Posted on 06/26/2018 10:44:50 AM PDT by servo1969
If you don't want to watch, here's the quick written version:
Disney staged a big "secret" conference call with ranking people in the Star Wars division. Security guards were posted outside the doors at offices to prevent eavesdropping. Pixar and Marvel representatives were able to listen in on the call, but not speak on it. Apparently this was allowed to get feedback, I guess at a later point, about the Star Wars situation.
Disney's head Bob Iger wants to fire Kathleen Kennedy, but there's a problem: No one they're willing to offer the job to is willing to take it. JJ Abrams (Randolph reports) was offered the job, but turned it down flat. "Several" were approached.
One person that's brought up as a possible replacement for Kennedy, Dave Filloni, isn't being considered for the job by Iger, I guess because he hasn't run anything big like a studio.
Randolph says (speculating, I think) that no one wants the job because the Lucasfilm team is divided between old-guard Star Wars people and Kennedy's handpicked loyalists.
I would speculate myself that, assuming this claim that no one wants the job is true, it's because the brand is broken, and people know that, and it's a no-win situation: Everyone seems to think that Star Wars is supposed to make money automatically. That's no longer true post-Solo, but people still think that, so any head of Lucasfilm is in a situation where the best they can do is meet expectations (make money), and the worst they can do is fail spectacularly.
There's no upside. Well, except a huge pile of money, but I imagine the people being approached are already getting huge piles of money from other ventures with more of an upside as far as their reputations.
So no big-name person would want to walk into that situation. Smaller names would take that chance, but apparently Disney hasn't gotten desperate enough to offer it to a smaller name. Yet.
Randolph says that Disney feels that Star Wars is too targeted to "older SJWs," instead of its traditional fan base of men, and this is also hurting Star Wars in its merchandise sales, as "older SJWs" don't really buy movie tickets and certainly don't spend a lot of money on Milennium Falcon playsets.
She also reports that all the Star Wars "anthology" movies are indeed on hold as Disney tries to figure this out, except maybe for one: The Obi-Wan movie, which Disney thinks it should have made instead of Star Wars. However, while this movie is not officially on hold, it's also not on the front-burner, either.
Lastly, while "Episode IX" is still on (it's already started filming), it's "too late for any major course corrections." Kathleen Kennedy has ceded all creative control to director J.J. Abrams, maybe to spare herself further blame, maybe because she wants to just sit this one out, or who knows, maybe because Disney wants the ball in someone else's hands.
One point she alludes to, which she made before: She thinks that Star Wars never appealed to Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen Kennedy didn't like the franchise, because it was, indeed, a boys' adventure franchise.
Instead of making a boys' adventure franchise she didn't get and didn't like, she made it into something she could like: a girls' empowerment fantasy.
This kind of sums up the problem with Social Justice Warriors taking over male-skewing sections of pop culture: They just don't like it. They never did like it. Some of them even feel that these parts of pop culture encourage "toxic masculinity," and therefore are evil.
And therefore must be subverted and remade into something they never were before.
So you... put multimillion dollar companies into the hands of people who don't like the product those companies sell and in fact might even hate?
Well, good luck with that, I guess.
Doubling Down and Redoubling Down: Apparently an official employee of Lucasfilm, writing for the "official" StarWars.com website, has decided to inform people that they are not "customers" of Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm owes them nothing at all, not even polite treatment.
She seems to be echoing Kathleen Kennedy, who has previously declared that she owes nothing to the male fans of Star Wars (who, let's face it, have maintained the value of the franchise for 40+ years):
"I have a responsibility to the company that I work with. I don't feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way. I would never just seize on saying, 'Well, this is a franchise that's appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'"
Yes... yes... reach out with your Hatred... all is proceeding precisely as I envisioned...
Iger got exactly what he asked for...someone who’s never accomplished anything.
That's box office gross. They still have to split that with theatres, distributors, and pay for all that promotion.
They also paid George Lucas $4 billion for that nerdy fan base that they've burned and chased away.
Star Wars was supposed to be a money tree like Marvel for Disey, instead they're bringing up the rear.
Thanks. My wrong. I had thought they were the same.
Your exceptions tend to prove the rule. Don’t forget Golda Meir. Maggie Thatcher.
The whole ‘accountability and reason’ meme came from the movie, ‘As Good As It Gets’ with Jack Nicholson playing a very successful and reclusive author.
A female fan buttonhooked him at an elevator and told him what a fan she was.
She said that she loved his female characters, and asked how it was he was able to capture them as he did.
His reply, “I think of a man, and then I take away accountability and reason.”
Something I never considered about this statement, which is hilarious in the movie, is the obverse of it - that accountability and reason are the things that withstand the other, baser aspects of a man’s nature.
Don't know Iger from a hole in a wall, but perhaps he had some youthful "indiscretion", or not-so-youthful, and the #METOO crowd was knocking on his door?
Instead, Disney opted to make Rey a millennial chick with superpowers, which makes a farce of the force.
