This is yet another example of Get Woke, Go Broke. South Park's "Panderverse" mocked Disney's special kind of stupid. Audiences are voting with their wallets.
I don't think that is necessarily true. The new Indiana Jones film was far from "woke," yet did poorly, as did The Flash, another non-woke film, and The Marvels. Unless you consider casting non-white males as "woke," none of those films were in any way, shape, or form political or "woke." Meanwhile, Super Mario Bros. and Barbie, both very much in the "woke" camp, knocked it out of the park.
The new Indiana Jones movies was a woke as it gets particularly if you examine the film prior to its delays and reshoots. Test screenings were abysmal and the initial ending of the film was Indy dying and Phoebe Waller bridge literally putting in the hat. Her role in the film was severely cut prior to release.
Reading the rest of your comment indicates a difference in the understanding of “woke” from how it’s used pejoratively. It’s far from merely “replace white men,” though that’s an undeniable symptom and an easy one to point at.
Consider “woke” as: replace story, theme and branding with a specific modern leftist ideology that requires the elevation of “marginalized people” in a deterministic hierarchy. Men<women; White < Asian < Hispanic < Black; cis < homo < trans; rich < poor; religious < secular... and so on. The complaint isn’t merely that it’s bigotry (which it is) but also that it’s terrible entertainment that no one wants to see because it’s utterly predictable. A counter example is the success of One Piece which has numerous gender and race swaps and indeed a trans actor but delivers the story of One Piece without changing the narrative or themes. People don’t have an issue with swaps--they hate shite media.
And if you want to argue this is just angry right wing dudes in the US, take a second look at how terribly these media projects fare overseas. Bombs. All of ‘em.
Of course this may also be related the the trend of simplistic, superficial and boring tropes Hollywood has been pumping for decades. It makes the application of “woke” even worse because it belies the fact that it’s all a cynical money grab in a vacuum of ideas.
I only know the version I saw in the theater, and it didn't exhibit any of the traits you've listed. I noticed no leftist ideology whatsoever, nor any elevation of marginalized people. I saw a film where Indiana Jones traipsed around the world, fought villains, pieced together clues, and unearthed a relic with magical properties. His female sidekick was just that, a helper. She never outdid him, and in fact she was constantly being proven wrong and learning from him. She went from being a cocky, immoral rogue to someone who learned the value of doing the right thing from Indy. Overall it was a refreshing change from the sorts of films you describe, as it avoided all the woke pitfalls.
I've never heard of One Piece, so I can't comment on that. Google tells me it's a cartoon, but it's nothing I'm familar with.
Isn't the perception of the movie as being woke more relevant than the reality of it's wokeness when explaining a lack of viewership? It seems to me that people did not go to this movie because of their expectations of the movie (based on current trends and promotional material).
This is made worse by the fact that reviewers of films are either not going to even consider mentioning a level of wokeness (if they are woke), or will always assume all Hollywood products are woke (if they are anti-woke).
I have been surprised by movies and shows whose narratives have diverged from the messaging I expected, so I find your description of the movie totally plausible, and not resulting from a unique definition of woke. However, perception of woke (accurate or not) seems like a relevant factor IMO. As a counter-example, take Top Gun: Maverick: an extension of an old franchise that actually performed very well. N=1 but this movie stands out against the overall argument of the article. Maybe the line between nostalgia and monotony rides the contours of our viewpoints.
That's an interesting thought. It is hard to understand how some movies get singled out for backlash from the anti-woke mob, and equally hard to determine if that backlash has any effect on ticket sales. I remember the rage directed at the first Captain Marvel film, despite it being completely devoid of any wokeness whatsoever, but the film made over a billion dollars. Meanwhile, something like the recent Mario Bros. film, which was stuffed full of activist propaganda, skated by unscathed, and also made a over a billion. There seems to be no correlation between angry backlash and box office.
When a film that enrages the small but vocal mob does fail, they will no doubt take credit for the failure, i.e. The Marvels, but my sense is that its poor box office showing had nothing to do with perceived wokeness at all.
And yes, there's also the matter of what is even meant by woke. To some it seems the act of casting a non-white male in a lead role equates to wokeness. To others, what matters is the film's message.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that woke vs. anti-woke is yet another contrived point of division, giving people yet another excuse to insult and hate one another, and is ultimately of no consequence when it comes to box office results.
There’s a real discussion that needs to happen about ballooning budgets as well. Films like Dial of Destiny, the recent Little Mermaid or the Marvels were so behind schedule and over budget, they needed to gross half a billion (or more) just to break even (other notable examples The Flash and Rings of Power). So we have a situation where the stakes couldn’t be higher and any impression that might derail a film’s trajectory--which is upstream of word-of-mouth--can have disastrous effects including political ones! It’s incredible to consider how important media is to every aspect of our society!
Lastly, I think there’s a real story about the re-tooling of IJ:DoD and a subsequent media cover up, but it’s not a story I can personally lay out, and as Greg notes, may be irrelevant based on the film that was actually released. What I can say about that film, regardless of it it was Woke, is that it was a deconstruction of Indy and the pulp genre.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with deconstruction as a critique or revelatory process to suss out patent themes and ideas. The Barbie film was also a deconstruction--and hugely popular because of that! But it’s important to notice that the audience to whom that film largely appealed (and was marketed toward) were college educated women who statistically are more likely to have studied the varieties of critiques as part of their English majors. The movie hit them right in the place that best justifies their world views.
Consider deconstructionism as the underlying template upon which Woke resides and we can start to see an even longer thread, one we can tug all the way back to “Bonny and Clyde”, or “The Man Who Killed Liberty Valence.” This was very sexy once upon a time, but all film going audiences have leveled up since then and rather than being new and exciting, Deconstruction is tired and cliché. Unfortunately, I find the argument I’ll sum up as, “We just want our simple stories back!” as unworkable. This isn’t a genie that can go back into the bottle and film will need to move into a new stage in order to maintain relevance. I think this makes video games even more likely to overtake cinema as games can deftly navigate all of these realms by offering the participants the opportunity to generate their own narratives. It’s why I don’t think the “cinema will be just fine,” narrative is a safe bet.
