To clarify, the box office data is the profit/loss already. I don't think I made that sufficiently clear in the video, but it does say it on the y-axis and some movies are shown to lose money, so hopefully it's reasonably obvious - Jack
Disney was always woke and nobody cared. You should chart from the start of their battle with Florida policies which made them appear to take a political side. Taking a political side is always suicidal.
Box office data profit should be measure as % of investment + marketing as well rather than absolute amount here. Investing 100M for a movie and make 20M profit is not the same as investing 500M movie and make 20M profit
Disney makes bad movies, then uses wokeness to deflect criticism. Disney's performative progressivism is as offensive as its disregard for entertainment quality.
Yeah this is the real problem, black-washing is bad not just for changing beloved characters, but... it usually goes hand-in-hand with terrible story re-writes.
@@marhawkman303 Yeah, remember that time that Super Woke Progressive LGBTq Feminist Disney put all their backing behind their first openly LGBTq heroine and . . . wait no they didn't do that . . . they canceled her show early despite positive reviews/word of mouth, and then fan backlash got them to give the staff three special hour long episodes to wrap the story up. Yes, I'm still salty about the Owl House.
Ironically Disney lacks diversity and this was what the original Disney had in spades...not diversity of skin tones (which is ultimately shallow) but diversity of IDEAS, perspectives, opinions. He knew in the 1950s that conservatives weren't creative, he hired liberals who were also artistic, and were good story tellers...along with being from different cultural background, political ideologies etc. the films were multifaceted and represented the best of humanity and the lessons that it has to teach us.
But a lot of why they are bad is due to a woke ideology. They hired people based upon identity politics, not because they were the best people for the job.
They don't always release that information, so it shouldn't be factored in as a variable. The test is also not very scientific in general but it could point towards there being nothing to the popular saying or checked towards yes there is something
The entire analysis the guy does is flawed b/c he uses the "reported" budgets which Disney has had producers mention are fake. The actual budgets are on average $100 million more than reported and that's before you factor in the marketing costs. It's much easier to just look at the trend of the company (Disney) and how much money they've lost since starting this woke initiative. That's a clear, definitive trend.
@protostar8 Then my your estimates it's impossible. So why bother. Just continuing believing your narrative, cause from that survey I can already tell conservatives are just BSing "43% said Discussion of Female issues" is woke. How is that woke?
@@riccardomariani4660 Incorrect. The first thing you learn in any good stats class is that stats are HIGHLY manipulatable. While correlation doesn't equal causation ignoring the correlation in this scenario when the company has literally pivoted their entire programming approach towards the "cause" is a bit naive.
Going Lazy kills Disney. A significant part of their content consists of remakes, sequels and spinoffs. The series "Arcane" on Netflix (to name a counter example) was a success in terms of views & reviews. It had a diverse cast with strong female leads, LGBT romance, etc. It did well, because it featured a compelling story, difficult choices, ambiguous moralities, and character growth through trauma and struggle. Disney right now just slaps the "You are perfect the way you are" and "you can do anything if you believe in yourself" tropes on their IPs and calls it a day. Most people don't hate diversity, they hate the garbage plot that so often comes with it.
it also used the British/foreign head writer/ guest writer system instead of the writer room concept (which WGA is pushing for). Without the writing by committee crap the story came first.
indeed, its almost like instead of woke themes that make it bad, its just that writers who are woke suck at story telling. like they cant think outside of a pre-programmed box and use creativity to tell a good story. theres ways to have those themes in a movie and still be good, put some of your soul into the movie!
The Last of Us had an entire gay romance episode and I wouldn't call it "woke" simply because it's inclusive... I wouldn't call it woke at all because it's not a moralizing intersectional feminism lecture dressed up as entertainment. Woke goes wrong in the same ways Christian films go "wrong" in that "the message" is overt rather than conveyed via themes, consequences, and allegory.
@@virtualaliasThat episode was definitely woke. It was nothing but a filler episode to show two gays for no reason. It added nothing to the story. It was weird and odd to include it. Besides, if it was a straight couple instead of a gay one, the episode wouldn't even have existed in the first place since there was no reason for it anyway.
I think what is really Disney's problem is that they have become too reliant on nostalgia bait and are willing to recycle old ideas hoping that the consumers will give them more money. But eventually you will run out of old ideas and you cant recycle a movie for a second time. As a result the company started to become less creative which in turn makes bad writing more frequent. But the company will not give a poop as long as it gives them triple digits.
The problem with Disney is that they're banking on nostalgia while at the same time completely disrespecting the original and changing way too much of the story for it to actually be a true live action adaptation. They would have been better off just writing a new story after making so many changes. The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White are prime examples.
For clarity though, "Go Woke Go Broke" is not just to do with a film or series 'going woke', but more that a studio would emphasise on this point before trying to actually make a good story or likable character. People want to see good story and characters that are relatable and fallible, it is why characters that follow "the hero's journey" are some of the most loved because it follows the formulaic fall and rise of what makes a film hero great. To top this off, yes the point of Disney rehashing their IPs into live action is now both stale and uninspired. It worked for the first few movies because people were not expecting it, so it had that 'wow' factor... now it is just showing its true a colours: Disney trying to cash-cow older movies to milk whatever is left of them (and to justify reselling old merch with high cash values)
I agree. Hence why stories with "strong female leads" have been popular before (The Terminator, Tomb Raider, Alien). But that was because the stories were the points of the movies. The fact that the "hero of the story" was in fact "heroine of the story", was not the important part. Which is where the new movies are going wrong. As the point of the movie is, that it is a strong and independant woman, which is in the lead, and then there is a story around that.
The classic point of failure can be identified by removing the woke component when done correctly the story still stands. But in the case of those stories with a woke agenda the story collapses.
disney was always this bad. theyre on site child trafficking scandals have been consisten since before me and you were born. further... go rewatch pinocchio... literally about a pedophile and drugging kids. go re watch pocahontas, her song about the white man is pure CRT. disney hasnt changed, you just started noticing.. they didnt "go woke"
Same. Way back in in my junior year back in like 2015 I remember first reading about Disney trying to make a live action remake of Jungle Book, Mulan, Mermaid, Lion King....I was already saying that it was a bad idea lol. The original movies were PERFECT as they were they didn't need to be trampled on
That is true however I would've gone to the movies for the Little Mermaid for sentimental reasons, I used to love it as a child, but when I saw the black chick in the trailer I said: no thanks. And I roll my eyes every time they force a gay couple into a movie.
Yeah, it's not as simple as 'go woke' then do poorly. Lot of factors influence or converge to turn down audiences. This video perspective is too 'investigative to disprove wokeness damage' and sees things too superficially with numbers. Reminds me how game companies make patches based on numbers and turns out people hate the patches lol
People used to gobble anything Disney regardless of how bad the story or over played. Disney stories were always woke but Nobody cared as it was traditional to watch anything Disney. I know too many people that are avoiding Disney during their battle with Florida policies. Now supporting Disney means supporting a political agenda. It was a totally avoidable bridge to cross but they did and a side was taken. Never take a political side.
I think the movie industry as a whole is just not as profitable as it used to be. I think more and more people are entertaining themselves in other ways rather than watching a movie.
Movies todays are packed with CGI, fall victim to studio interference, rewrites and reshoots plus the occasional celebrity name attached that their cost simply explodes. Add the add-money and movies have to make just an absolutly absurd amount of money to break even. Ofcourse movies are not "profitable" if they need to make like a billion$ just to offset the cost.
Yea...that's what you do when movies aren't good - you find other entertainment. But some movies still occasionally make over a billion, which means it is still profitable if you make something people want to see.
Too many players because tech made it feasible to tell a story compellingly with less budget. Avatar is the opposite of that of course, but still. There’s so much to watch, it’s not that special anymore to go all the way to the city to go see a movie with overpriced popcorn etc etc.
Rotten Tomatoes pulled negative reviews for Little Mermaid (and other movies) at the studios request. There was a paragraph about it on the website...that they're pulling or hiding certain reviews. Not sure if it's still there.
Yea, Disney movies get special treatment where Rotten Tomatoes simply disable 1 star reviews and only count 2-10 star. Meanwhile all paid bots who give 10/10 are always kept, because it isn't review bombing if you bot a high score.
@@beepboop-o5s I'm old enough to remember when Disney hired lesser beings to be trained by their white employees and then terminated the white employees ... a short while later, Disney was no longer creative and merely recycled old material
What is breaking Disney is the fact they are pouring like, half a dozen 200M+ budget movies and expecting all of them to make a profit. Even if you liked Elemental, how the heck did this movie cost 200 millions to produce?
They're Woke in their production as well -- they had to send stuff back for rework over and over again, because they weren't using the best people for the job.
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa It also doesn't include merchandising revenue, which is what made George Lucas a billionaire. No one wants to buy merch from Woke movies. Get Woke, Go Broke.
