SD on 25/7/2025 at 20:11

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If it cost $250m to make, and the rule of thumb is that films need to gross double their costs to make a profit, then it would have needed box office receipts of $500m. It apparently realised $570m, so it may have turned a profit, depending on how much was spent on marketing.

I'm pretty relaxed about race swapping of fictional characters though. There's no earthly reason why a mermaid needs to have pale skin. It's way more offensive when they do it to real people.

Starker on 26/7/2025 at 05:31

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A right wing reactionary talking point does not racism make. Because the truth here is obviously not that white authors can't get published because of racism against white people. The fact that white authors massively get published and overwhelmingly dominate the publishing market proves that point. This is the reason for these kind of hoaxes -- they can't find actual examples of systemic racism against white people, so they need to manufacture and misrepresent them.

Corporations having a woke agenda and willingly forgoing profits in order to be racist against white people is so patently ridiculous of a conspiracy theory it shouldn't even pass the smell test. And, if you dig just a little bit deeper to see what kinds of people are sniffing these particular farts, often just barely enough to slightly scratch the surface, you start to hear about cultural marxism and certain people being in charge of the entertainment industry. It's all so fucking transparent.

Tocky on 26/7/2025 at 16:15

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I was recently called a bigot for speaking out against moon hoaxers. The person claimed they were a "group" and I was being prejudiced. I attempted to explain that I was following the dictates of logic but of course you can't logic someone out of something they did not logic their way into.

The point I'm making is that labels do not really help except to short cut reasoning and reasoning should never be cut short. I suggest listening to what Starker said because even if you don't like what he said the reasoning is sound.

In my case I was particularly distressed because an elementary school teacher where my grandchildren go was spouting the nonsense conspiracy. Lucky for me I raised my daughter to be logical and she passed it along to her kids so they are immune from such idiocy. Her husband was called to the conversation early and insults followed and no proof I gave would be listened to and I may have to fight him at some point. Also it is apparent we are headed for idiocracy. Knowing a subject before teaching it is apparently passé these days. Always seek to know. Always pick out the logic and fact. Emotion gets you and the world beliefs instead of reason.

Starker on 27/7/2025 at 01:01

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Again, white people as a group are not discriminated against by the publishing industry, as I've shown by posting the stats that white authors in fact get published in massive numbers. You need to actually show that it is happening, if you claim that it is happening.

A small percentage of non-white authors getting published is not racism against white people. It's competition.

Cipheron on 28/7/2025 at 00:31

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The Little Mermaid did fine at the box office. The cost overruns were because it was being filmed at the height of the Covid pandemic.

So those were unforseeable events that lead to the budget being much higher than expected. If it was a "wokeness" issue then the initial budget would be normal but the box office would be bad, neither of which are things that are true.

Anyway these things have a long tail, making money for Disney for years or decades after their release. So you've got the fact that Disney makes LOTS of content and needs LOTS of content for their various streaming services and other outlets, and you can't predict hits ahead of time. They're going to make a lot of things, some will do better than other things ... so they make a range of things all tweaked to appeal to **different people** then they see what does well.

Why do they make things that lose money? because they make lots of things, and you need to make a lot of things to work out which ones are going to actually make you money. This is movies, it's not cups of coffee. Imagine if you ran a coffee shop, but every cup of coffee you made had to have a unique recipe. You're going to have to get creative, and some blends of coffee are going to do well, others not so well, but you need to make them to find out which ones are which.

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Also, there's no consistency here. See Alita: Battle Angel, it did $85 million in domestic US box office, on a $170 million budget, so you'd assume that would be fodder to call it a flop. After all, The Little Mermaid made $298 million back domestically on a $240 million budget, and they're calling that out as "losing money". However nobody is calling Alita a flop, and that's because it wasn't labeled as "woke" at the time, therefore it wasn't in the crosshairs, so instead the messaging is about how Alita made the rest back on international box office, streaming, DVDs etc.

So why does Alita get the free pass? it's because at the time the right wing media pundits were holding up Alita as an example of an "anti woke" film, because a few liberals didn't like it, and to contrast it with Captain Marvel, which was apparently "woke". Well, news, Captain marvel made $1.1 billion at the box office, so apparently being woke didn't hurt it, whereas being "non woke" didn't help Alita.

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As for the outrage machine: they assume every next movie or game is going to have a "trans" lead character or some shit, because apparently that's what they "always do" despite it never actually happening. Like there's GTA 6 outrage bait claiming the female co-lead will be trans. ... on what basis would they predict that? What previous game from any major studio makes you play a trans main character? It just never happens, so they just make it up.

What the "diversity" in corporate media amounts to is the same thing that capitalism always does: chasing money. If there's a franchise with an 80% male audience, well ... the male audience is saturated with content. Making more content isn't going to make more money because they're already saturating male consumers with as much content as can be consumed.

But ... women now account for 70-80% of discretionary purchasing power. So if you want to know why existing franchises with a very gender skewed consumer base are trying to bring in more female viewers and gamers, it's that. Because women have the most disposable income of any group **not currently buying the product**. So 95% of the "diverse" casting is going to be casting a white woman, because white women have all the money to spend in the US

It's not going to extend beyond that to some "slippery slope" where every protagonist is trans, because trans people simply don't make up a large number of consumers, thus there would be no profit-based motive to make a series like that. So people who tell you this is where things are heading: they're idiots who simply don't understand why things are happening and want to tack some non-existent "agenda" on top of capitalists doing what capitalists always do: chasing emerging markets and expanding their consumer base.

Men have money too, but they're already purchasing the product and increasing the amount of choices would just add more options into an over-saturated market. But ... if you can work out how to make high-budget high-profit franchises that pull in more female consumers, i.e. if someone can crack that code, they can make a lot of money, like the way the MCU cracked the code on superhero movies and turned them into a money-printing machine: if someone can make an AAA or blockbuster franchise that more women like, that's a largely untapped market. This is why they keep trying it, but none of them have quite cracked the code yet, which is why they're open to more experimental projects. Once someone hones in on one that is a profitable formula, all the experimental stuff will get canned and they'll just make shit according to the formula.

So no there's no "moral messaging" they give a shit about. The corporations are going "there's a group over there who has money, and the money isn't going in our pockets, how can we adjust the product to solve this problem?" ... if you can come up with a plausible plan for how to make that happen, they'll give you money to make something new and a bit different, which could be something weird, because nobody as of yet knows what the formula is to make the thing they want to make that suctions up all the women's money into their corporate pockets. Any "messaging" ends up being superficial "girl boss" white-girl feminism, or something equally out of place, since it's just low level pandering to try and pull in a specific class of consumer to spend money.