“if you want to argue this is just angry right wing dudes in the US” actually at this point it sort of is. A brief visit to Fox News is enough to confirm that 😉
I will agree on one thing though - a lot of movies use representation to signal virtue instead of actually writing an intelligent script, which the Marvel series has done pretty much from the beginning and elsewhere is largely the case across the board. But a movie that actually executes on that idea, and still comes in for the same mindless invective, is a different matter. I’d argue “Barbie” is such a movie. No doubt it’s successor movies will swiftly fall into the franchising trap
Personally, I think using Fox News as a measure for anything is a big mistake and I hope you might consider the issue is more complex than you’ve been led to believe. I’m a creature of the left and it’s clear to me there an issue with leftist tribalism, I don’t need conservatives to tell me that.
I think you meant that response for someone else. I wish the woke polizei would infiltrate my Substack. At least then someone would be commenting on it. :P
The extremely woke Barbie movie just made over a billion dollars so I don’t think that’s the problem. People are just bored of formulaic movies, whatever their politics.
THIS! How about just good stories. Escapism in small measure is delicious but every damn movie a comic book hero is just too much.
H’wd cannot seem to be creative anymore. Copy copy copy. Speaking of Barbie they’ll now be making movies based on other toys with none of the irony or wit and wonder what the hell went wrong. SMDH
My wife, in her third pregnancy, insisted on mowing the grass until she was at seven months. In spite of my protestations. She's definitely not "woke," or anything like that :)
Using “woke” is the de facto standard for stating a refusal to think before making an argument! Super impressive technique for letting all of us know about the vacuum inside yr head there!
Pretending one doesn’t understand “woke” is a de facto standard for people whose heads are fully inserted into their rectum. It was a proud term of art on the left a mere 5 years ago. Everyone knows what it means.
Perhaps, if you really want to school that guy, ask him to define his terms. Let him fall into his own trap by describing what he means by “woke.” You’ll either catch him out or not. Wisdom comes from finding out you were wrong, not knowing you were right all along.
(If you want my definition, which is fair, see my reply to Greg, I don’t wish to re-type it. If you disagree tell me why.)
Even if the term was common on the left 5 years ago, that doesn't mean it has the same definition now. I know that what it meant originally was "aware of social injustice and bigotry in an immediate, practical way." And, when used as a pejorative, it meant "someone who thinks they are aware, but actually isn't."
That clearly is not how the term is being used today. But there's a reason you had to come up with your own definition: those who use the term don't define it. And this seems to be deliberate, as its use is very mercurial. It changes depending on the topic and the person. This is common with right wing pejoratives for left wing positions. See also "politically correct," "virtue signaling," "SJW." None of them are well-defined. I think it's entirely intentional. It's a term used more in rhetoric than argument. By keeping it nebulous, the same thought terminating cliches can be used.
I'm not pretending when I say I don't know what "woke" means. I'm making a point about how poorly defined it is. Sure, I could also make that point by asking them to define it, but then I'd have to monitor this page and stick around. That's more effort than I'm willing to put in. I just read an article, saw a comment I thought was wrong by someone who seemed reasonable, and made an argument.
At the end of the day, there isn't an agreed upon definition that always applies. Heck, even the definition you gave is extremely subjective. It allows "go woke go broke" to be always true. Because anything that didn't go broke can be said not to really be woke.
Black Panther made money, as did Barbie, so "wokeness," or what you might perceive as "wokeness" (i.e., non-white characters, or women in leading roles) wasn't the issue. The Flash failed as well, and it's subtext was quite conservative.
Black Panther had a well-grounded, longstanding story to start with that could stand on its own. It wasn't an attempt to dumb down something else.
For a good example of dumbing down something else, a pre-existing story, take the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, which was awful. (The later 2021 movie is pretty bad as well, for entirely different reasons.)
Which just means that "go woke, go broke" is not true. Black Panther is woke but because it could "stand on its own" and isn't "an attempt to dumb down something else," it did well. That suggests the problem is not being woke, but not being able to "stand on its own" and "dumbing thing down."
That's my thing. No matter how you define "woke," everyone agrees there is at least some woke stuff that does do well financially--that doesn't "go broke." The same right wingers who say "go woke, go broke" will then decry things that are woke and doing well. So clearly the aphorism is not correct.
It's more aspirational. The right wants it to be true.
It depends on your definition of woke. The dumbing-down and inversion of reality are unequivocally "woke." So the Bud Light thing or the 2016 Ghostbusters bombed, for example. The Black Panther phenomenon lies in a gray zone. It could be interpreted as woke, but it has its own story, independent of anything else. Stuff like that won't automatically succeed, but it can stand or fall on its own merits.
My favorite recent positive example was the book and movie Hidden Figures. It could have been a woke screed, but it wasn't done that way. It had its own historical validity and human interest, on its own, and did well.
That definition doesn't really make sense, though. There are plenty of movies out that that no one would call woke that dumb things down from the source material and which are very unrealistic. So having those traits does not make something woke.
What I'm suggesting is that people are finding movies they would normally call woke that actually do well. So the response is to change what "woke" means. I've literally never heard of the idea that significant changes in the source material has anything to do with being woke. No one calls the old Super Mario Bros movie woke.
I think it would be a lot easier on people if they realized "go woke, go broke" isn't true. Yes, sometimes "woke" thing do poorly, but it generally is not because they are woke. The new Super Mario Bros movie was decried as being woke because it sidelines Luigi and makes Peach a girlboss. It was predicted to do poorly. But then it came out and did really well, and suddenly it wasn't "woke" anymore.
It's really not being "woke" that is causing problems here. You just have audiences getting tired of things combined with inflation. When they did something new, like with the Barbie, it did well. And everyone on the Right was calling Barbie woke. The difference is, it found an audience that appreciated its "wokeness." You gotta make sure your wokeness actually plays to the people who like wokeness.
The "woke" part is certainly part of it, but not all. The new Top Gun movie had some "updating" along those lines, but did well, because audiences weren't hit over the head with it, and it didn't interfere with the main plot.
Movie studios should look to the ads in old comics for the next concept they can flog to death. Sea Monkeys: The Movie. Spider Man vs the Hostess Twinkie Thief. The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac, etc.