Corrolation vs Causation. I think the percived wokeness is a simptom of a different issue. Disney is not taking any big risks anymore, not allowing super daring creative individuals to do there thing like in 'Everything Everywhere all at once'. Rather it feels like they have a checklist of things that worked at some point or another or have come out of focus groups. We get a little wokeness, little bit nostaliga bait, amazing visuals and a more generic version of a story we already heard before like if it was written by AI. You can feel its a corporate project and doesnt have as much soul or is the vison of one individual.
Every other company like WB is doing precisely that. It isn't "perceived wokeness" it's activism pretending to be entertainment. Their writing is trash because the views behind those writtings are trash. To quote the girl who played remade Ariel "it isn't about love, it's about what she wants" aka it's about me. It's about ego and nobody cares about your egoisms other than yourself. This wretched view that in order to matter you need to search for power for power's sake makes their characters at best unrelatable and at worst into detestable villains prettending to be heroic or complex characters when they're in fact just one shade of black away from being as evil as Dio Brando.
@@leos.2322 I personally dislike the live action remakes and think they've often missed the point due to executive pouncing on shallow criticism, or misunderstanding nuanced critique, but, uh . . . Yeah the original Little Mermaid was like . . . Aerial falling in love at first sight with a person she doesn't know, due to her infatuation with the surface world and proceeding to voluntarily strike a deal with a literal sea witch who sang a song about the consequences of her deals if you can't keep up your end of the bargain. That's not love, that's childish naivety of a teenager. It always was. Like, did you not see the original movie? Jeez, the old standby analysis about the Disney renaissance was that they are movies overwhelmingly about their protagonists seeking their identities. Which is the definition of ego. There's plenty of valid criticism to be had. The live action films don't really justify their own existence, except as a cash grab. They add nothing and often break things while trying to ineptly fix critique. But this one just comes off as kinda weak to me and a character assassination of the actress.
@@Bustermachine It's woke crap.. being attracted to someone is usually how love begins. Almost all entertainment have become activism/political. But you can keep ignoring the obvious. Many people I know including me aren't spending money on most of the things being made because we are of the opinion it's all gone woke, and apparently many more do as well.. so why not take that serious?
What you are missing is that the bad story telling is happening because disney is carelessly dumping all these woke topics into their movies for what they think is an easy win while simultaneously wrecking the original story.
@@_Dibbler_ My boy giving me a free psychoanalysis? Wokeness is largely a western problem, not mine. If I pay for a ticket to watch a movie, I don't want blue haired individuals pushing their liberal ideologies onto us instead of producing an actual entertaining movie with a story :)
Youve hit the nail on the head! Disney is a brand where you used to be able to rely on a certain amount of quality in their films. The last 10 or so years that quality of story telling has gotten progressively worse each time they attempt to shoe-horn in another woke moment or ideology just for the sake of doing it. The wokeness itself kinda sucks, but in order to get it into their stories they are sacrificing more and more actual quality story. Take the little mermaid, they swapped races - for what reason other than just because... then instead of following the story they changed the emotional attachment by making it so that there was no pay-off at the end.
My friend and I recently went to see Oppenheimer (great movie, too long) and were both turned off by the trailers at the very beginning because almost everything presented was really just a rehash of old movies or a continuation of old franchises. Examples include a new Exorcist film, a new Conjuring/Nun film, and a handful of others that were honestly so forgetful that I'm having trouble recalling them.
There is at least one major red flag in this video - saying that Rotten Tomatoes is a good metric. It's horrible in fact, they were caught red handed manipulating user reviews few times, like deleting 'bad' review bombs, but leaving 'good' ones. Also if movie is under performing, but handful of hardcore fans watch it and they like, while cinemas are almost empty - that will create Fresh on a bad movie. Rotten Tomatoes should never be trusted.
"We asked a random sample of people, who were attending an all expenses paid promotional weekend retreat at a 5 star resort, if they liked the movie. The majority, without bias, said YES!"
Wokeness is one factor that I look at. Other important factors for me include poor writing and bad CGI, and fan baiting (ie actors and writers who seem disconnected with what their audience wants and decides they need to fix the story. These actors and writers call anyone who says their movie or TV show are bad an ist, regardless of what people are actually saying is bad. People don't like being called names or being told what to think or feel.)
@@AshAshAshAshAshAshAshAshAshAsh @stevenstrain283The showrunners of The Rings of Power seem to have called the Lord of the Rings fans racists because they don't like their show. I looked at a ton of comments and reviews about the show across social media, and maybe one person out of thousands said they weren't watching the show because it had black people in it. Everyone else said that the costumes, writing, wirework, etc looked really really bad. I think the message the showrunners are trying to send is "Say something negative about our show, and we'll call you a racist." I realize that some people deserve to be called out because of their opinions, but it looks like the showrunners are being bullies and trying to use their platform to silence people. It isn't working. When I see examples of what they did elsewhere when it comes to media, I believe that people with influence are essentially saying that other people's feelings and opinions don't matter, even if they are constructive, kind and true, and that is not okay for anyone to hold them or express them.
@@HeatherVerhagen Sure, people are complaining the show is "woke" because of "bad wirework" by the way I watched the show, I'm not even certain what scenes would require wirework let alone work that looks silly.
no they don't. a group of morons harass a black actor cause he must be white. That actor ignores them. Then in one interview he decides to say something like "c'mon guys, you believe dragons exist in this world but not black nobles?"-->Cultural warriors make videos titled "actor so and so attacks the fans", "studio so and so says if you hate the show then you're racist". You go and watch these videos and come here and make this comment. Reality: the guys who harassed that black actress on Obi Wan calling her the N-word, are the ones they called out, not the fans. Stop self-victimizing.
The problem isn't so much that Disney went 'woke', its that they went about it really stupidly. Rather than tell stories that would represent various types of people naturally, they decided to change existing stories which was very irritating to long-time fans. Also, since the characters no longer fit the situations in the movies coupled by a lack of development time leading to poor writing made a lot of these films a bad time for all involved. Mulan and Star Wars sequels are prime examples of the mistakes Disney has been making. In Mulan the main character was made overwhelmingly powerful from the word go leading to a lack of any character development. In Star Wars the main character, Ray has hardly any lines and seemingly becomes overwhelmingly powerful with no training. Add to that the actress playing her was so poorly rehearsed in fight scenes that weapons just 'disappear' from foes hands so that she is not prematurely killed off. Some legacy characters were killed off at points that make no sense at all while one particular character is kept alive despite their death being what the movies needed and that the actress behind the character had already died (so Star Wars fans had to watch as Princess Leia became Mary Poppins in space). Also every male character left in the films were made to look like either a coward or a gung-ho idiot before the second movie of the trilogy was complete made the films a prime target for conservatives while the resurrection of Palpatine was a lazy and stupid move that made little sense in context to everything that had happened before (in universe) and would not have been needed if Disney had not allowed Rian Johnson (writing and directing 'The Last Jedi') to move away from the trilogy plan that JJ Abrams had drawn up. To be fair, 'The Force Awakens' was hardly a master class in film making, mainly consisting of plot elements copied and pasted from the original Star Wars trilogy but it made a lot more sense than 'The Last Jedi'.
I remember this and a great example is the real-life alladin. The fact that they changed the story itself to have the woman become the sultan, and alladin (the character for which the entire story is supposed to be about) into just a secondary character to the leading lady (while woke), is just a complete misrepresentation of the story. I also think the stats shown in this video somewhat misrepresent the problem. If you buy into the notion that people who arent woke are "being silenced", and are even scared about speaking out, then it also follows that the numbers themselves would be skewed, as statistically, the only people putting out reviews would be those speaking favorably (or aligned with the, today, more socially acceptable message). Also, I would imagine that you generally would only be getting "ratings" from people who are going to see the movies. If ticket sales are down, then those that WOULD have seen the movie simply have not seen it, and thus don't have anything to review. In other words, the statistics don't account for people who just didnt see it, didnt review it BECAUSE of it's wokeness, or that the numbers are simply positively biased. The reviews never ask people who DIDN'T see it why they didnt. Those numbers are close to impossible to capture.
The part I hated was when they made Han Solo and Princes Leia divorced. That killed the entire love story of the first three films. It seems they were so woke they just couldn’t stand having a popular female character be married to a man. It was that love story that made the original movies tolerable by women.
Yes, - but if Milan and Rey had actual struggles to overcome, were portrayed flawed from the beginning, and had an actual character arc - they wouldn’t be the fem bosses they were intended to be and wouldn’t be in the woke category. The message in both those movies are “women are perfect and don’t need help”. That’s text book woke and also makes for a very boring movie. So yeah, Disney is absolutely losing money because the themes are to push woke ideology which makes for boring and uninteresting movies regardless of how you vote.
But that is precisely why it's wokeness. Trying to use famous products to sell a political message is an integral part of the process used in Marxism, where Wokeness, intersectional Feminism, Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory all come from.
I think it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation of JUST Disney studios films over the past 20 years, instead of only recently, as looking at only the past 2-3 years, doesn't provide a whole lot of context or big picture information.
even now the correlation is bad. R2 that is not going up = bad for business...you have to understand that people's salaries are going up, inflation etc. Any trend that is now going upwards or maintaining a high level of engagement is seen as a failure. Especially since the untapped population/market is always increasing. I think the data suggests what is likely happening: i.e. the industry is stagnating despite the enormous efforts to be inclusive and increase market share through that instead of better movies lol.