They are writing off $50 million on the Solo movie - not that big of a deal to them...not that they want to. With foreign revenue, streaming revenue, rental revenue, purchased Solo movies and merchandise sales, Disney could have lost a lot more, but they are a marketing machine.
Eh, maybe, but what I do know is that masculinity doesn’t necessarily equate to reason and accountability. I know it certainly didn’t with Jean-Paul Sartre, George Lucas, or any of those guys. Heck, technically, the feminists of the 1960s actually hated femininity, to the extent that one could be forgiven for thinking that, had transgender surgeries been around, they probably would have taken that. I know Mallory Millet, the sister of Kate Millet, once commented that Kate was exactly the type of person who probably would have surgically changed her gender to be male if she was given the opportunity to do so. And Simone de Beauvoir’s reasons for advocating for abortion was specifically to have women “kill like men do”, not to mention made some extremely anti-femininity statements that actually comes across as downright misogynistic, like claiming that women should “lop off their breasts” due to them “not serving the individual economy,” plus referring to housewifery as “parasitic” while strongly implying they should be gotten rid of, plus referring to even merely possessing maternal instincts as “oppressive”, and bashing female bodies as being “sick.” That’s why, with all due respect, I’m not particularly fond of the whole “femininity = lack of reason or accountability” meme.
I have a complex view on Jack Nicholson myself. On the one hand, I’m not particularly fond of his very left-wing politics (even shilling for the likes of Cuba). But on the other hand, I do have immense respect for the fact that despite his leftist politics, he is a staunch pro-lifer and against abortion, and actually has a pretty sound reason for being that (he himself was nearly aborted).
As far as reason, well, that would depend largely on what you mean by “reason.” After all, the French Revolution used “reason” (especially the type of “reason” promoted by the likes of Voltaire and Diderot) to commit its horrific murders and actions, so in that sense, reason did nothing to withstand the baser aspects of a man’s nature, and if anything, reason made it the baser aspects even WORSE.
I don’t think that’s the case. Let’s not forget that he had kept Gay Days around despite being in the perfect position to get rid of it, and if anything, he actually tried to outright advertise it on the Disney website, which was even noted on FOX. Not to mention he was also involved in both the censoring of Path to 9/11 and in burying the DVD release to such an extent that Disney didn’t even sell the rights despite having one prospective buyer, Lion’s Gate Productions. And both instances were done specifically due to the Clintons in some way shape or form: The former was because the Clintons, in Alinsky style, engineered a media circus and ordered him to follow through with censoring it, and the latter was done at their behest in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton could get the nomination for the presidency. If anything, he’s more likely to just support the radical left, not even caring if Disney doesn’t turn out a profit. I actually wonder why Disney hired him to replace Eisner, especially when, buying back Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’s rights aside, he has not done any good for Disney and if anything may have made Disney even WORSE off than before.
But who is the Empire and who is the Rebel Alliance?
And which side killed Carrie Fisher?
There was some question then and now whether the Dark Side or the other side of the Force would prevail in both heroes and villains. You had to have some of that conflict for the movies to be interesting.
I'm not so sure that things got complicated and were ruined by it. Rey, the new girl, is a very simplistic character, and so is the evil old White guys versus good young multiracial multi-gender guys schema.
Disney, IMO, went down hill when they, the BOD, got rid of the Disney family members, and installed whatshisname, the former US Senate Majority Leader, as the Chairman.
You may be looking at it from the standpoint of examples that decided to abandon one, the other, or both.
I don’t recall there being a former US Senate Majority Leader acting as Chairman. I know Bob Iger was installed shortly after Michael Eisner got fired, which was partially caused by Roy E. Disney getting fired by Eisner and his protesting out of disgust for what Eisner did, though.
I agree that complicating things, especially on the good and evil front, ruins a whole lot of things (forget Star Wars, we already learned that lesson with the 2014 Maleficent film.). Unfortunately, I’m currently hesitant to call Luke Skywalker good, or the Empire and Vader evil, largely thanks to the fact that George Lucas actually DID based the Empire on America, and the Rebels on the Vietcong, meaning he STILL tried to do a subversion of traditional good vs. evil by depicting the Vietcong as the good guys despite objectively having much more claim to human rights violations than the Americans did.
George John Mitchell Jr....A Democrat, Mitchell served as a United States Senator from Maine from 1980 to 1995 and as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995.
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Mitchell served as chairman of The Walt Disney Company from March 2004 until January 2007,...
You talking about the reason bit, right? Or my examples on the feminists who seemed to hate masculinity? Just needing clarification since it could go either way.
Oh, okay. I suspect he might have been the guy who got Iger in, then.
Might as well redo 7. It sucked, too.
what ever you do there will always be people with SJW attitudes that think they have to change a creative indever to reflect those values because there opinion is superior. they are not true artists for them its always about supporting there ideology not about anything else. If you work on a project you have to make sure that they are seen by everyone there for what they are so they are not given a chance to ruin the project.
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