in his rocking-chair and hands it all over to his goddaugher (the character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and one of the original versions seems to really have dragged Indy's character down, even rumoured to have the time travel McGuffin used to go back in time and wipe him out of the timeline completely so the only Indy would be new girlboss Indy. As you can imagine, that went down swell at test screenings 🙄
The version at Cannes seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with the critics, even when Disney scrubbed a ton of the indignities heaped on Indy, and some critics were pretty savage about it.
Even on Rotten Tomatoes, where there are critics saying it's good, the score stands (so far) at 50%:
The good news is that it’s not as poor as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The bad news is that it’s not much better.
Mostly, it's to wrap up the series (presumably while Ford is still alive and can still act the part). There's sort of on-off talk about maybe doing a TV show, who knows, but that's down the line. Even in the movie, they seem to have used CGI to de-age Indy for the opening bits set in the past, so perhaps that's the future, if AI gets off the ground: Number XIX in the Indiana Jones franchise with all (or mostly) AI-generated actors! Even if your star has been dead for thirty years, we can make them look eternally 35 years old for a limitless number of features!
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