Disney Deathwatch (7/10/24)
The Acolyte
There’s a number of things I’d rather do than get caught up on The Acolyte but given the interest around it I have little choice. It has managed the impressive feat of stirring up the kind of hatred that hasn’t surrounded a Star Wars project since The Last Jedi. While The Rise of Skywalker was certainly hated that was mostly because of its utter cinematic incompetence. As bad as it was, it was an attempt at course correction.
The Last Jedi was nothing short of a canonical train wreck. The writers clearly hated Star Wars and wanted to shoehorn into their own fan fiction version of what they thought a galaxy far, far away should be. The polar opposites good vs evil were dead at the end, and there were strong overtones of BDSM romance fiction.
It was literally Shades of Grey in Galaxy Far, Far Away. Seriously, the movie version of that book was in the theaters about the time The Last Jedi was being written. That was what the Reylos were really into.
The reason I bring it up is that The Acolyte is absolutely playing to that market. It was written for the Reylos, and they have responded eagerly. Smilo Ren has them panting for more. The audio for the visually impaired went into simpering detail about the “sunlight shining on his taught muscles” when this Dollar Store Asian Ezra Miller went skinny dipping.
The weirdest part of that scene was the reaction of the shills. Most of the male shills, (and these guys are supposedly straight) wanted full male frontal on Disney+ show. Reactors, if any of you are reading this, you can not buy female attraction with simping. It never works.
It has not however saved the show from falling off a ratings cliff. The Neilsons are out now and they are B-a-a-a-a-d. Amandla is claiming death threats again, despite the fact that White Supremacists don’t watch Disney+ and have no idea who the fuck she is. While Star Wars remains a perennial there are a few rays of sunshine to be found at…
Disney Studios
Here at least there is some good news for Mickey the Great and Terrible. Inside Out 2 now holds the record for Pixar at $1.25 billion. That is about $800 million in 2015 dollars, which is the same amount the first Inside Out made when it came out. Actually, the ticket sales are a little behind that when you factor in how much those prices have gone up. Nonetheless, even $1.25 billion in Biden Bucks is a lot of money so Bob Iger can pretend this Bob Chapek greenlit project is a big win for him.
Deadpool and Wolverine will probably do close business to that. Moana 2, I have doubts about since it’s such a crash project. Regardless, Bob Iger will at least be able to claim that he turned things around if he announces his retirement at the end of this year and doesn’t stick around for next year’s bombs like Captain America and Snow White. Also, if nobody takes a close look at what is happing to…
Disney Parks
Walt Disney World was empty on the 4th of July. Okay, not literally but it may as well have been It was getting the turnstile numbers that you normally associate with the first week of December. This would be terrifying in a functional company but Disney doesn’t seem to mind. The company’s eternal mantra of “Never admit to making a mistake” seems to have morphed into, “Never admit there’s a problem.”
WDW is Disny’s second-biggest source of income after ESPN, and there has never been lower July numbers in the history of the park, (except for 2020 and that was a little special). Here’s the thing about December numbers, that’s when Florida Man takes his family to the Magic Kingdom, he and his clan avoid it like the plague during the summer.
Bob Iger has always taken a minimal interest in the parks, (except for Shang Hai). When a major ride opened in Eisner’s day he was at that park no matter where on the planet that park was. Iger almost always skips that. It’s possible that somewhere inside he thinks the amusement park business is beneath him. His first love is and will remain sports news, but Hollywood is a close second. He loves power and up until recently, the CEO of Disney has been the most powerful man in Tinsel Town. He loves his “Two Shower Days.” If you don’t know what that means, Iger will take a second shower in this office and then change into Black Tie for some big show biz event, (Oscars, premiere nights, award dinners those kinds of things). He lives for those evenings.
However, (and this is kind of revealing) when he presents his justification to the stockholders for his massive compensation packages, he never compares himself to other studio heads. He compares himself to tech giants. It’s one of the reasons I think that his secret dream for years was for Steve Jobs to buy out Disney and then make Bob the president and COO of Apple, finally becoming CEO of the company himself. While that dream is now dead he is quietly harboring a new one, turning Disney into a tech company. He’s already talking about the need for YouTube-user-style content on Disney +.
Disney will likely die before Bob’s dream of being a titan of tech.
