The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at the Daily Wire explains what went wrong with how Disney was approaching filmmaking in the past decade, to the point where boys for starters were driven away, and even for women, their steps were damaging:

Disney executives are now hunting for answers, considering every conceivable tactic from “splashy global adventures” to old-fashioned “treasure hunts” in an effort to lure young men between the ages of 13 and 28 back to the House of Mouse.

But for Bill Rivers, a bestselling author and former Trump admin speechwriter, the diagnosis is clear. The problem with Disney isn’t the lack of over-the-top projects. In the end, he says, Disney alienated their audience by forcing an ideology that undermined the same values it used to celebrate.

When asked for his initial reaction to Disney’s alleged “boy trouble,” Rivers blamed it squarely on the stories being told.

“It’s self-inflicted,” he told The Daily Wire via an email interview. “They’re going to have to ditch an ideology that sneered at masculinity, chivalry, righteous honor, power for noble purposes, the warrior ethos – all these things that coded as toxically male – and accept these attributes are actually good and necessary for any healthy society and worthy of exploring in entertainment.”

“This ideology was obviously anti-men,” Rivers added, “but the kicker is realizing it was also perniciously anti-women because it drove men out of the places women wanted to engage with them. Disney’s already taken the first step by recognizing they have a problem; the next step is to remain stubbornly open to stories they would have discarded as too traditional. It’s a time for tradition. Traditional stories stick around for a reason.”

A return to tradition, Rivers argues, is precisely what Disney needs to survive. “Unfortunately for Disney, it’s both,” he said when asked whether the issue was about content or a deeper cultural disconnect.

“On content, the boldest thing Disney can do right now is return to traditional storytelling – courageous heroes, nasty villains, and incredibly high stakes for believable characters who wrestle with timeless challenges like family, romance, revenge, redemption. You can tell these stories in outer space or [a] small town in Appalachia, because setting matters less than plot and character.”

The overarching failure, according to Rivers, is how Disney treated young men for years.

“Regarding Gen Z men, Disney still treats them as if they don’t matter when it pushes cash-grab reboots aimed at them and not works of art crafted for them. ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Minecraft,’ the new superhero slop – this is the warmed-over childhood content of Millennials and Gen Xers. Worse, you’ve got these ideological political messages shoved in there. It totally kills the story,” Rivers said, noting how young men “hate being told what to think.”

For decades, Rivers notes, Disney never faced this problem.

“Marvel, Star Wars, even Pirates of the Caribbean kept this 13–28 year old demographic engaged. What changed? Disney was fortunate to acquire some of the most compelling storytelling in American culture with the original Star Wars and Marvel comics. But these franchises were products of once-in-a-generation geniuses who did the creative heavy-lifting half a century ago or more. Ideological execs have squandered this inheritance for a payday or used them as a vehicle to ram political messages down their audiences’ throats. That’s propaganda, not storytelling.”

And “great storytelling,” Rivers insists, is hard to come by because the content creators have to trust their audiences to come to certain conclusions. That will never work if the studio openly despises them.

As noted, even women have been victims of all this wokeness, and some of these screenplays of recent were submerged in stuff like "girlbosses", who lacked appealing personality, were otherwise sexless, and femininity was belittled as much as masculinity. And if men could be stripped of chivalry, then women could obviously also be victim of the same in the screenplays Disney was developing. Why, do the filmmakers even have creative freedom and autonomy? If not, that's another serious mistake right there.

Unfortunately, the chances Disney will follow good advice at this point are very slim, and if they won't prove they can producer movies and TV shows devoid of wokeness, then box office receipts will continue to remain stagnant.

Labels: animation, golden calf of LGBT, marvel comics, misogyny and racism, politics