"Movies flourished ... and will do so again." I strongly disagree. Going to the movies is expensive, noisy (too high volume levels), overloaded with ads, ridiculous prices for popcorn, soft drinks etc...stay home and watch Netflix! Small cinemas showing documentaries, old movies, mixed with live lectures, music etc. will survive — the big movie houses are toast!
I’m not sure cinemas are toast...there are lots of ways clever business people can keep the doors open, but I largely agree that presuming everything will be fine is a mistake.
Some years ago, Netflix had a category called "Independent" films. They had good storylines with engaging characters and didn't cost a fortune to make. As I remember, many were made in Canada. I can't find them anymore since Netflix began to compete with the Hallmark channel over the most insipid romance stories.
Oh, gosh, I remember that. I also remember "alternative rock" which was also mostly Canadian (New Pornographers, Sarah Harmer, etc) and their interesting and engaging music. It's been replaced with what sounds to be AI-generated mush. As Ted has commented, whatever happened to key changes?
Movies went woke a long time ago. And they have lost me as a customer forever, me and almost every single person I know. Way back in the 1980's I noticed that critical favorites were simply films that had typical left wing cliches gratuitously and inappropriately thrust into the course of the movie. Or occasionally they could even be the whole point of the movie. These movies were always trying to "teach me a lesson". It was so predictable. White people are racist. Southern people are anti-gay and also very stupid, along with a whole list of other tired cliches. At first I was able to avoid most of that just by avoiding art house type movies. Over time the rot has spread into all of the mainstream movies. The lefties in Hollywood just can't help themselves. They feel they have to lecture down to the audience. It's boring and most people aren't going to tolerate it. They have alienated at least half of the potential audience and deserve to go broke. Insulting the customer is a terrible business model
I saw the first Captain Marvel in 2019 and was literally squirming in my seat; I was so bored and desperate for the movie to end that I had to fight to keep from running out of the theater. I can't imagine how bad this new one is. (Anyway, the real Captain Marvel is the grinning guy in the red suit with the lightning bolt on his chest; this chick is just a claim jumper.) I had seen everything in it before, you see, and it was all done better before. There wasn't a single surprise, and the whole enterprise felt tired and cynical in a way that even the most formula westerns usually don't. (Hell, even in a bad western you usually get to see some actual scenery instead of green-screen nonexistence.)
I went from loving the superhero genre, lapping up Spiderman 2 and Iron Man and the first X-Men movies to being as completely done with the whole thing as done can be; the movies are just so bad now, so passionless and pro-forma. Or maybe I'm just growing up. (Sixty-three is a little old to get excited about spandex ciphers belting each other for no purpose other than setting up the next installment in the franchise.)
Larsen did a pretty good Captain Marvel. The problem was that the character had limited resonance. She was part superhero, part IP character squat in a conflict with DC, so she mainly got called in whenever the lawyers got nervous about the IP claim.
Movies like this compel leaving the theater, regretting every second you wasted there. I was most grateful when streaming enabled us to see the first ten minutes of “Black Widow” without having to leave the theater when realized what a hot heap of garbage it was.
Right on the nose as usual. My personal pet peeve when you asked what bothered us recently was this very same issue. The virtual extinction of new, original and creative films made by auteurs, and their replacement by remakes, reboots, sequels and spinoffs made by committees of studio heads and money people--all looking for the next big multi-hundred-million-dollar payoff, all copies of copies, all more of the same thing until nobody can stand to see them anymore, and the abandonment of the plain old "good" movie with real stars and a decent (but not massively ballooned) budget (the drama/comedy/dramedy kind of thing a Jack Nicholson or a Meryl Streep used to star in--think of movies like Moonstruck, As Good as it Gets, Broadcast News, An Officer and a Gentleman), what used to be the "bread and butter" of the industry. Aside from the incredibly rare exception to the rule, they essentially don't exist anymore. Sure, there are independent films made (such as A24 films) but made with microscopic budgets and noticeably thin production values. Even Woody Allen (who has now fallen on disfavor over scandal) found, before the scandal ended his career, that although his movies virtually ALWAYS made money, he couldn't get funding in America anymore because the money people weren't interested in spending small millions on a movie and making 15 to 40 million in profit from it anymore. They all wanted the multi-hundred-million-dollar payout or nothing. He had to go to Europe to find anybody willing to invest in a "small change" drama or dramedy movie. Why don't studios realize that if you stop making ORIGINAL films and keep endlessly milking the old franchises to death, there won't be any new franchises to profit from once people are sick of endless repeats of the old ones. And another issue, which we hear little about because the entertainment companies are scared to talk about it and make trouble for themselves, is the pleasing of the Chinese market (the Chinese government really), as studios demand doing today, which exacts a price of its own. The Chinese government interferes strongly with what a movie can contain nowadays. Why do you think you can see Russian bad guys in movies today, but not Chinese baddies? You can't make a movie about the Dali Lama anymore or about Tibet, or the Chinese will punish not only the studio which made such a film but the parent corporation which owns that studio too, costing them possible hundreds of millions. They banned Disney merchandise, threatened to stop the then under-construction Disney amusement park, costing them untold millions, years back when the Disney owned Touchstone Pictures released a film about Tibet. The president of Disney had to fly to China to apologize to get the ban lifted and proceed again with constructing Disney's Chinese park back then. In the last James Bond film, Bond fights a series of guards of various nationalities, and one was Chinese. The studio had to edit this fight because the Chinese government said Bond defeating this one Chinese guard among other nationalities made the Chinese look weak. So, to keep the studio and the parent corporation from being punished to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the scene of Bond defeating this one Chinese guard among guards of various nationalities was edited out of the film. The Chinese government (not the Chinese people, but the government) not only prevent what they don't like from being shown in China but also now prevent it from being seen by anybody anywhere else in the world. They censor the world, not just their own people now. They have learned to use our profit motive against us to censor what is seen even outside their borders. Very smart to use our money against us this way. The American film industry has sold its soul and made a deal with a devil, so to speak, all in the name of profit. And they, like the record industry, will sadly wind up bringing about their own downfall as a result of their rampant greediness. Back on the subject of the lack of content that isn't from a comic book or video game or a reboot/spin-off of an old TV show or previous movie: I find it depressing that they'll apparently have to wind up suffering for it in the end once they have finished killing off the golden goose with infinite repetition, going back to the same well over and over until the well is long dry--and will need to finally hit absolute rock-bottom before at last beginning to learn any lesson whatsoever from it. I sure wish they could learn the lesson sooner and more easily, but greed takes a lot of persuasion to see the error if its ways--and it unfortunately never learns any such lessons for very long before forgetting them and repeating them all over again.