Force awakens is an outlier - it was early movie, and new release of bellowed brand. So box office would be higher 🤔 and audience weren't as allergic to this as it is now. Show just recent 2-3 years - that would show up more correlation imo🙂
I thought the same thing. Force Awakens is an outlier because it was the first installment of the new Star Wars franchise so people didn't yet know how bad Disney was going to mess it up. Barbie is an outlier for two reasons: 1. Misleading marketing (similar problem to Force Awakens) 2. There are very compelling arguments that it is actually an anti-woke masterpiece and therefore may not belong on the woke side at all.
So is Barbie, the marketing around it made it seem like a normal movie made just to have a good time. No one knew it was woke until after the first weekend when it had gotten most of the conservative and normal peoples money.
IMHO, that list of "things that make a movie woke" needs one more piece: the thing needs to be included for social reasons not related to the plot. A chunk of dialog that seems out of places and mostly their to make it pass the Bechdel test would be a prime example.
Not necessarily to make a movie woke in the neutral sense, but rather to make a movie woke in a lame way. _This_ is what really annoys people and can lead to financial damage. When wokeness is just superficial posing to check boxes, it becomes ridiculous and even tends to have a counterproductive effect. It's cargo cult, ritual over substance.
I dont know since when you watch movies ... but having a political statement for not plot reason has been a thing since at least the 90s. I guess what upsets people is that social reasons are political statements people are not as used to.
@@informatikabos5481 for me, it's the virtue signaling aspect; as often as not, they aren't even doing a good job of convincing me *they* care about the thing, but rather it looks more like they feel stapling it on will win them points somehow.
@@benjaminshropshire2900 That is a very valid criticism that people across the whole political spectrum share. At the same time, big budget Hollywood movies were never known for a lot of nuance or thought.
The biggest reason why I'm not going to the movie very often is not due to being Woke! It's due to the cost of going to the theater! I took my daughter to see Barbie and it was over $50 for two of us! That means for my whole family it would be close to $100 or more to see a movie! Hollywood hasn't had a new idea in 40 years!
Then go on Tuesday’s and Sunday’s: it’s half off. Plus, bring ur own food to the theater, since u have to grab ur bag with you anyways to not be burglarized
This. Imagine spending this much for a 2/3-hour movie when a video game isn't that much more expensive and a single game sometimes gives me 200+ hours of playtime.
Wokeness is directly linked to bad writing, that's what this video is missing. The reason franchise are rebooted and revisited is partially because of wokeness, the reason characters are bland and badly written is wokeness, the reason for certain subjects and morals being overrepresented in films is wokeness, and even plot holes and bad writing can be attributed in large part to allow wokeness in movies. So yes wokeness definitely play a huge part in the decline of the movie industry.
No it's not. This started once the Chinese market became large and affluent enough to appeal towards. Trying to target too many demographics watered down storytelling (woman, men, USA audience, Chinese, age etc.) and had studios leaning in to both de-risking (pulling in their old catalogue, proven brands, i.e. Star Wars, Marvel) and targeting too many audiences. They want to appeal to families, gay people, young people, old people, multi-cultural people, etc. The idea of wokeness carries with it a connotation that there is some agenda. That is insanely naïve. They want to make money. On paper this is the best way to make money. Unfortunately on paper business decisions have very little to do with good storytelling. This is simply a cycle. Disney went through this before in the 80s.
@@gtwucla There is an agenda, is Disney the only corporation going trough this? absolutely not. There is lobbying in corporate america to push this ideology, i would say that it's you who are naive if you don't see how wokeness has infiltrated corporations at every level. Why is there DEI framework and organisation in every departments of practically every corporations. Why BlackRock and other special interests invest and infiltrate every boardrooms to push ESG and multinational organisations agendas ? Seriously at this point if you look at it and don't see how many people and organisations push this agenda you are either blind or you just refuse to see it.
@@gtwucla That is a curious argument because if it was connected to China they have traditional non-woke gender roles. If you take your argument at face value, the influence of China would have pushed the film industry towards a non-woke agenda. But it didn't. "On paper this is the best way to make money". How many gays and transsexuals are there? Surely the easiest way to make money would be to make films of universal appeal but again they don't do that.
@gtwucia, I'd say that you make a reasonable assessment of HOW woke ruins art, but not why so many organizations are blindly following the lemmings. The only thing naive is not being suspicious that there is an agenda. Keep thinking and you can see it.
Yes. I recently saw a TH-cam video that explained that directors and reshooting movies up yo 3 or 4 times and that this is causing the cost of the movies to skyrocket. Disney needs to hire more experienced directors with clearer visions for their projects.
While quality storytelling is a big part of the problem I have noticed a different problem that may prove to be even more impactful. The fact is, many big media companies today are not understanding their target audience or they are trying to target the wrong audience with their product. A prime example of this was the Amazon show Rings of Power. Amazon didn't seem to realize that the LotR fandom is quite possibly the most rabid fandom in existence and to change a beloved character and story from the source material would awaken the rage of said fandom.
Just a thought: people who have claimed "go woke, go broke," as an explanation, might also have stopped supporting Disney with their money... kinda like me... You know, that's just a thought, but my whole family tries to avoid giving them money because when we do, Disney turns it around and insults us.
I don't know woke or broke. What I know is that I paid for $80 yearly subscription and watched Moon Knight. Then spent $40 for a family to the new Indiana Jones movie. Ok, so now for me DIsney is a brand that I give money to, to make me feel stupid. Will make sure it does not happen again.
@@ronaldthered6650No, he doesn't. He's lying by statistics by using outliers like Star Wars 7 & 8 to shore up his argument. Everyone knows those movies effectively killed the franchise and any lingering good will from the audience, as seen by Solo's market failure immediately after. He's oversimplifying his analysis by ignoring the fact that two decades of movies have crutched on franchise reboots/remakes in lieu of actual marketing, and some "woke" movies succeed based on the good will of their franchises' previous installments.
I think Disney made the mistake of putting too much focus on its streaming service which has resulted in them needing to generate a huge increase in new content. The need to try guarantee success has resulted in Disney going down the route of remakes, even if that damages franchises like Star Wars in the future.
That was my opinion as well. Remake after remake after remake. Nothing new, just the same story with improved CGI, sound or music. While interesting at first to see how technology could improve the original, that nugget has lost its luster. If studios want to succeed they need to get a good story well written for film and shot in a descent way without breaking the bank and limit social messaging in the movie.
I think over saturating the market is also a problem. I mean I'm a fan of Star Wars, but even I don't watch every single new mini-series Disney puts out anymore. Plus, how many more of these things can they really make? I mean what's next, is Jar Jar going to get his own mini-series? Or a sequel to the Star Wars Holiday Special?
@@catdogmousecheese Some KoTOR movies or shows might be interesting. But, I think they need to set the Skywalker Saga characters down for a few decades.
"... in the future." *????* Their story telling was so horrid, I lost all interest in their future ideas after they killed off the Skywalker bloodline and brought back Palpatine because they couldn't figure out a good antagonist character. Not to mention, the story circulates around characters, not the world they live in. What ever happened to the "world building" concept?
@@ryandylan6946 race swapping has nothing to do with storytelling. It has everything to do with Disney making supposed attempts at being somehow "representative" and that's pure wokeness.
The aspect of wokeness I hate the most is that in historical settings, the script reflects the writers attitude in 2023, and not what people would have thought in the historical period.
One of the issues I see in a lot of the movies that are underperforming. Is how studios are interacting with audiences. When someone in your movie goes out and starts calling people racist, homophobic, bigots, or toxic males if they don't watch their movies. Turns a lot of people off. Even many on the left don't like it.
Many on the left agree, they just are broader consumers of media so if a movie has poor storytelling or just looks like poorly (as was the case for most of the Disney remakes) they'll just skip them, instead of showing support for the idea with dollars. In addition, a lot of progressives still haven't returned to the theaters, and streaming pretty much cannibalized that industry.
The 'murican POV about what is "right" or "left" is fun. It is almost like it is inverted for the clueless Americans... Edit: That explains why they are so bad at geography
I believe the reason barbie did so well is because it is a brand that actually fits that kind of woke narrative. Its does not feel forced and does not stick out like a sour thumb in the storytelling.
yea it actually didn't seem that woke to me tbh. You have to consider the context. It's a fake toy world where the Barbie's as construction workers and trash collectors don't actually do these things because nothing is constructed and there's no trash. The men are side characters because they always have been in a doll marketed to girls. I thought it was a pretty decent movie
One thing I want to add to your point is that Barbie even though woke, it was not woke in a radical way like Disney. It still focuses on storytelling, with each character having their own flaws to overcome and most importantly it does not attempt to force the "Strong female character" trope into it. Unlike Disney, who often sacrifice storytelling and character development for the sake of wokeness
the graph "Rotten Tomatoes - Wokeness" doesn't consider that the score by critics and the wokeness index have a cofounding variable (woke movies on Rotten Tomatoes tend to receive higher ratings) so if there this negative correlation existed it wouldn't appear on the trend line or would appear much less clearly.
