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I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
Tbh this seems utterly pointless for judging anything about the wider "left-wing takeover" or even Disney. We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies. We have no comparisons to other books released at a similar time. We do have a comparison to a book series released decades ago, which is likely irrelevant in the current market. We have no analysis of anything else Disney does with the property, or Disney's own success.
You say this:
No shit it doesn't matter. Even if sales of the book series blew away the Thrawn trilogy that the author cites, it wouldn't even make a dent in Disney's P&L. Where's the look at Disney's overall financial health?
Every large corporation has issues with "fiefdoms" forming: is there any evidence that Disney is worse than, say, Ford? Or P&G or Salesforce or Shell or Walmart or Apple? Any evidence that left-wing or "woke" politics is causing particular problems for Disney over the pet issues of other large corporations
If you want to complain about a book series, go ahead. But I think you need to bring much more evidence to link this to any kind of issue with major corporations
Star Wars is the epitome of nerd franchise. Nerds buy books. Now, if the books had broken into the mainstream (say, like Harry Potter), it would have blown all of the previous entries away. But even if they didn't, nerds still buy books. If these books were appealing to the traditional Star Wars demographic, 6 figure sales wouldn't be a problem.
It's not necessarily irrational for Disney to blow some money on a gamble like that, but that they keep putting them out does imply something about Disney's internal politics.
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Ah so you didn’t bother reading the article. Cool.
A new release sold 13000 copies, much lower than the figures for some of the other books.
Why would you post something that harms your own argument? Or are you saying that the 15million figure is the comparison? Except that's not the same time at all, those books were released in 1991 and that's 20+ years of sales, not to mention a massively book industry
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Wow, 13,000 copies? A veritable Harry Potter indeed.
By modern SFF standards, 13,000 copies is actually respectable numbers. Not bestseller numbers or "Could become an HBO series" numbers, but you might be surprised how few copies most books sell. And as @Magusoflight pointed out, this is for a 30 year old set.
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That’s for a newly released box set for a book trilogy written in 1991. So, yeah. Better numbers for the newly minted woke novels
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