There once was a time when we would go out to the movies, galleries, or stage shows to be entertained. We launched ourselves into another world, removed from our day to day stresses, etc. Today the entertainment industry offers us lessons on how we should think and conduct our lives according to their doctrines. No thank you...
I watched way too much Batman growing up, and that scene with Batman running around with the bomb is probably the greatest most hilarious Batman scene ever.
One thing that amazes me is Disney's attempts to make Brie Larson a superstar. I see her everywhere, in TV ads, on chat shows, etc. GIVE IT UP. She's a moderately-attractive woman with less-than-optimal acting skills. She's never going to be Cate Blanchette.
Speaking of seeing a movie in a theater vs seeing it on streaming - recently I took a flight from Hong Kong to JFK and was happy to see "Tár" among the choices for the screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Happy because it lasted approximately five minutes in the local theaters. All I can say is "wow" because a well-made movie with a talented cast will be marvelous no matter the size of the screen.
"That’s what saturating the market does to you." A bit off-topic but that is what happened with disco in the late 70's. The currently popular notion that the backlash was nothing more than racism is a very incomplete picture. It had become formularized and omnipresent. I myself went from enjoying disco to being like "Dear God, if I hear that Donna Summers song one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists!" At some point, almost everything on the radio sounded like a variation of The Love Boat theme.
People who think disco backlash was based in racism need to check out the famous "Disco Demolition Night" fiasco at Comiskey Park in 1979. People hated disco because it was disco.
Read up a bit more on that night. People who were there reported people showing up with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder records... not disco, but black R&B.
Plenty of people just hated disco, it’s true, but there were still also many who recoiled from its associations with black and queer subcultures.
I would rather watch "Midnight Cowboy" for the fourth time rather than most of the movies that have come out in the last few years. Last week we watched "Wonder Wheel", a Woody Allen Amazon production. It was underwhelming at best.
God I certainly hope you're right. Movie theater marquees are genuinely depressing these days and have been for a long time. The A24 films have been a breath of fresh air though and by their success perhaps indicate the direction other studios will have to take.
The argument that Disney's too woke is almost too silly to argue against, but let's do it anyway. For the folks arguing that people don't want representation in their movies, I direct you to Moana, Zootopia (animals but def about prejudice and diversity), Coco, Black Panther 1 & 2, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Huge hits, all of them. Hamilton was Disney+'s first big streaming hit, too. More importantly, they are all well-written, well-casted, visually engaging productions.
Clearly, judging from the comments, there are some people who are going to stay away from movies because they are afraid that non-white lead characters are going to hurt them somehow. But the great majority of folks are more mature than that, and will respond to quality filmmaking.
Looks like the Disney monopoly is struggling! They’re probably the worst rent-seeking company in existence (other than fossil fuels companies) and this death-rattling is most welcome
Nah, Disney will find a way to stick around. I remember seeing "Is Disney dying?! articles when I was a kid in the '80s, when all they had was their vaunted "vault" and no new ideas. Plus, LOL at all the righties who want to see the company fail because it's "too woke," or whatever boogeyman they're after this week. If Disney collapsed, the entire economy of Florida would go in the crapper.
There was a time when Disney was sort of an underdog. Then they started cranking out modest budget but fairly well written and acted movies like Splash. I think Spy Magazine said that their talent search was staking out the back door at the Betty Ford clinic, so they got some good talent at modest prices.
Avengers: End Game should have been the end for Marvel -- they successfully completed a decade-long story in a satisfying way. After that, they should have taken some time off before deciding to move forward without their most popular characters. Guardians of the Galaxy's success convinced them that third-string properties like Shang-Chi and the Eternals could keep the MCU afloat in the absence of Captain America and Iron Man. The problem was those films didn't have a talent on the level of James Gunn at the helm and audiences were feeling burned out. Flooding the market with questionable streaming television shows didn't help, either. Releasing only Deadpool in 2024 is a good move, but it may not save the MCU.
No one wanted a new Indiana Jones film, especially without its original creators involved. With an 80 year-old Harrison Ford in the lead role, they had to film a lot of the movie in front of green screen and on sound stages. It lacked the spectacle of its predecessors -- I was thinking in the theatre that it looked like a streaming film and not a big-budget entry in a storied franchise. The car chase sequence was especially terrible. Not to mention how the film went out of its way to essentially invalidate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some vocal fans may have hated it, but it felt much more like an Indiana Jones picture than Dial of Destiny (a name I totally forgot and had to look up, despite having seen the film in the theatre a few months ago).
You are definitely right about Avengers: End Game being a natural end to the series. The writers managed to get the whole thing to hold together and build momentum towards the grande finale. Sarah Finn, who cast all of the films, did an amazing job. It was an impressive series, sort of a great television season writ large.
This is yet another example of Get Woke, Go Broke. South Park's "Panderverse" mocked Disney's special kind of stupid. Audiences are voting with their wallets.
PS: love the How To format ;)
I don't think that is necessarily true. The new Indiana Jones film was far from "woke," yet did poorly, as did The Flash, another non-woke film, and The Marvels. Unless you consider casting non-white males as "woke," none of those films were in any way, shape, or form political or "woke." Meanwhile, Super Mario Bros. and Barbie, both very much in the "woke" camp, knocked it out of the park.
The new Indiana Jones movies was a woke as it gets particularly if you examine the film prior to its delays and reshoots. Test screenings were abysmal and the initial ending of the film was Indy dying and Phoebe Waller bridge literally putting in the hat. Her role in the film was severely cut prior to release.
Reading the rest of your comment indicates a difference in the understanding of “woke” from how it’s used pejoratively. It’s far from merely “replace white men,” though that’s an undeniable symptom and an easy one to point at.