Indeed. Critics on RT fall over themselves to rate woke movies well. The audience score is more useful, though that is skewed by the opposite where woke films are review bombed. Maybe somewhere in between the two is the real number.
@@IAMShteve Even audience scores are "fortified" -- the studios pick a number, maybe 85% or similar, and put their thumbs on the scale to make it stay there. Rotten Tomatoes ratings can't be trusted.
When you have Disney execs proudly admitting that they are promoting their "not at all secret gay agenda" in every movie and kids show possible, it tends to turn normal people off... The kind of people looking for family friendly entertainment to watch with their kids. This used to be Disney's target audience but no more. Woketivism is clearly far more important to corporate DEI merchants than good writing and good story telling. It's obvious in every woke Disney product, especially with Star Wars, MCU and Indiana Jones, and we the people are sick of the rubbish. I gladly cancelled my Disney+ subscription months ago. It felt so good, I wish I could cancel it again.
It may not be sufficient to look at how "woke" a movie is perceived after the fact, but how it was perceived before its release. For example, The Force Awakens benefited from the positive Star Wars brand value at the time but contributed to the erosion of that brand non the less.
Agreed... the fact this fella included Force Awakens which was literally riding the golden chariot of previous Star Wars movies with all new main characters while also including previous beloved characters proves the fella hosting this video doesn't understand basic logic.
Except The Force Awakens was a great movie, unlike JJ Abrams' subsequent attempt, in part because it went after the nostalgia for the previous films, which was the right thing to do. Too great of a departure from the previous films would've caused the entire franchise to tank then and there. That said, I think he kinda blew his wad on his first Star Wars movie and was right to leave the franchise then. If only he'd stuck with that determination instead of rejoining for the third instalment.
@@Alan_Duval The Force Awakens... Rey literally learns her Jedi powers without any training... that's not good writing. It was the beginning of their Mary Sue character and as Kathleen Kennedy began saying "The Force is Female". The Force Awakens was a big success because their was no Star Wars movies or shows for a very long time which were not cartoons.
@@NTJediThat didn't really become a criticism until later on, a lot of fans gave it the first one some grace believing the writers had a plan. Once the later films came along and showed this writing was all bad and being rewritten on the fly the first got reassessed and its weaknesses became mainstream points.
TLDR missed a two main points: (1) studios do not get 100% of the box office, rather about 50% of domestic and 30% foreign); (2) there needs to be a plot over time (for example the Star Wars sequel trilogy box office decreased as the anti-woke sentiment grew).
Star Wars sequel trilogy box office decreased because the movies are bad. Even if you ignore or change the woke parts, Disney movies are still bad. Replace Rey with a guy, make the "gender studies" admiral a dude, remove all traces of wokeness, and the movies are still bad. It's not just Star Wars, it applies to all Disney movies. I'm sure a corporation like Disney does market research, and they know the audience gets less intelligent by the day ( that has been empirically proven ), so they create content geared towards a retarded audience. The problem is that they went overboard with the retarded part.
yea, he forgot to inject bias into his math. Since when do we say the team which scored the most goals isn't necessarily the winner, we have to check how much the club spent training them first??? I love how you guys invent new metrics: Star Wars under Disney became the 2nd largest film franchise in history, but you twist that into "plot overtime" just to get the outcome you want.
@@aishaalamoudi599 "Since when do we say the team which scored the most goals isn't necessarily the winner" - since the team retired 4 years ago. Star Wars is now a streaming-only franchise, since even disney knew better than to burn money on a Ryan Johnson trilogy, or a D&D trilogy, or any of the other movie projects they announced and quietly scrapped.
@@jeronimo196 Wow; another NEW metric; to judge a studio we ignore the films the studio actually put out, and start riffing about movies they could've put out but didn't ! Using this metric, you can claim James Cameron is a huge failure. 5 Star Wars films in 4 years; 1 made over 2bil and is still the biggest domestic in history, 3 made >1bil. pffff what a disaster !
@@aishaalamoudi599 new metrci/old metric - disney lost momie on Solo and haven't greenlit another SW movie since. "The greatest franchise since MCU" and they dare not produce a movie for fear of bombing. Which is where the MCU is also headed for - "The Marvels" is going to be a spectacular failure.
As a mathematician I love to see journalists doing statistical analysis! Really good job. Can you make your data set public? I think that the analysis is missing a few hidden variables (such as mow much money the studio gets, as well as the total movie sales of the year), so I would love to include that.
As a mathematician, you probably also recognize that there is no accounting for the true negatives in this case. Those being the people who simply didn't see the movie, and thus didn't have anything to review in the first place. Why didn't those people see the movie? You also could thus see the positive bias in the data, as generally those who went to see the movie MAY be only those simply OK with what they've heard about the movie's messaging in the first place, and would thus more easily give it a more positive rating in the first place. Statistics are tough, because it is always sooooo easy to bend them to output any message, and many of the times, we don't even completely understand which variables truly drive an outcome.
It's always enjoyable to watch how someone might try to quantify a complex claim, but it often falls short. In this case, there are many factors not taken into account: brand degradation over time, age/demographics of target audience, budget and marketing budget, etc.
It was just revealed in a Vulture article this week that film studios use Rotten Tomatoes to BUY critic reviews. So using RT as any gauge of movie quality is a joke.
Midway through. It doesn’t matter if Disney is a bigger “offender” than other studios, it is that they cater to kids and if they have recently shifted, parents (who are more conservative than the average person) have responded by spending less money on their products.
Actually, as a parent, I sought out stories with more inclusivity. I want to raise humans who give others respect and them with dignity even if they are different.
@@wyldflowerchyld What exactly is a "story with more inclusivity" to you, though? A lot of people like reading folktales from different cultures, for example, but those stories aren't "inclusive". The diversity comes from you choosing a German folktale followed by an African folktale followed by an Indian folktale (for example). In spite of that, some would call that "inclusive" while others use "inclusive" to mean stories that explicitly tell us each character's race and sexual orientation and are specifically about race, racism, GLBT, etc. Many parents also draw the line at the GLBT stuff but are open to racial diversity.
The biggest problem is that the amount of money going unto producing a movie is ridiculously high, and there's too many if them coming iut at any given time. Furthermore, movies tend to remain in cinemas for very little and most people simply prefer to wait a few months and watch them at home. The theater going experience can be excruciating.
They should keep the best performing movies in cinemas longer. Maybe people don't care enough to see it now, but later on a friend or date might want to go see it.
@@leonidas14775 If it isn't in a cinema with a huge screen and superb sound I simply won't bother to go. The cinema is too expensive for a second rate experience.
@@leonidas14775 the problem is the next shiny movie comes along and the cinema needs to push the older movies out to make room. also the cinemas only really make money on older movies ( 2-6 weeks old ) and off the candy bar.
What is this... You're using the ratings for a movie which most people didn't watch? That's like surveying the number of fans entirely inside a fanclub.
I really wish you guys had added a third scatter pivoting the Rotten Tomatoes score to X against profit Y. I wonder what the correlation there is. I'd expect it to be significant
I enjoyed watching a demonstration of something too few news outlets do: testing a current often-voiced belief with appropriate surveys and simple statistical tests. Also, a great content-to-advertisement link. Well done. 🎉
Surveys are junk. The harsh reality is, profits versus expenses. And these movies don't appeal to most people so they make a lot less money and the money spent making these movies is very high so...they go bankrupt! No matter how many clever graphs and charts and yapping by leftists, the harsh reality of profits versus losses remains: Hollywood hates most of us, want us to go away, we went away and lo and behold, Hollywood is going bankrupt! Who could have guessed! Well, all of us knew exactly how this would end. Ask Budweiser.
Um. Trusting Rotten Tomatoes, which hasn't been trustworthy since Captain Marvel (if not before)? Splitting off Marvel and Lucasfilm from Disney, when they're all run by the same people? Failing to note that if it weren't for _The Force Awakens_ taking advantage of pent-up demand for Star Wars (and the subsequent collapse in the Star Wars audience), his whole argument collapses? You don't have a clue about what's going on here, do you.
@@jimluebke3869 The basic principle holds: woke does not equal broke to a statistically significant degree for recent films, for the box office c.f. movie wokeness as described.
@@old_grey_cat Include the costs of buying LucasFilm, and the goodwill that came with that, include the billion(S) in losses for the Galactic Star Cruiser debacle? Yeah, Get Woke Go Broke indeed. Seriously, just look at a very simple graph of the Disney Trilogy. Down, down, down, and all because Wokeness demanded old white men get killed off to make way for Mary Sue. (Who, by the way, is really an archetype of a woman discovering how the power of having babies changes life around her.)
In the box office profit/wokeness index, I think star wars single handedly distorts the picture. We can see (presumably) 3 movies on the right side, skewing the average greatly with it's huge budget, profits, and legacy nature luring in people. All in all, as you are comparing different budget size movies, I think the right way of comparing them would be in profit%, not a simple amount.
