domain:themotte.org
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.
In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here.
I don't think they explicitly wanted to alienate their male audience, but there's undoubtedly an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They're very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preach to men about their supposed privilege and shove women in their faces which are ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just end up being odious. I don't think they explicitly want men to be give their IPs the cold shoulder; rather I think they want men to eat these ideological messages up. Hell they do this to female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to lecture their male audience instead of appeal to them.
I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate them into feminism. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls".
What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of politicking that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.
Until they learn to stop doing this, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
35m ago
Hmmm, street walking, were you? (Scribbles note)
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
42m ago
What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.
I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.
Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)
That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.
Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.
Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.
There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.
(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
58m ago
Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).
"Going for a run, he showers off the sweat" is no more correct, so it's not really about the tense here. "Going for a run, he listens to music" is only very slightly better. The issue isn't actually that the latter action has to take place during the former; it's that "going for a run" is actually a description of a static event, describing the start of the run.
So I'd say that "going for a run, he stepped out the door" is actually more correct than either of the other two, and also more in-line with the original example. It's an odd case where the sentence structure only works if the latter action is somewhat taken while the start of the former action is happening.
"Starting his run, he stepped out the door" is best of all. Or "Following the man, he stepped through the door behind him." In both cases the former action sort of describes and informs the latter but is also an action in its own right. I'd argue this is precisely what's happening in the sentence you described too. "Hefting" isn't actually separate from swinging the mace; it's a description that informs the swinging of the mace, similar to "Using all his strength, he swung the mace."
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