Consider “woke” as: replace story, theme and branding with a specific modern leftist ideology that requires the elevation of “marginalized people” in a deterministic hierarchy. Men<women; White < Asian < Hispanic < Black; cis < homo < trans; rich < poor; religious < secular... and so on. The complaint isn’t merely that it’s bigotry (which it is) but also that it’s terrible entertainment that no one wants to see because it’s utterly predictable. A counter example is the success of One Piece which has numerous gender and race swaps and indeed a trans actor but delivers the story of One Piece without changing the narrative or themes. People don’t have an issue with swaps--they hate shite media.
And if you want to argue this is just angry right wing dudes in the US, take a second look at how terribly these media projects fare overseas. Bombs. All of ‘em.
Of course this may also be related the the trend of simplistic, superficial and boring tropes Hollywood has been pumping for decades. It makes the application of “woke” even worse because it belies the fact that it’s all a cynical money grab in a vacuum of ideas.
I only know the version I saw in the theater, and it didn't exhibit any of the traits you've listed. I noticed no leftist ideology whatsoever, nor any elevation of marginalized people. I saw a film where Indiana Jones traipsed around the world, fought villains, pieced together clues, and unearthed a relic with magical properties. His female sidekick was just that, a helper. She never outdid him, and in fact she was constantly being proven wrong and learning from him. She went from being a cocky, immoral rogue to someone who learned the value of doing the right thing from Indy. Overall it was a refreshing change from the sorts of films you describe, as it avoided all the woke pitfalls.
I've never heard of One Piece, so I can't comment on that. Google tells me it's a cartoon, but it's nothing I'm familar with.
Isn't the perception of the movie as being woke more relevant than the reality of it's wokeness when explaining a lack of viewership? It seems to me that people did not go to this movie because of their expectations of the movie (based on current trends and promotional material).
This is made worse by the fact that reviewers of films are either not going to even consider mentioning a level of wokeness (if they are woke), or will always assume all Hollywood products are woke (if they are anti-woke).
I have been surprised by movies and shows whose narratives have diverged from the messaging I expected, so I find your description of the movie totally plausible, and not resulting from a unique definition of woke. However, perception of woke (accurate or not) seems like a relevant factor IMO. As a counter-example, take Top Gun: Maverick: an extension of an old franchise that actually performed very well. N=1 but this movie stands out against the overall argument of the article. Maybe the line between nostalgia and monotony rides the contours of our viewpoints.
That's an interesting thought. It is hard to understand how some movies get singled out for backlash from the anti-woke mob, and equally hard to determine if that backlash has any effect on ticket sales. I remember the rage directed at the first Captain Marvel film, despite it being completely devoid of any wokeness whatsoever, but the film made over a billion dollars. Meanwhile, something like the recent Mario Bros. film, which was stuffed full of activist propaganda, skated by unscathed, and also made a over a billion. There seems to be no correlation between angry backlash and box office.
When a film that enrages the small but vocal mob does fail, they will no doubt take credit for the failure, i.e. The Marvels, but my sense is that its poor box office showing had nothing to do with perceived wokeness at all.
And yes, there's also the matter of what is even meant by woke. To some it seems the act of casting a non-white male in a lead role equates to wokeness. To others, what matters is the film's message.
If I had to make a guess, I'd say that woke vs. anti-woke is yet another contrived point of division, giving people yet another excuse to insult and hate one another, and is ultimately of no consequence when it comes to box office results.
There’s a real discussion that needs to happen about ballooning budgets as well. Films like Dial of Destiny, the recent Little Mermaid or the Marvels were so behind schedule and over budget, they needed to gross half a billion (or more) just to break even (other notable examples The Flash and Rings of Power). So we have a situation where the stakes couldn’t be higher and any impression that might derail a film’s trajectory--which is upstream of word-of-mouth--can have disastrous effects including political ones! It’s incredible to consider how important media is to every aspect of our society!
Lastly, I think there’s a real story about the re-tooling of IJ:DoD and a subsequent media cover up, but it’s not a story I can personally lay out, and as Greg notes, may be irrelevant based on the film that was actually released. What I can say about that film, regardless of it it was Woke, is that it was a deconstruction of Indy and the pulp genre.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with deconstruction as a critique or revelatory process to suss out patent themes and ideas. The Barbie film was also a deconstruction--and hugely popular because of that! But it’s important to notice that the audience to whom that film largely appealed (and was marketed toward) were college educated women who statistically are more likely to have studied the varieties of critiques as part of their English majors. The movie hit them right in the place that best justifies their world views.
Consider deconstructionism as the underlying template upon which Woke resides and we can start to see an even longer thread, one we can tug all the way back to “Bonny and Clyde”, or “The Man Who Killed Liberty Valence.” This was very sexy once upon a time, but all film going audiences have leveled up since then and rather than being new and exciting, Deconstruction is tired and cliché. Unfortunately, I find the argument I’ll sum up as, “We just want our simple stories back!” as unworkable. This isn’t a genie that can go back into the bottle and film will need to move into a new stage in order to maintain relevance. I think this makes video games even more likely to overtake cinema as games can deftly navigate all of these realms by offering the participants the opportunity to generate their own narratives. It’s why I don’t think the “cinema will be just fine,” narrative is a safe bet.
Devon
“if you want to argue this is just angry right wing dudes in the US” actually at this point it sort of is. A brief visit to Fox News is enough to confirm that 😉
I will agree on one thing though - a lot of movies use representation to signal virtue instead of actually writing an intelligent script, which the Marvel series has done pretty much from the beginning and elsewhere is largely the case across the board. But a movie that actually executes on that idea, and still comes in for the same mindless invective, is a different matter. I’d argue “Barbie” is such a movie. No doubt it’s successor movies will swiftly fall into the franchising trap
Personally, I think using Fox News as a measure for anything is a big mistake and I hope you might consider the issue is more complex than you’ve been led to believe. I’m a creature of the left and it’s clear to me there an issue with leftist tribalism, I don’t need conservatives to tell me that.
I see the woke polizei have infiltrated your substack. My condolences. They're everywhere.
