The Four Color Media Monitor

Front Page Magazine tells how Disney is still having a hard time figuring out how to appeal to young men in this day and age of sad PC:

Disney bought Marvel to build franchises that would appeal to young men and then turned those franchises into something young men wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Then it bought Star Wars and… well you know.

Now it’s looking for new ideas to appeal to young men with strong female gay characters.

Leadership at Walt Disney Studios has been pressing Hollywood creatives in recent months, multiple sources tell Variety, for movies that will bring young men back to the brand in a meaningful way. “Young men” is defined here by sources as ages 13-28, aka Gen Z.

You mean Predator: Badlands, swapping out Ahrnold for Elle Fanning, The Devil Wears Prada 2, the live-action Moana, Princess Diaries 3, and whatever Kathleen Kennedy next chooses to do with Star Wars isn’t going to do it?

Appealing to young men is such a mystery that Hollywood somehow knew how to do for about 70 years and then the young men began unaccountably disappearing even when Disney made that movie where an elderly Indiana Jones was replaced by a British woman. What do men want? It’s a mystery.

Well the answer is partly that they made the lady stars so unappealing and otherwise sexless, yet made them into such absurd "girlbosses" and "Mary Sues" that as a result, even women couldn't find them admirable figures, and note how in some ways, yes, they made the female leads into lesbians, and even acting bizarrely masculine, something Sex & the City also did in its time on TV (as this article notes, it was also non-realistic, and these were surely the kind of people who'd preach belief in realism). So why else do they think nobody's interested?

Breitbart also addressed the news like this:

And I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the idea that Disney was looking to expand the fanbase to include girls and women. Girls and women already love these franchises. No, no, no, no, no…. Never forget that Disney is an evil, corrupt, and filthy rich company. This was never about expanding the audience. Rather, this was about Disney believing it could use the mighty propaganda power of motion and sound to reshape and reprogram the culture into something feminine and queer. And most unforgivably, that quest included the assassination of our children’s innocence through the targeting of little kids with gay sexualization.

Hand the reins of Star Wars over to a sexless, perfectly-perfect and dull, charisma-free Mary Sue named Rey.

Fail.

Have a sexless, mouthy woman shame and harass Indiana Jones for being Indiana Jones.

Fail.

Turn Marvel into a freak show filled with men-on-men necking and sexless, insufferable girlbosses running the show.

Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fail.

Don’t get me started on Willow.

Fail.

The Force is female, y’all!

Man alive.

Everything Disney touched turned to woke. Disney purchased some of the greatest and most successful brands in history and deliberately sought to alienate, insult, and denigrate their loyal fan base, i.e., young men aged 13 to 28. And now they want them back…

This isn’t difficult… Here’s an eight-point plan to attract young men: 1) Hot chicks, 2) men who take charge, 3) adventures that capture the imagination, 4) no gay crap, 5) no politics), 6) respect the biological fact that men are problem solvers and women are nurturers, 6) bring back Steve McQueen-cool, 7) fire Kathleen Kennedy, and 8) stop purchasing franchises you hate. [...]

Personally, I don’t think Disney will ever change. Recapturing the goodwill and imagination of normal boys will mean a cultural shift these leftist groomers are genetically incapable of making.

Sad but entirely possible. Speaking of the woke Willow sequel, curious how sexless they make its lesbian scene look too. In any event, it's not something that cried out for a sequel, and certainly not one that would ruin what artistic merit the 1988 film had. Of course, what do they mean by "feminine"? Unfortunately, not the women themselves, but the men should seem that way. And that's but another reason why the resulting movies have lost so much influence.

In another related topic, Pajamas Media explains why Hollywood no longer enchants:

For decades, Hollywood’s spell worked because two forces pulled together: art and money.

The art impulse pushed filmmakers to innovate, to reach for beauty, to treat story as craft worth perfecting. The money impulse demanded discipline — pacing, clarity, immersion — because a film that didn’t move people wouldn’t sell. Art alone was indulgent, and money alone was formulaic, but when art and money aligned, you got classic stories: "Casablanca," "The Godfather," "Star Wars," "The Lion King."

Then, in the 1960s, something shifted. Postmodernism seeped in. Film students were trained not only to create but to deconstruct — to pick stories apart until much of the beauty and magic was stripped away. At the same time, they were swept up in politics, convinced that art could and should change society. Put the two currents together, and a new realization dawned: stories carry the power to shape lives. And so they decided to wield that power consciously. Now there was a third impulse on the stage: social change. Art gave way to money, and money yielded to agenda.

And when the main measure became agenda, the spell began to collapse. Studios stopped trusting story to speak for itself. Writers and directors were no longer trusted to tell the best tale; they were tasked with carrying the “right” message. The script became a Trojan horse, hollowed of wonder, stuffed with ideology.

Regrettably, postmodernism very likely played a role in bringing entertainment down to the bottom we're at now. And, there can be no doubt creative freedom's been taken away, and many writers and directors are no longer hired based on whether they believe in creativity, if at all. That's what happens when there's only so much PC running the show. Perhaps it's time for Disney to sell off some of those franchises, and then, we'll see if buyers make a better effort to at least produce sequels that can bring the franchise to a decent conclusion.

All that aside, it's fascinating how even today, Hollywood by and large won't consider animation a valid art form for adults, no matter how well regarded some Japanese anime can be. That's bound to be another severe weakness in Hollywood, yet when they do dabble in animation these days, it's clear they're only willing to do so for political reasons.

Labels: animation, dreadful writers, golden calf of LGBT, history, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics