The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at the Federalist took a look at how superhero films (and TV programs) became so commonplace since the turn of the century, to the point of oversaturization on the market, and now they're in decline, mainly because of the PC that's been forced into many current productions. It's also told here:

Due, in equal part, to the groundswell in computer-generated imagery (CGI) technology and the West’s newfound sense of vulnerability, superhero movies provided people with comforting and aesthetically engaging stories of interesting and self-actualized men and women who fought the good fight by taking matters into their own hands. People could easily escape their social and economic woes by flocking to the theaters to see Tobey Maguire web up petty crooks, Robert Downey Jr. take on the military-industrial complex, Christian Bale attempt to restore order to a city overrun by nihilistic cynicism, and Henry Cavill ponder what it truly means to be human.

I hate to say it, but for me, it's gotten to a point where CGI has become insufferable, and even Cavill's Superman movie hasn't aged well, because of its relentlessly dark angle. How come that doesn't occur to the writer here? Anyway, here's the main gist of the article:

During the glut of superhero content throughout the 2010s and early 2020s (particularly the Covid years), leftwing political themes like feminism, environmentalism, Western resentment, and racial grievance became thematic focal points of tentpole Hollywood productions.

Coastal elites have always heavily skewed leftwing, a fact which no serious person denies. As such, for decades, American entertainment has jabbed at anyone to the right-of-center but generally kept the criticism relatively tongue-in-cheek. After all, being blatantly adversarial to half of the country is a risky calculation — Republicans watch movies, too.

But, naturally, as unabashed left-wing radicalism spilled into the mainstream during this time, the people tasked with creating entertainment jumped the shark and crammed it into every medium we consume. And studios embrace it — recall Disney executives proudly touting their “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.”

Story and immersion took a backseat to “representation” of “marginalized” people and hardly veiled leftist commentaries replaced character development. The goal became lecturing, not entertaining.

For instance, Marvel’s “Black Widow” was a movie about the oppressive and manipulative nature of patriarchy; “Thor: Love and Thunder” laid the LGBT propaganda on thick while Flanderizing formerly complex female characters into girl-boss archetypes; “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” harped on racial animus; and the entire plot of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” revolved around an intersectional proletarian uprising.

Films and TV shows like these are some of the most heavy-handed in terms of political correctness. As for Black Panther's sequel, did they really think the audience was going to care enough if T'Challa himself was out of the picture, and they didn't seek a new actor to replace the late Chadwick Boseman?

And whereas Disney’s Marvel is the biggest culprit, since it has the largest catalog, blame must also be placed at the feet of DC Studios. With each release of duds like “Wonder Woman 1984,” “Black Adam,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” and “The Flash,” DC leaned heavily into feminist resentment and anti-Western chauvinism while writing quality circled the drain.

A crucial reminder why DC's films can't be overlooked in terms of all the bad influence they've dished out either. The Blue Beetle film looks like it'll contain woke propaganda too, and a definite insult to Ted Kord. No doubt, the filmmakers couldn't care less what Ted was subject to in Countdown to Infinite Crisis.

And since we're on the subject, a writer for PJ Media recently said that, despite the unfortunately high box office for the Barbie movie, it won't save WB:

“Barbie” is on track for a billion-dollar take at the box office, Warner’s first since before the pandemic lockdown, despite some ferociously bad reviews. But it’s going to take more than one blockbuster to stem Warner’s losses in streaming, plus the production shutdowns due to striking actors and writers.

There’s just one problem: Warner doesn’t seem to have any more billion-dollar pictures in the pipeline.

On Thursday, Warner CEO David Zaslav announced that production shutdowns have saved the studio’s streaming services money in the “low $100 million range,” according to Vanity Fair. While nine figures is nothing to sneeze at, not making movies and TV shows isn’t a sustainable business model for a production studio.

Warner’s “advertising revenue fell 13% year over year to $2.5 billion,” according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. “Revenue from studio content plunged 25% to $2.4 billion during the quarter, which included the disappointing release of ‘The Flash’ from Warner’s DC superhero franchise.”

The company’s last big summer tentpole release is “Blue Beetle,” due out August 18. It’s yet another superhero origin story flick. I’ve seen the trailer, and I can sum it up this way: Blue Beetle is Spider-Man meets Venom meets Greatest American Hero. Seriously, there’s a suit from outer space (Greatest American Hero) that gives powers to a likable, smart teenage boy (Spider-Man) but doesn’t always do what he wants it to do (Venom).

I took my wife to see the new “Mission: Impossible” a few weeks ago, and they played the “Blue Beetle” trailer. When the trailer ended, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “There’s nothing there we haven’t seen in a dozen other movies.” And my wife leaned back over to me and whispered, “That’s the same thing you said about it when we were here for John Wick.”

That’s right: even the trailer was so formulaic that I had to see it twice before it registered.

“Blue Beetle” was relatively cheap to produce — “just” $120 million — but it probably won’t have legs anything like “Barbie.”

Based on its woke directions and politics of the director, hopefully not. In any case, I'm decidedly tired of seeing anything produced by WB at this point, just like I'm fed up with Disney. I think the last good movie I saw coming from WB was Crazy Rich Asians, and nothing since has piqued my interest. Let's also consider they, much like Disney, haven't been treating their classic Merrie Melodies cartoon productions well these days either.