I think you meant that response for someone else. I wish the woke polizei would infiltrate my Substack. At least then someone would be commenting on it. :P
I believe you interpreted my comment in incorrectly.
How so? You told me the woke polizei have infiltrated my substack. How else am I to interpret that?
The extremely woke Barbie movie just made over a billion dollars so I don’t think that’s the problem. People are just bored of formulaic movies, whatever their politics.
THIS! How about just good stories. Escapism in small measure is delicious but every damn movie a comic book hero is just too much.
H’wd cannot seem to be creative anymore. Copy copy copy. Speaking of Barbie they’ll now be making movies based on other toys with none of the irony or wit and wonder what the hell went wrong. SMDH
I’d watch Margot Robbie mow grass...
My wife, in her third pregnancy, insisted on mowing the grass until she was at seven months. In spite of my protestations. She's definitely not "woke," or anything like that :)
I had my heart attack while mowing grass, that day I should have watched ANYBODY else doing it...
yep, get woke, go broke. Disney is on the wrong side of history now.
Using “woke” is the de facto standard for stating a refusal to think before making an argument! Super impressive technique for letting all of us know about the vacuum inside yr head there!
Pretending one doesn’t understand “woke” is a de facto standard for people whose heads are fully inserted into their rectum. It was a proud term of art on the left a mere 5 years ago. Everyone knows what it means.
Perhaps, if you really want to school that guy, ask him to define his terms. Let him fall into his own trap by describing what he means by “woke.” You’ll either catch him out or not. Wisdom comes from finding out you were wrong, not knowing you were right all along.
(If you want my definition, which is fair, see my reply to Greg, I don’t wish to re-type it. If you disagree tell me why.)
Even if the term was common on the left 5 years ago, that doesn't mean it has the same definition now. I know that what it meant originally was "aware of social injustice and bigotry in an immediate, practical way." And, when used as a pejorative, it meant "someone who thinks they are aware, but actually isn't."
That clearly is not how the term is being used today. But there's a reason you had to come up with your own definition: those who use the term don't define it. And this seems to be deliberate, as its use is very mercurial. It changes depending on the topic and the person. This is common with right wing pejoratives for left wing positions. See also "politically correct," "virtue signaling," "SJW." None of them are well-defined. I think it's entirely intentional. It's a term used more in rhetoric than argument. By keeping it nebulous, the same thought terminating cliches can be used.
I'm not pretending when I say I don't know what "woke" means. I'm making a point about how poorly defined it is. Sure, I could also make that point by asking them to define it, but then I'd have to monitor this page and stick around. That's more effort than I'm willing to put in. I just read an article, saw a comment I thought was wrong by someone who seemed reasonable, and made an argument.
At the end of the day, there isn't an agreed upon definition that always applies. Heck, even the definition you gave is extremely subjective. It allows "go woke go broke" to be always true. Because anything that didn't go broke can be said not to really be woke.
Why not head on over to taibbi's substack? You'd be more at home over there. It's where the woke-obsessed gather to woke-yodel.
Lucrezia! It’s been to long!
Woke-yodeling sounds hilarious! I think you’re on to something.
Black Panther made money, as did Barbie, so "wokeness," or what you might perceive as "wokeness" (i.e., non-white characters, or women in leading roles) wasn't the issue. The Flash failed as well, and it's subtext was quite conservative.
Black Panther had a well-grounded, longstanding story to start with that could stand on its own. It wasn't an attempt to dumb down something else.
For a good example of dumbing down something else, a pre-existing story, take the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, which was awful. (The later 2021 movie is pretty bad as well, for entirely different reasons.)
Which just means that "go woke, go broke" is not true. Black Panther is woke but because it could "stand on its own" and isn't "an attempt to dumb down something else," it did well. That suggests the problem is not being woke, but not being able to "stand on its own" and "dumbing thing down."
That's my thing. No matter how you define "woke," everyone agrees there is at least some woke stuff that does do well financially--that doesn't "go broke." The same right wingers who say "go woke, go broke" will then decry things that are woke and doing well. So clearly the aphorism is not correct.
It's more aspirational. The right wants it to be true.
It depends on your definition of woke. The dumbing-down and inversion of reality are unequivocally "woke." So the Bud Light thing or the 2016 Ghostbusters bombed, for example. The Black Panther phenomenon lies in a gray zone. It could be interpreted as woke, but it has its own story, independent of anything else. Stuff like that won't automatically succeed, but it can stand or fall on its own merits.
My favorite recent positive example was the book and movie Hidden Figures. It could have been a woke screed, but it wasn't done that way. It had its own historical validity and human interest, on its own, and did well.
That definition doesn't really make sense, though. There are plenty of movies out that that no one would call woke that dumb things down from the source material and which are very unrealistic. So having those traits does not make something woke.
What I'm suggesting is that people are finding movies they would normally call woke that actually do well. So the response is to change what "woke" means. I've literally never heard of the idea that significant changes in the source material has anything to do with being woke. No one calls the old Super Mario Bros movie woke.
I think it would be a lot easier on people if they realized "go woke, go broke" isn't true. Yes, sometimes "woke" thing do poorly, but it generally is not because they are woke. The new Super Mario Bros movie was decried as being woke because it sidelines Luigi and makes Peach a girlboss. It was predicted to do poorly. But then it came out and did really well, and suddenly it wasn't "woke" anymore.
It's really not being "woke" that is causing problems here. You just have audiences getting tired of things combined with inflation. When they did something new, like with the Barbie, it did well. And everyone on the Right was calling Barbie woke. The difference is, it found an audience that appreciated its "wokeness." You gotta make sure your wokeness actually plays to the people who like wokeness.
Saw that movie last night. Too funny how direct they were in poking the bear.
The "woke" part is certainly part of it, but not all. The new Top Gun movie had some "updating" along those lines, but did well, because audiences weren't hit over the head with it, and it didn't interfere with the main plot.
Movie studios should look to the ads in old comics for the next concept they can flog to death. Sea Monkeys: The Movie. Spider Man vs the Hostess Twinkie Thief. The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac, etc.
"The Man With the X-Ray Eyes". Wait...they actually made that one.