Star Wars skewed it because it was early days in this phenomenon. Woke wasn’t even really a thing when The Force Awakens was released; it was pre-Brexit and pre-Trump. The Last Jedi went SUPER hard on the woke because it was in the immediate fallout of major cultural and political shifts - but it did well because by and large The Force Awakens was considered good, very refreshing compared to the prequels and people were invested in the unresolved plot points, all of which round headed Rian Johnson crucified. Then the only people who went to see Rise of Skywalker were the very strange people who liked TLJ, the few who hoped RoS would course correct and a reduced proportion of normies. So while the box offices were high (2.1bn, 1.3bn and 0.9bn), it’s clear that going woke was a notable factor for the decline in the Star Wars box office. Now we have Lizzo in Mando and a dying Disney+ 😂
An issue with star wars (or any series of movies for that matter) is that it takes time for any drop in quality to reflect in viewership. If you go for a first movie in a series and get less than what you expected you can't unsee that movie. Your only choice is to not see the next one. This is a trap movie makers (and game makers) can fall into. They see an initial good result from a reboot/continuation of a popular franchise and think that they did well. Then when another follow up releases with lower numbers they blame the way the second one was made and not the first.
YES! Glad I'm not the only one who was waiting for profit%. The Budgets of these movies are wildly different, but if investors/companies make a 10x return vs 5% return, its a whole different thing. Appreciate the work put into the video though.
So basically rehashes , under advertising, and bad writing ruins a movie ? Makes sense. But sometimes over advertising can affect it too. The live action Lion King movie from 2019 was advertised like it was going to be this spectacle when it was really a lazy rehash of the animated classic.
The reason why I think people are thinking that going woke is the reason why Disney is struggling is not because the movies are woke in general. But rather, that Disney prioritizes woke ideologies over good storytelling and writing.
They’re not even prioritizing it though, what Disney movie has really had anything to say, truly, about society and it’s issues? It’s performative and it doesn’t resonate because of that. If they made good movies that just happened to have diverse casts that reflect our modern reality, that would also be a way to go. It’s so insincere and pointless you can just smell the marketing quants forcing it in to try to lock in an audience that segment that doesn’t super appreciate shitty pandering.
@@UnsolicitedContext Nobody would care if the movie was good first, but we both know that they're not made to be good. You got the people working on.. I think it was the Proud Family reboot saying they have a "not-so-secret gay agenda" . Pair that with statements doubling down on messaging from Bob Iger and it's pretty clear that they *are* prioritizing putting out propaganda over actual content. Disney is A-OK with that because it gets them a higher ESG score, which means more investments from Blackrock to make up for them hemorrhaging subscribers from D+ and seeing record low attendance at the parks, and all the movies that bombed. Except they aren't making up for losses. They're hovering dangerously close to bankruptcy. There's even been rumors of them prepping to sell off IPs they own. Take those with a grain of salt, mind you, but it paints a pretty grim picture for the House of Mouse. I think the lesson here is that it's not so much "Get woke, go broke" as much as it is "Go broke, get woke, then croak."
The thing is, wokeness and extreme incompetence at your job _always_ seem to go hand in hand, so its really a double whammy, you dont just get force-fed *"THE MESSAGE"* you get force-fed it in a very badly-made and ham-fisted way.
The irony is, when brilliant stories have progressive politics interwoven into them really well, the vast majority of conservatives and the anti-woke mob don't seem to notice it. It's only when the wokeness is hamfisted (so it's bad writing, not wokeness, per se) or really, really in your face (i.e. not subtle) that it gets picked up. And have you seen the writing and moralizing in the 'God's not Dead' series? Now there's a masterclass in bad writing in a thoroughly non-woke, moralizing franchise. Meanwhile, many conservative music fans complain about Rage Against the Machine "getting political" when they were super-political from album one; what's changed is "fan" awareness (it seems that they originally ignored, or indeed agreed with the lyrics, 'What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!'). Similarly, you seldom hear complaints about wokeness or progressive politics regarding the Star Trek franchise, even though it was racially diverse from day one in the 60s, and presented an egalitarian (possibly outright communist) future. There was even an anti-Vietnam episode. Uhura's role on The Enterprise was so unusual for the time that MLK begged Nichelle Nichols, in person, not to quit after the first season because she was such a role model for black girls and, along with Sulu, was an example of racial equality. Actually, I found this article, correcting an article on Fox suggesting that Star Trek had gone woke: www.inverse.com/entertainment/fox-news-star-trek-woke-politics-wrong
@@Alan_Duval I'd agree that leftist messaging is not intrinsically a bad thing. It only becomes "Woke" when THE MESSAGE overrides _any_ other consideration including plot, character and entertainment value, which - sadly in modern media - are often entirely absent, leaving only THE MESSAGE to bore you to tears.
I took my 9yo son to a Disney movie and I was very disappointed half way through exactly for the same reason. It was too woke and practically an advocate for homosexuality! I was like, seriously!? An animated movie that’s targeting little children, why does it need to cover stuff like this!? Shame on them!
Yea, I think that the problem is more complex, if you ask me even wokeness doesn't have to be with those movies being bad, being bad has to do with the movie being bad, wokeness is just something that they use as a topic to try to disguise that the movie is bad, basically wokeness tries to be ketchup.
using wokeness as a disguise or KETCHUP would only work for a progressive viewer. for a conservative wokeness is less ketchup and more diarrhea over your fries
Wokeness and good storytelling aren't mutually exclusive, but they act like it. A lot of times, tho, you can't separate the woke from the bad, especially when you have beloved characters being bashed on by younger, more "diverse" counterparts.
also, you should never look at the critic scores. since no one listens to them. its like taking reviews of a product from the staff that made it. The big media companies OWN the critics/ large review sites. take IMDB for instance
I know rotten tomatoes is one of the only benchmarks you can use, but history dictates some of their data has been heavily doctored. That being said, I like the way you guys do your videos. Keep it up.
Yes, we had IMDB saying explicitly that they were changing the rating of the little mermaid because the score was too low..... no longer those scores can be trusted.
I mean it could be that or even in liberal spaces people are tired of Disney for just releasing the same movie over and over (i.e similar stories and/or live action)
@@cencent2189you can think that. But my grandkids are now the perfect age for starting Disney movies. But you won’t find a single one in my house. I tell everyone not to support their theme parks. Since it’s out about the ped of that work there that got busted. Not a safe place
Rather than wokeness in movie being the main factor in movies underperforming, I believe trying to excuse bad writing by trying to make movie more woke is the reason. Also trying to recreate old movies for people in 25-40 years demographic to invoke nostalgia isnot working now. Nostalgia is when you feel something while seeing something you liked in the past once in a while. But now, we are seeing most of the movies trying to include the nostalgia factor.
By infusing the woke into the movies, they're destroying the nostalgia factor they're banking on. If they stopped inserting modern agendas, they could capitalize on the nostalgia better. It's easy to tell now in most cases which movies are changing to suit narratives and which aren't, so people can choose accordingly.
The 'wokeness' of a movie in many ways drives the bad writing, because you can't have old privileged people writing stories for 'modern audiences', so the writers rooms are devoid of experienced proven talent and are instead stocked with fresh faces often on their first significant writing gig. Settling for lesser writing talent with the correct mindset is the issue, IMO.
@@XxxXxx-lr7vo completely understand your opinion because if they are pushing an agenda, they do have to change the way they write the movie completely understand just don't belive that lazy writing implies that people call a movie woke but completely understand you're opinion
The most important thing to say right now, storytelling is what matters, no one is going to enjoy a story with bad storytelling, and since media industry is all about enjoyement, well, I do not need to explain further. Honestly I found better hobbyist fanfic writers than writers wich corporations hire, those guys really would fit the role better, but they write to enjoy it in itself, and most do not want to work as writers and stay with this as they hobby. Some of them are true masters in this. They just do not feel need to enter this industry.
I'm a writer, both hobbyist and professional. The things you can write for yourself and for your audience are very different from the things the studios or executives or editors or publishers will let you write for their audiences. It's mostly people with no business writing telling writers what they are allowed to write and then still making constant changes. Studios and publishers don't like "creatives". Edit for typos
@@autumnleaf2263 How much they are telling what to write? How much they are interfering to the core of the story? This practice seems off, considering that the best and most well-selling books were writed without anything like that, like the Lord of the Rings.
Yep, Snow White looks like it’s going to be the most insufferable film known to humanity. This is purely because of the conduct of the actress playing Snow White.
@@brianfoss571 possibly quite a lot, you dont need data to see it (but to confirm it). Air Jordans are by far the best sneakers brand of Nike (if not directly the biggest brand period), so it follows that their biggest brand is quite possibly the biggest brand if you focus only on their Republican fan base, and thats true no matter the demographic: black people, democrats, adults, young. The biggest brand overall will likely be their biggest seller if you focus on smaller demographics. Thats not necessarily true, to confirm that you need data, but you are asking as it is not the natural thing that the majority of Republicans are buying Air Jordans.