But if you want to know why the Barbie adaptation did so well, the following sadly suggests conservatives lent themselves to its financial success:

But surprisingly, at least for me, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles praised the film, saying that his colleague, Ben Shapiro, “got it all wrong” when it comes to “Barbie.”

Knowles even called the movie’s director, Greta Gerwig, a “genius director” and said the movie is actually “conservative.”

“I left the movie a lot more optimistic about the culture,” Knowles said Wednesday on “The Michael Knowles Show.” “‘Barbie’ is great,” he added. “Ben is completely wrong. A lot of conservatives, mostly who haven’t seen the movie, are wrong to think it’s terrible and woke. The movie is splitting the right. I’ve noticed that a lot of the conservative, traditional, kind of hardcore right-wingers really like ‘Barbie.'”

Knowles is not the only conservative who praised the film, however. Multiple conservative women have come out and expressed their support for the movie, claiming that it acknowledges “what makes a woman a woman.”

Katrina Trinko, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Signal, said that although the film does include “woke” aspects, it “challenges the understanding of women promulgated by the sexual revolution and modern feminism.” This notion, she said, is one “Conservatives should cheer… not despair.”

[...] I also find it interesting that conservatives are praising “Barbie” despite the film’s inclusion of a “transgender” actor. To each his own, I guess.

One can only wonder how the woke aspects don't ruin everything for the supposedly "conservative" ones. And their excusing what's by now a clearly political move to cast a male transsexual actor in the role one of the Barbies makes clear something's wrong with their common sense. The insulting lecture by one of the actresses how it's "too hard" to be a woman and live up to certain expectations makes it all the more mystifying that these would-be conservatives would act as apologists for it. How does that itself acknowledge what makes women women? These commentators apparently fell for an awful concept known as moral equivalence. If anything, this can serve as an important reminder that there's right-wingers out there who regrettably don't have a firm standing on certain principles. And then you wonder how bait-and-switch can occur so easily? By contrast, liberal entertainer Bill Maher took issue with one of the dumbest cliches the film builds upon:

Bill Maher posted a lengthy social media screed against Barbie, focusing on the plot line that finds Barbie (Margot Robbie) confronting Mattel’s board of directors, which is portrayed as all-male. In reality, however, Mattel’s board is comprised of 11 people — five of whom are women.

Maher said the movie creates a “zombie lie” by knowingly perpetuating a long-dead falsehood.

“Barbie is this kind of #ZombieLie,” he tweeted. “Spoiler alert, Barbie fights the Patriarchy. Right up to the Mattel board who created her, consisting of 12 white men! The Patriarchy! Except there’s a Mattel board in real life, and it’s 7 men [6 in actuality] and 5 women. OK, not perfect even-steven, but not the way the board IN THE MOVIE – which takes place in 2023 – is portrayed. And not really any longer deserving of the word ‘patriarchy.’”

He added: “Yes, there was one, and remnants of it remain – but this movie is so 2000-LATE.”

Maher went on to say that Barbie’s portrayal of stereotypical male and female behavior feels bizarrely dated for a movie set in 2023.

“I saw Barbie with a woman in her 30s who said, ‘I don’t know a single woman of any age who would act like that today,'” he wrote.

And that confirms how contrived this movie is, in a way that winds up being as insulting to women as it is to men. On which note, Matt's Movie Reviews even said:

There is a scene in Barbie where it is explained that the doll should be embraced as a vessel to project inspiring ideas to its fanbase of young impressionable girls. Barbie, the movie, takes that wisdom one step further by becoming a high-heeled Trojan horse from which it espouses all matter of feminist nonsense that is eye-rolling at best and sexist at worst.

It's also reprehensible how, if the movie was meant to be surreal, the filmmakers don't seem interested in marketing and promoting it as such, which points to a serious insult today's entertainment is guilty of - they try to pass only so many things off as "realistic", or, they deliberately insult intellects with ingredients that are deliberately political, and in modern slang, woke. And considering the late Mattel founder Ruth Handler was the first company manager when they were established in the late 1940s, one must wonder why they're insulting her memory along with the merchandise she developed. Or how the real life board of directors is comfy with the false portrait this film depicts. They're really okay with a movie that belittles their own reputation? Wow. Also note how some movies like this are so obsessed with delivering a certain vision that, in the end, they only end up hurting the causes they claim to represent.

If Warner Brothers is losing money, and facing the same kind of collapse Disney will one day, it's for the best. I ceased caring about the superhero films they produced long ago, and these current pseudo-fantasy films don't interest me either. If and when Marvel/DC fold and are hopefully sold off as publishers, that'll be for the best too. And it remains to be seen how many people will be buying Mattel's toys for their children if they find the Barbie film an insult to their childhoods.

Update: while we're on the topic of the Barbie film, the Daily Caller's reported at least 2 Islamic-led countries are barring the movie because of LGBT themes appearing there. Not a surprise, of course, if the left's okay with that.

Labels: Avengers, Batman, Captain America, dc comics, golden calf of LGBT, licensed products, marvel comics, politics, Spider-Man, Superman, women of marvel, Wonder Woman, X-Men