Dim Mak...the death grip!!!! (Which would actually be a great movie... they guy’s story is bonkers)
My daughter is reading old Billy Bunter comics from the 1930s. I don't suppose Billy would be a popular choice 🤣
I say, you fellows!
"Movies flourished ... and will do so again." I strongly disagree. Going to the movies is expensive, noisy (too high volume levels), overloaded with ads, ridiculous prices for popcorn, soft drinks etc...stay home and watch Netflix! Small cinemas showing documentaries, old movies, mixed with live lectures, music etc. will survive — the big movie houses are toast!
For me the worst part of going to a movie theater is the rude people talking during the movies.
I’m not sure cinemas are toast...there are lots of ways clever business people can keep the doors open, but I largely agree that presuming everything will be fine is a mistake.
Some years ago, Netflix had a category called "Independent" films. They had good storylines with engaging characters and didn't cost a fortune to make. As I remember, many were made in Canada. I can't find them anymore since Netflix began to compete with the Hallmark channel over the most insipid romance stories.
Oh, gosh, I remember that. I also remember "alternative rock" which was also mostly Canadian (New Pornographers, Sarah Harmer, etc) and their interesting and engaging music. It's been replaced with what sounds to be AI-generated mush. As Ted has commented, whatever happened to key changes?
Movies went woke a long time ago. And they have lost me as a customer forever, me and almost every single person I know. Way back in the 1980's I noticed that critical favorites were simply films that had typical left wing cliches gratuitously and inappropriately thrust into the course of the movie. Or occasionally they could even be the whole point of the movie. These movies were always trying to "teach me a lesson". It was so predictable. White people are racist. Southern people are anti-gay and also very stupid, along with a whole list of other tired cliches. At first I was able to avoid most of that just by avoiding art house type movies. Over time the rot has spread into all of the mainstream movies. The lefties in Hollywood just can't help themselves. They feel they have to lecture down to the audience. It's boring and most people aren't going to tolerate it. They have alienated at least half of the potential audience and deserve to go broke. Insulting the customer is a terrible business model
You won't be missed in the theaters.
slumping ticket sales say otherwise
I saw the first Captain Marvel in 2019 and was literally squirming in my seat; I was so bored and desperate for the movie to end that I had to fight to keep from running out of the theater. I can't imagine how bad this new one is. (Anyway, the real Captain Marvel is the grinning guy in the red suit with the lightning bolt on his chest; this chick is just a claim jumper.) I had seen everything in it before, you see, and it was all done better before. There wasn't a single surprise, and the whole enterprise felt tired and cynical in a way that even the most formula westerns usually don't. (Hell, even in a bad western you usually get to see some actual scenery instead of green-screen nonexistence.)
I went from loving the superhero genre, lapping up Spiderman 2 and Iron Man and the first X-Men movies to being as completely done with the whole thing as done can be; the movies are just so bad now, so passionless and pro-forma. Or maybe I'm just growing up. (Sixty-three is a little old to get excited about spandex ciphers belting each other for no purpose other than setting up the next installment in the franchise.)
Larsen did a pretty good Captain Marvel. The problem was that the character had limited resonance. She was part superhero, part IP character squat in a conflict with DC, so she mainly got called in whenever the lawyers got nervous about the IP claim.
Movies like this compel leaving the theater, regretting every second you wasted there. I was most grateful when streaming enabled us to see the first ten minutes of “Black Widow” without having to leave the theater when realized what a hot heap of garbage it was.
Right on the nose as usual. My personal pet peeve when you asked what bothered us recently was this very same issue. The virtual extinction of new, original and creative films made by auteurs, and their replacement by remakes, reboots, sequels and spinoffs made by committees of studio heads and money people--all looking for the next big multi-hundred-million-dollar payoff, all copies of copies, all more of the same thing until nobody can stand to see them anymore, and the abandonment of the plain old "good" movie with real stars and a decent (but not massively ballooned) budget (the drama/comedy/dramedy kind of thing a Jack Nicholson or a Meryl Streep used to star in--think of movies like Moonstruck, As Good as it Gets, Broadcast News, An Officer and a Gentleman), what used to be the "bread and butter" of the industry. Aside from the incredibly rare exception to the rule, they essentially don't exist anymore. Sure, there are independent films made (such as A24 films) but made with microscopic budgets and noticeably thin production values. Even Woody Allen (who has now fallen on disfavor over scandal) found, before the scandal ended his career, that although his movies virtually ALWAYS made money, he couldn't get funding in America anymore because the money people weren't interested in spending small millions on a movie and making 15 to 40 million in profit from it anymore. They all wanted the multi-hundred-million-dollar payout or nothing. He had to go to Europe to find anybody willing to invest in a "small change" drama or dramedy movie. Why don't studios realize that if you stop making ORIGINAL films and keep endlessly milking the old franchises to death, there won't be any new franchises to profit from once people are sick of endless repeats of the old ones. And another issue, which we hear little about because the entertainment companies are scared to talk about it and make trouble for themselves, is the pleasing of the Chinese market (the Chinese government really), as studios demand doing today, which exacts a price of its own. The Chinese government interferes strongly with what a movie can contain nowadays. Why do you think you can see Russian bad guys in movies today, but not Chinese baddies? You can't make a movie about the Dali Lama anymore or about Tibet, or the Chinese will punish not only the studio which made such a film but the parent corporation which owns that studio too, costing them possible hundreds of millions. They banned Disney merchandise, threatened to stop the then under-construction Disney amusement park, costing them untold millions, years back when the Disney owned Touchstone Pictures released a film about Tibet. The president of Disney had to fly to China to apologize to get the ban lifted and proceed again with constructing Disney's Chinese park back then. In the last James Bond film, Bond fights a series of guards of various nationalities, and one was Chinese. The studio had to edit this fight because the Chinese government said Bond defeating this one Chinese guard among other nationalities made the Chinese look weak. So, to keep the studio and the parent corporation from being punished to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the scene of Bond defeating this one Chinese guard among guards of various nationalities was edited out of the film. The Chinese government (not the Chinese people, but the government) not only prevent what they don't like from being shown in China but also now prevent it from being seen by anybody anywhere else in the world. They censor the world, not just their own people now. They have learned to use our profit motive against us to censor what is seen even outside their borders. Very smart to use our money against us this way. The American film industry has sold its soul and made a deal with a devil, so to speak, all in the name of profit. And they, like the record industry, will sadly wind up bringing about their own downfall as a result of their rampant greediness. Back on the subject of the lack of content that isn't from a comic book or video game or a reboot/spin-off of an old TV show or previous movie: I find it depressing that they'll apparently have to wind up suffering for it in the end once they have finished killing off the golden goose with infinite repetition, going back to the same well over and over until the well is long dry--and will need to finally hit absolute rock-bottom before at last beginning to learn any lesson whatsoever from it. I sure wish they could learn the lesson sooner and more easily, but greed takes a lot of persuasion to see the error if its ways--and it unfortunately never learns any such lessons for very long before forgetting them and repeating them all over again.