@@lobachevscki Seeee, the problem with looking at this as a numbers game is that you are forgetting the psychology side. Republicans and Conservatives dress like ass, and most conservative guys thinking caring about fashion is too feminine for them. Anything that's not the silhouette of cargo shorts or a three piece suit, will not be something they'll consider. They're not going to buy air jordans when tennis shoes and sketchers are way cheaper and are just as "functional."
@@lobachevscki My point is that Republicans were never the target market and core demographic for the product. So Jordan's comment didn't actually mean much. He knew that the vast majority of conservatives would be fine with a simple pair of New Balances, but the ones willing to buy Air Jordans would do so because of his reputation as the best basketball player ever, on and off the court. Adults complaining about race-swapping in The Little Mermaid are forgetting that they are NOT the target audience for a Disney princess movie! Their kids are. This isn't about reselling adults' childhoods back to them - the original's on Disney+ for those who only want Jodi Benson's version. It's about ensuring that the demographic born after 2008 - which is a bit more than half non-white - has characters who look, talk, (and sing) like them, so they see themselves in those movies and can have merch marketed to them. Merch is where the real money from a movie's made, and Disney's playing the long game on that with Halle Bailey.
One thing I don’t think you took into account is when you approach making a movie with an agenda (in this case wokeness) quality will suffer. You cannot make a good movie when you’re too busy trying to check boxes. For instance picking a director and writer based on DEI rather than their talent. Nobody cares if either is gay, a person of color or whatever, however if they were chosen because they are gay rather than their talent, then you have a problem, because then you have a bad product.
I went to see barbie as a conservative, it was really a one time thing though. Hearing about feminism, patriarchy, and how hard it is to be a woman in every movie would be really annoying- it was really just the hype around the movie which lead me to go. Disney keeps remaking old movies for "modern audiences" instead of making new exciting ones and there's a lack of interest for it. They have destroyed the reputation among the right and when they release a new "woke" movie, it gets slammed to the point where if you search up their name in youtube it's mostly videos about how they're destroying their company.
Exactly. One can roll their eyes on the overt lecturing, but the movie is supposed to be silly. Then there’s literal women I know who definitely do have experiences of being treated as lesser because of their sex. The thing is, one can watch a movie and not necessarily agree with the message. But the outrage over Barbie is both hilarious and sad. It’s not that big of a deal
Barbie marketing campaign made sure to hide the movie's political messaging. That was crucial to its success I think, and movie studios will definitely be taking notes.
@@jtgd It's not that big a deal in the context of one new, original movie, though the messaging was hidden until the week it came out, so many people saw the movie without ever knowing about it beforehand. The marketing was brilliant, even combining Oppenheimer into it (Barbenheimer) to give both movies a bump in sales. Greta Gerwig, the person involved in putting that message to screen for Barbie, is also in charge of the new Snow White movie, which we've been told by cast will be just as woke and will be a complete re-imaging of the story altogether. So people expecting to see a live-action telling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves will see something completely new with overt political messaging.
Most search engines are trying to find content that appeals to the user searching. You're finding mostly videos about how Disney is destroying their company because that's what youtube thinks you want to see. It's not an accurate sampling of the videos on the platform.
not being woke. but MEDIOCRITY is killing Disney and cinema in general. Barbie is what the incels would call ¨woke¨🤪, but it's extremely successful because it's good. that simple
I'm sorry but the message at the end was such a waste. They could have set the example when the Ken's asked for equal power. They said they'll only give it to them when men give women equal power in the real world. They had the opportunity to be better and set the example for people to follow. But no. Also the way they took the Ken's was nothing smart or using their genuine skills, just using blatant stereotypes of what men and women "act" like.
@@SASMADBRUV7 you missed the point completely. Ken was fixed in the idea that ¨It's Barbie and Ken¨ meaning he could not find his own identity without her. All he did throughout the movie was a constant attempt to get her attention. Barbie rejecting him was a way of letting him know that before becoming someone else's something, he has to find his own value, as an individual, not ¨as a man¨ ( a generic stereotype¨) by his own. that's the message
Well, a weak to no correlation using this approach. I know myself and many other comments are suggesting alternative approaches or other definitions for "woke", and we'd really like to see the raw data too
@fubar12345 The methodology used is not definitive, as there is no definitive method of measuring wokeness, and there are multiple measures of a movie's success. If you've got an alternate measure that produces statistically significant results, that would be interesting to see.
@oriontigley5089 The correlation presented in the video was not weak correlation. Weak correation looks different. They said it was not significant. And anyone who knows statistic would confirm that the number they showed is really tiny. It is much more probably caused just by random fluctuation. "Not significant" means that it is not possible to be distinguished from random fluctuation - that is the deffinition of "Not significant" in statistics. Saying that there was a relationship between wokeness and success based ont this data is like seeing 51 men and 50 women in one museum during one day and making a conclusion that men like museums more than women. It just doesn't make any sense.
4:02 Actually, many progressives and lefties ALSO criticize wokeness or rather pseudo-wokeness, corporate pandering and neo regression. It's not just conservatives. Conservatives are just against EVERYTHING woke while many of us are against pseudo-wokeness specifically. And we get a lot of that everywhere now. You can have very woke movie done well and you can have pseudo-woke movie that only has surface-level wokeness but it's actually empty, pandering or even toxic.
Unfortunate that what he said is utterly wrong from a statistical perspective -- the coefficient of determination doesn't test the relationship statistically.
I think it just doesn't understand its audience anymore. They want good writing, fresh stories and, if classics are revived, don't tinker with them so much as to lose their nostalgic value. Occasionally it feels like they've been very performative in their progressivism, which makes me want to roll my eyes, but I think most people don't care if there is more diversity in casting and characters (something which your survey also shows).
The bigger problem is that the movies seem to be about nothing besides diversity . They put all their effort in diversity and not into the story. Strange worlds had bad dialoges and the charackters felt pretty 1 dimensional, the whole island beeing a turtle is also not something new....or in other words, you just didn't know how they were able to put so much money into such a bad movie, you just didn't see it.
I have never heard of either Elemental or Strange Worlds. And I am sure I have only heard about the other Disney movies because of the controversy. I used to go to the cinema alot, but I became fat up with remakes and superhero franchises.
Movies kind of depend on you to go to the movies so they can tempt you with their 10 trailers for new movies. If you stop going, that is already 10 trailers less you are watching.
2 things I want to discuss: Firstly, it's not simply the inclusion of different characters, but how one dimensional they are. People who are gay aren't just gay, they're full people with many parts to them, and writing them based around just that one identity is very boring. Secondly, when it comes to race swapping characters, many who are frustrated want to see genuine stories about different cultures and races. Putting a black person in for Cleopatra, as an example, does not share more history of Sub-Saharan Africa. It's just black face for a place that was, at the time, a mixture of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian. Another little note: rotten tomatoes has been accused several times of changing disliked movies' scores to make them higher. People have been talking for some time about seeing scores overnight suddenly jump up by 20%. Not saying it's true necessarily, but it does make that metric controversial.
I really hate the term 'woke', its an umbrella term whose definition is colloquially ill-defined. There's this pernicious idea that if you agree or disagree with one aspect then it all applies to you and it becomes a straw-man argument
I would have looked at your wokeness results over time too. When the Force Awakens came out, people were probably just hyped for Star Wars again. Also, I don't think many who complain of wokeness are against female representation etc. However, over time this might have shifted. The first example of wokeness may not have meant anything to many, but after years of examples, this might be a case of black female lead? Going to be woke. People's tolerances are stretched by this point and it doesn't help that Disney is remaking old content like the Little Mermaid where there is a clear race swap or men no longer the heroic prince but a creepy stalker - we can compare like for like. If it were an original story let's say it might not have had as bad of a response. Having examples of gay kisses cut out for China for example but front and centre for Western audiences also doesn't help and in cases where it just wasn't necessary. Looking back, people probably now see the force awakens as woke but that's with the lens of what films came after it. We now have Snow white and the seven dwarves who isn't white and dwarves who aren't dwarves.
bad writing, piss poor remakes no one asked for combined with trying to cash in on the woke agenda led to their downfall. it's not either this or that, it's everything.
I think the way they tried to cash in is the problem. Making good movies which are also progressive makes money - making bad movies in order to be progressive doesn’t
Weird thought but the people who tend to complain the most about movies being woke tend to be the audiences it was never for. Take for example the little mermaid the amount of mostly grown men and women who complained about the movies race swap in comparison to in person reviews from little girls is quite funny. Any kid who actually watched it didn’t even think the race swapping was that big of a deal.
Oh, children clamored to see the Mermaid do everything and the Prince do nothing in the new movie...yup. Good grief, you leftists are grasping at straws as you all drown!
While the race-swap was a problem for many (because it goes against the source material...not because the audience is "racist"), the themes in the movie were also a big part of the criticism (I don't need no man, etc).
