Friday Night Open Thread

Talk about whatever you want so long as it relates to pop culture.

All others get the ax.

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Jon Favreau appears to have saved his own ass. The lousy viewing numbers for the first four episodes of The Book of Boba Fett have been completely forgotten about so far as Mickey the Great and Terrible’s senior servants are concerned. Episode Six has reportedly tripled the ratings of BBF’s opening night.

More importantly, much more importantly so far as the executives are concerned, it has outperformed even their surprise streaming hit Encanto.

This presents Disney with a dilemma. On the one hand, they finally have something that appears to be popular in the Star Wars universe. On the other, the higher-ups at Disney want to keep the Third Trilogy canon. It isn’t just Kathleen Kennedy, there are plenty of Disney movie executives who are either Woke or don’t want to retcon away three movies that they spent close to a billion dollars in combined production costs making.

I should point out that the Woke execs aren’t really that Woke, they aren’t like dysfunctional green-haired TikTokers with more genders than neurons, no, what they are is members of The Club, the third or fourth generation descendants of the guys who originally founded Hollywood. These baby moguls are Baizou Left. Their friends, who are also members of the Club, gave them all kinds of ego-stroking when The Last Jedi came out. Sure, they were expecting $2.5 billion and didn’t get half that but clearly, this was a devastating blow against Orange Man Bad… Somehow.

They’ve been preening about the status it gave them for years. But Trump is gone now, Handmaid’s Tale is canceled and Marvel has had three flops this year. Giving Star Wars what they want instead of what they need, is becoming a tolerable idea.

It’s the other execs that will be a hard sell. As I said, a damaged asset is still an asset. What they can’t quite understand is that they can either have Real Luke or Testical-Boob-Monster Milk Swilling Hobo Luke, but not both.

They could avoid thinking about the issue by dismissing the season finale of the second season of The Mandalorian as a one-off fluke. But now the numbers from Luke’s second appearance show that it wasn’t. Real Luke is a bigger asset than the Third Trilogy.

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Why is Marvel making TV shows about, Ironheart, Muslim Ms. Marvel, Girl Thor, and other characters that broke what was left of the comic book industry and won’t sell once on the big (or little screen)?

Simple enough. It’s all a grift for members of the ruling and protected classes. Sana Amanet is the creator of Muslim Ms. Marvel. She had no history with writing (let alone reading) comic books at all before being hired by Marvel but what she did have was parents who worked for Obama.

There is no money in comic books, these days (truthfully there was never much unless you worked in Manga) but the moment a comic book character you created hits the screen the big paycheck comes because that is in your contract.

EVS was crowing about a recent six-figure residual check he just got from DC. I’m sure that today’s DC Comics would rather bite its hand off than cut him a check but, since Geoff John gets a much bigger check they have to pay EVS too.

When Marvel’s current payola projects were started, Disney was a colossus bestriding the planet. They could afford a few well-connected parasites and besides, they needed a ton of original content anyway. They didn’t care if peoplel watched it so long as they had it. But there was supposed to be other stuff too and those contracts expired during the lockdown. Marvel was able to stay in development when no one else could. Which leaves Disney the problem of having a ton of filler content and nothing people actually want to see.

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Here is Mathew Harris, the UCLA lecturer that promised to shoot up Boulder.

California’s college students were being lectured by this guy. He gave all of his students a “C” except for hot chicks who got an “A.” It’s impressive stuff.

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