There once was a time when we would go out to the movies, galleries, or stage shows to be entertained. We launched ourselves into another world, removed from our day to day stresses, etc. Today the entertainment industry offers us lessons on how we should think and conduct our lives according to their doctrines. No thank you...
I watched way too much Batman growing up, and that scene with Batman running around with the bomb is probably the greatest most hilarious Batman scene ever.
I must have seen it when it was first released but had forgotten it. Made me laugh out loud. Those Batman TV shows were so good.
I recommend that you search Youtube for the surfing contest between Batman and The Joker.
One thing that amazes me is Disney's attempts to make Brie Larson a superstar. I see her everywhere, in TV ads, on chat shows, etc. GIVE IT UP. She's a moderately-attractive woman with less-than-optimal acting skills. She's never going to be Cate Blanchette.
Speaking of seeing a movie in a theater vs seeing it on streaming - recently I took a flight from Hong Kong to JFK and was happy to see "Tár" among the choices for the screen on the back of the seat in front of me. Happy because it lasted approximately five minutes in the local theaters. All I can say is "wow" because a well-made movie with a talented cast will be marvelous no matter the size of the screen.
Tár was an excellent film.
I think she's hot. Of course, I thought Hillary Clinton would make a great president too.
"That’s what saturating the market does to you." A bit off-topic but that is what happened with disco in the late 70's. The currently popular notion that the backlash was nothing more than racism is a very incomplete picture. It had become formularized and omnipresent. I myself went from enjoying disco to being like "Dear God, if I hear that Donna Summers song one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists!" At some point, almost everything on the radio sounded like a variation of The Love Boat theme.
People who think disco backlash was based in racism need to check out the famous "Disco Demolition Night" fiasco at Comiskey Park in 1979. People hated disco because it was disco.
Read up a bit more on that night. People who were there reported people showing up with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder records... not disco, but black R&B.
Plenty of people just hated disco, it’s true, but there were still also many who recoiled from its associations with black and queer subcultures.
I would rather watch "Midnight Cowboy" for the fourth time rather than most of the movies that have come out in the last few years. Last week we watched "Wonder Wheel", a Woody Allen Amazon production. It was underwhelming at best.
God I certainly hope you're right. Movie theater marquees are genuinely depressing these days and have been for a long time. The A24 films have been a breath of fresh air though and by their success perhaps indicate the direction other studios will have to take.
The argument that Disney's too woke is almost too silly to argue against, but let's do it anyway. For the folks arguing that people don't want representation in their movies, I direct you to Moana, Zootopia (animals but def about prejudice and diversity), Coco, Black Panther 1 & 2, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Huge hits, all of them. Hamilton was Disney+'s first big streaming hit, too. More importantly, they are all well-written, well-casted, visually engaging productions.
Clearly, judging from the comments, there are some people who are going to stay away from movies because they are afraid that non-white lead characters are going to hurt them somehow. But the great majority of folks are more mature than that, and will respond to quality filmmaking.
All of these are original stories. The problem comes when you remake an old story in "woke mode".
Looks like the Disney monopoly is struggling! They’re probably the worst rent-seeking company in existence (other than fossil fuels companies) and this death-rattling is most welcome
Nah, Disney will find a way to stick around. I remember seeing "Is Disney dying?! articles when I was a kid in the '80s, when all they had was their vaunted "vault" and no new ideas. Plus, LOL at all the righties who want to see the company fail because it's "too woke," or whatever boogeyman they're after this week. If Disney collapsed, the entire economy of Florida would go in the crapper.
There was a time when Disney was sort of an underdog. Then they started cranking out modest budget but fairly well written and acted movies like Splash. I think Spy Magazine said that their talent search was staking out the back door at the Betty Ford clinic, so they got some good talent at modest prices.
I like fossil fuel companies. Give them money every week or so.
Avengers: End Game should have been the end for Marvel -- they successfully completed a decade-long story in a satisfying way. After that, they should have taken some time off before deciding to move forward without their most popular characters. Guardians of the Galaxy's success convinced them that third-string properties like Shang-Chi and the Eternals could keep the MCU afloat in the absence of Captain America and Iron Man. The problem was those films didn't have a talent on the level of James Gunn at the helm and audiences were feeling burned out. Flooding the market with questionable streaming television shows didn't help, either. Releasing only Deadpool in 2024 is a good move, but it may not save the MCU.
No one wanted a new Indiana Jones film, especially without its original creators involved. With an 80 year-old Harrison Ford in the lead role, they had to film a lot of the movie in front of green screen and on sound stages. It lacked the spectacle of its predecessors -- I was thinking in the theatre that it looked like a streaming film and not a big-budget entry in a storied franchise. The car chase sequence was especially terrible. Not to mention how the film went out of its way to essentially invalidate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some vocal fans may have hated it, but it felt much more like an Indiana Jones picture than Dial of Destiny (a name I totally forgot and had to look up, despite having seen the film in the theatre a few months ago).
Up next: Indiana Jones and the Walker of Wonder
You are definitely right about Avengers: End Game being a natural end to the series. The writers managed to get the whole thing to hold together and build momentum towards the grande finale. Sarah Finn, who cast all of the films, did an amazing job. It was an impressive series, sort of a great television season writ large.
For more on Sarah Finn and some interesting comments on the series:
https://www.indiewire.com/influencers/marvel-cinematic-universe-casting-director-sarah-finn/