Men couldn't POSSIBLY have daughters and granddaughters whom they take to the movies now could they? As a man (whose adjectives are "feed up, sick and tired) I am perfectly capable of making judgements about movies and whether I want my young children to see it or not. Whoopie Goldberg says "it's a movie about a DOLL". Well, Whoopie, so was the movie "Child's Play" with "Chucky".
Another possibility is a delayed effect. Meaning for example, that the inherent power of a past franchise in terms of global reach compensates for deficiencies in the movies themselves. For example The Force Awakens was the first new official Star Wars trilogy in decades, so just via the franchise's past performance and marketing wins alone, it hides the blips. Many people disappointed with those movies went to see them at first due to past performances that weren't so much leaning towards the Woke side, but it takes time for people to be discouraged. A bit like the Roman empire's decline, it takes time for something that rose to this height in power, to erode itself into oblivion.
I wouldn't be in surprised if 10-20 years from now Disney doesn't excist anymore. Basically every aspect of Disney is in decline, form the Toys to Theme Parks and everything in between.
I'm 43 years old. I live in Australia. I grew up with Disney. Disney cartoons used to air on Sunday nights after dinner. Myself and my three brothers would make a big deal of it, every sunday. We'd eat dinner then watch Disney for 2 hours. There was no politics, no racial quotas, no ideological pursuit, just entertainment. They were great memories. 35 years later, I find identity politics has seeped into and infected EVERYTHING. Not only do I have to deal with being told literally everything that exists today is "problematic", and needs to be changed, but I also have to deal with the happiness I found as a child in Disney's cartoons placed on the naughty list and substituted for something that's NOT Disney's cartoons as I knew them. For this reason, I will not spend another dollar on ANY Disney movie, ride, cartoon, merch, anything. They went woke, and because of that, they are without my money, that I otherwise would have loved to give them in exchange for what they once provided. Use all the maths you like, and speculate on different reasons all you like. But they're not getting another cent from me purely and simply because they went woke.
But you have a kind of extreme reaction. In the other extreme, some will pay money just because they release "woke" movies. The important thing is where most people put their money. And it does not seem to depend on the wokeness of the movie.
@@fawzibriedj4441 No, I have the normal reaction. Those who pay money simply because the movie is "woke" are the extremists. People go to watch movies for entertainment, not for political correctness and woke ideology. And the majority is on my side. That's why Disney is losing money.
I'm sorry to be this blunt, but that's an extremely naive take on the matter! Just because you didn't notice the ideology in classic Disney cartoons, doesn't mean it wasn't there! If you're honestly interested, I'd advise you to read into critical theory and ideology criticism based on the German Frankfurt School. Most of their thinkers would despise the superficial liberal approach of virtue-signaling "wokeness" by all these corporations. Nonetheless, they would although very sharply analyze how much politics and ideology are hidden in old and modern media alike. To just name a few examples: Showing Monarchy and/or a ruling class as good, the only possibility and even natural (see naturalistic fallacy), the portrayal of women as mostly naive weak and with beauty as their defining feature as well as historical revisionism in terms of colonialism, slavery etc.
@@lostprophet8888 Im sorry to be this blunt, but that's an extremely naïve take on this matter! 35 years ago, there was more of a focus on entertainment than ideology. Businesses were money driven. They made profit. This is the first time in history that ideological pursuit has outweighed profit. The first time that what an audience WANTS has been dismissed for what a company thinks the audience SHOULD want, to the detriment of profit. Your examples are ridiculous, the monarchy/ ruling class was both painted as good AND evil throughout disney cartoons (Queen of Hearts, Queen Grimhilde), the portrayal of women was often strong (Arial, Alice, Cruella De Ville, Fairy Godmother, Maleficent, Jessica Rabbit, Madame Medusa, Mary Poppins, Mulan, Pocahontas, Queen Grimhilde, Queen of hearts just to name a few). And there were no cartoons based on slavery or colonialism. That was Warner Brothers. Stories were told for the sake of stories. Cartoons were made on the basis of what the audience enjoyed, NOT what the company thought the audience SHOULD enjoy. I'm not sure you're actually aware of the content of Disney cartoons through the 80's. It seems you're just making things up in order to satisfy your ridiculous psuedo-intellectual rant.
@@nated80 If you really think that the superficial wokeness virtue signaling by Disney and other companies ISN'T driven by profits (and profits alone), you're even more naive than I proclaimed. ;p The best example is pride month logos that all these companies just use in certain countries and not in others (were they are even more needed due to the absence of certain human rights). Those companies DON'T really and honestly care for about these topics! They just want to act like they do, because market research shows that that's the way to got right now (or at least was for the last couple of years). Markets are global now and the world population is diverse. That's the only reason for all these superficial characters etc. Although many white US-Americans still won't believe that, since they see themselves as the center of the world. ;) That's also the reason why all these characters and stories are written so bad and superficial. The people behind them don't really care or understand something about the struggles of trans people, homosexuality, racism etc. They are just using virtue signaling to earn money with as many audiences as possible. In regards to my examples: I wasn't talking about Disney alone or specifically. (And how isn't Pocahontas a story about colonialism!? ;p) I'm sorry that you see my comment as a pseudo-intellectual rant. If you would read into anything I named in regards to critical theory, I'm sure you wouldn't think so. I just painted a picture in very broad strokes, because the TH-cam comment section isn't the place for a page-long in-depth discussion about very complicated topics in regards to capitalist propaganda and ideology. ^^
This. If your budget is 200 million, you'd need a really good film to break even in an economy where we have to make choices, where we can only afford one film in a quarter, one each month if we're generous and decide to eat one week less.
Overall return on investment is obviously the metric you should be using. How is it possible that you spent time putting this video together and didn't get the basics right?
What if getting woke and going broke is a slower phenomena? For example if all the audience in the world cand be divided into 10 groups and Disney makes a woke movie for each group, we all go watch it and dont like it but then Disney does it again, some of the audience returns but they also didnt like it. Eventually no one goes to watch Disney movies even if they become legitimately good because they burnt the audience's trust
I hope everyone recognizes the survey is self-fulfilling. It wasn’t an analysis of whether the movies in question are woke based on the presence of themes that respondents considered, “woke,” it’s literally just a reflection of their reputation. It’s not an analysis of whether the movie actually meets the equally arbitrary definition of woke; it’s just a reputation survey. People will of course rate movies that they’ve heard are woke/not woke accordingly so the results are exactly what you’d expect to see.
Really appreciate this statistic attempt it was interesting. Two major caveats though: 1. Movie Critics and people who rate movies are also incredibly woke. 2. Disney’s wokeness is turning away Disney’s audience. Barbie might be woke movie that did well but the Barbie target audience is not the same as a Disney’s typical audience. The wokeness is turning away the Disney fans!
Some of these movies were projected to be huge hits based on their IP and then bombed, which was not taken into account. A modest earning may be good for one film and horrific for another. This is the case of many of Disney's films. The reputational damage due to "woke" over time can also have an affect on the entire brand if it becomes widespread enough so that a "not woke" film may also be skipped over. Barbie's advertising also made a lot of people feel that it was NOT "woke" which got a wide audience excited about it. It's impossible to say how it would have gone if the commercials had included the "patriarchy" references, for example. Overall, this is an interesting analysis, but I'm not sure it necessarily hits the target.
It's a lot more than being woke. It's being woke and then blaming the paying customers for their failure. Obviously this is a known strategy to attract customers to your shop.
I don't think it's wokeness fully. It feels more like bad writing and shows and movies that audiences don't really want trying to make up for their writing via forced inclusivity or hand fisted social topics but that's just me.
Great video, insane animations! Would be crazy if TLDR anonymized and open-sourced this data - perhaps some other interesting insights can also be found.
What makes Disney look worse isn't the total profits, it's the profit margin. If a small studio spends $2 million to create a movie, and rakes in $128 million. That is considered vastly successful. Yet if a studio spends $400 million on a movie, and rakes in $526 million. That's considered breaking even despite the two movies raking in the same profit.
Very good analysis. Rehashing old stories which nobody asked for to cash in on nostalgia has to be a main reason behind this, and not only rehashing these old stories, but also retelling them (all?) undeniably worse than the original verions? I dont know a single disney 'live action' remake (which doesnt even make sense of a term to apply to the Lion King they made a few years ago) which is overall better than its previous namesake.
please don't use the nobody asked for line otherwise you just sound like an idiot trumpster. none of this stuff is necessary. nobody asks for anything that we get except the snyder cut and did that really do the world any favors?
