The Four Color Media Monitor

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page tells how older TV series and films are faring better with modern audiences than brand new productions of the past decade from Hollywood that were staffed by DEI hires, and points to at least 2 recent comics adaptations that suffered because of the overt focus on diversity lacking talent and merit:

Disney has lost a fortune on movies staffed by inexperienced DEI hires. “The Marvels”, its first comic book universe movie that didn’t even hit $100 million (amounting to likely losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was written and directed by Nia DaCosta, hailed as the first black woman to direct a superhero film, with one previous low budget horror film to her name. Her fellow writers had little more than a few episodes of Disney+ Marvel shows under their belts.

“Madame Web”, a recent effort to launch a Spider Man movie franchise without Spider Man, performed even worse for Sony. The movie was helmed by a TV director based on a screenplay originally written by an otherwise mostly unknown minority writer/director, and crashed badly.

The decline of animation quality at Disney has been chronicled in features like Film Threat’s D-Files which put it down to an urgent need to hire new diverse staff while purging the “old white guys” The new diverse hires “understood very little about actual animation and bringing art to life”, and “struggled to succeed at a job they weren’t qualified to have in the first place”. Their ineptitude was blamed on an intolerant workplace and the veterans were forced out.

To do animation right, you need to study hard at the art, and not just illustration, but also the scriptwriting. And these diversity hires were only brought in out of desperation to prove something entirely unnecessary. Even though they had very little to their resume to guarantee they had talent to take on a serious blockbuster. No wonder these films and cartoons are tanking so horribly.

This reminds of a time several years ago, when Dan DiDio was still publisher of DC, it was told the audience preferred a lot of older stories over the newer ones he'd produced. And that figures. He made the DCU so insufferable, and it was said he'd told in interviews he didn't think superheroes should have happy lives. That kind of mandate was exactly what brought down the DCU in many ways, and it's still suffering badly as a result. Some of what DiDio turned out seemed to have served as a template for movie screenwriters to go by, and we've seen the results in the years since, with many consecutive film adaptations faring worse at the box office than the previous ones. Now, even Marvel's experiencing much of the same with their movies, which, similar to several DC movies and TV shows, now also share wokeism in their screenplays. And it doesn't look likely to change in the future. Nor for that matter can we expect the upcoming DC films overseen by the pretentious director James Gunn to fare any better. When can we finally get back to dramas and romantic comedies?

Labels: animation, dc comics, golden calf of LGBT, marvel comics, politics, sales, Spider-Man, women of marvel