It’s not that Disney’s woke movies are causing people to turn away in an organised fashion like the Bud Light situation. It’s the consequence of the fact that woke writing philosophies lead to boring and internally inconsistent story universes that people don’t feel motivated to become invested in because better entertainment alternatives exist now. This leads to apathy in Disney’s other product lines. The target audience is a big factor in a movie’s success too. Barbie might be woke but it’s target audience is the most receptive to the woke message so it did well. Also movies with established franchises tend to do worse when a new entry is woke. Strange World was a new property so it went under the radar in terms of reputation but Disney live action movies are immediately compared to the originals which are masterpieces so the woke changes appear more striking. I think the methodology of this video may have been flawed because the wokeness level was judged by survey respondents when wokeness doesn’t have a universal definition in the minds of everyone. It would have been better for the small team behind this survey to give the movies an objective woke score based on the criteria given in this video and then to survey people for their opinions of the movies with questions which don’t mention wokeness so that it doesn’t bias the movies in their minds. Many of these movies have been out for a while so people’s view of them now may be different to when they were released and more unknown. Mulan is the perfect example. It fits the definition of woke in retrospect but when it came out, the concept of woke didn’t exist and it wasn’t written with a woke philosophy in mind so I wouldn’t even class it as woke. A woke movie isn’t just the woke aspects in it, it’s the intention behind it which people object to the most. Making Ariel black wasn’t a writing decision made in a vacuum which just happens to fit the definition of woke in retrospect, it was an intentional decision made in service of an agenda for no other reason than that agenda. Edit: I made a mistake with my Mulan example. I forgot there was a remake and I thought they were talking about the original because I have heard arguments before that the original was a woke movie. I think my point still stands because the Mulan remake was bad but it wasn't woke either and shouldn't be so highly scored in this video. It was made for the Chinese market which is notoriously non-woke and people say she was a Mary Sue in the remake but the Chinese government typically like their film protagonists to be stoic infallible super humans so it was all done in service of state propaganda and in the west, that type of story just isn't compelling.
Still. We've seen this before for decades. The conservative 'anti-woke' has overplayed its hand and is already being associated with the general Nazi atmosphere of the right wing just like every other cultural issue conservatives wander into. Woke is only going to become more prevalent while "anti-woke" is going to be associated with things like tucker Carlson, trump going to prison, or the Nazis and all the current neonazi groups. One side is explicitly more dangerous and inappropriate and that dynamic is only going to be more extreme as society progresses.
@@ThePrinceofHisOwnKingdom of course, it's hard since it has no defined definition. However, I, as well as many others consider something "woke" when it panders to the left at the expense of things such as creativity, originality and storytelling.
@@ThePrinceofHisOwnKingdom They gave a perfectly adequate definition in this video but my point is that this definition isn't universal for their survey respondents so I fear their respondent assigned wokeness scores are skewed by a mix of various uncontrolled factors due to bias and I think the presence of Mulan so high on the list is evidence of this. They needed to use their definition to assign the scores consistently otherwise comparing the scores is meaningless. Also, doing it this way means we only have to accept their definition to have faith in the result and if their definition is clearly wrong, we can see how the results are invalid. In general the respondents shouldn't know the purpose of the poll if you want accurate results which is why proper studies are blind. @oriontigley5089 who responded to you had a good general vibe description of it though. The intention to pander and the decisions made in service of it usually subtract from the overall narrative cohesion of the piece. A hypothetical example being a European period piece with a black aristocratic family or a high degree of racial diversity in the citizenry who's origin isn't addressed by the story leading to questions of consistency from the viewer. Although wokeness doesn't always mean the story can't be creative or original, it does mean there is a lack of internal consistency almost by definition. The reason woke media is usually boring and lacking in originality, I believe is because the writers are more focused on the woke aspects.
I agree with the comments that the issue is poor writing by Disney rather than their 'wokeness' but one thing I'd add as an analyst is that I don't think Box office profit/loss is a good indicator. This is mostly due to the fact it doesn't take into account budget size and brand loyalty (such as star wars). You could do it as a % made or loss compared to the budget that I think would give more accurate data.
To clarify, the box office data is the profit/loss already. I don't think I made that sufficiently clear in the video, but it does say it on the y-axis and some movies are shown to lose money, so hopefully it's reasonably obvious - Jack
Wait, can you explain it a bit further on how the calculation was done?
Did you guys do box-office minus movie budget minus market budget?
Disney was always woke and nobody cared. You should chart from the start of their battle with Florida policies which made them appear to take a political side. Taking a political side is always suicidal.
@thalyasylos2745 no they didn't.
While I can get behind Disney being a little woke, I cannot get behind Disney when it focuses too much on the wokeness part and not the story.
Box office data profit should be measure as % of investment + marketing as well rather than absolute amount here. Investing 100M for a movie and make 20M profit is not the same as investing 500M movie and make 20M profit
Disney makes bad movies, then uses wokeness to deflect criticism. Disney's performative progressivism is as offensive as its disregard for entertainment quality.
Yeah this is the real problem, black-washing is bad not just for changing beloved characters, but... it usually goes hand-in-hand with terrible story re-writes.
The label "progressive" reeks of elitism and dishonesty
@@marhawkman303 Yeah, remember that time that Super Woke Progressive LGBTq Feminist Disney put all their backing behind their first openly LGBTq heroine and . . . wait no they didn't do that . . . they canceled her show early despite positive reviews/word of mouth, and then fan backlash got them to give the staff three special hour long episodes to wrap the story up.
Yes, I'm still salty about the Owl House.
@@Bustermachine Yeah, it's weird, they're taking half-measures and making crap because they can't even make a bad plan and run with it....
Ironically Disney lacks diversity and this was what the original Disney had in spades...not diversity of skin tones (which is ultimately shallow) but diversity of IDEAS, perspectives, opinions. He knew in the 1950s that conservatives weren't creative, he hired liberals who were also artistic, and were good story tellers...along with being from different cultural background, political ideologies etc. the films were multifaceted and represented the best of humanity and the lessons that it has to teach us.
Disney is just making bad movies and remakes. It's Lazy.
Weirdly enough, this "lazy" propably costs them more money than making original movies.
But _why_ are they bad?
Many of them certainly are. Or mostly "meh" forgettable.@@edwardcullen1739
But a lot of why they are bad is due to a woke ideology. They hired people based upon identity politics, not because they were the best people for the job.
@@edwardcullen1739 obv not because of "woke" content as the video shows.
I think bad writing and poor use of legacy material is what's hurting disney.
just curious if you wear clown costume/wig 24 hours a day bro?
@@foodini666why so angry, bro 😂
@@foodini666care to elaborate on why you think Disney isn't doing well?
@@foodini666Weird fetish but alright.
And Nimona that was declined by Disney and saved on Netflix is evidence of that statement. It woke af but still good and entertaining.
It's not "So called" race swapping. When you swap races it is race swapping.
Scientifically race, is a social contract, and these characters are not real beings
cool make black panther white then, no big deal just a social construct
@@ravenwhiteduck3158 There actually been one white Black Panther (or 2 if technically count Becky in some alternate universes / stories)
@@TheStarBotThen why represent them? If it's all in your head just imagine that you're being represented on screen.
If race isn’t real then why do all you neoliberals pay extra to not live around diversity?
No calculation of film success is going to be accurate without analyzing the marketing budget and counting it against box office.
They don't always release that information, so it shouldn't be factored in as a variable. The test is also not very scientific in general but it could point towards there being nothing to the popular saying or checked towards yes there is something
The entire analysis the guy does is flawed b/c he uses the "reported" budgets which Disney has had producers mention are fake. The actual budgets are on average $100 million more than reported and that's before you factor in the marketing costs.
It's much easier to just look at the trend of the company (Disney) and how much money they've lost since starting this woke initiative. That's a clear, definitive trend.
@protostar8 Then my your estimates it's impossible. So why bother. Just continuing believing your narrative, cause from that survey I can already tell conservatives are just BSing
"43% said Discussion of Female issues" is woke.
How is that woke?
@@protostar8correlation doesn't mean causation, it is the first thing you learn in any statistics class
@@riccardomariani4660 Incorrect. The first thing you learn in any good stats class is that stats are HIGHLY manipulatable. While correlation doesn't equal causation ignoring the correlation in this scenario when the company has literally pivoted their entire programming approach towards the "cause" is a bit naive.
Going Lazy kills Disney.
A significant part of their content consists of remakes, sequels and spinoffs. The series "Arcane" on Netflix (to name a counter example) was a success in terms of views & reviews. It had a diverse cast with strong female leads, LGBT romance, etc. It did well, because it featured a compelling story, difficult choices, ambiguous moralities, and character growth through trauma and struggle. Disney right now just slaps the "You are perfect the way you are" and "you can do anything if you believe in yourself" tropes on their IPs and calls it a day. Most people don't hate diversity, they hate the garbage plot that so often comes with it.
it also used the British/foreign head writer/ guest writer system instead of the writer room concept (which WGA is pushing for). Without the writing by committee crap the story came first.
indeed, its almost like instead of woke themes that make it bad, its just that writers who are woke suck at story telling. like they cant think outside of a pre-programmed box and use creativity to tell a good story. theres ways to have those themes in a movie and still be good, put some of your soul into the movie!
The Last of Us had an entire gay romance episode and I wouldn't call it "woke" simply because it's inclusive... I wouldn't call it woke at all because it's not a moralizing intersectional feminism lecture dressed up as entertainment. Woke goes wrong in the same ways Christian films go "wrong" in that "the message" is overt rather than conveyed via themes, consequences, and allegory.
Very well said.
@@virtualaliasThat episode was definitely woke. It was nothing but a filler episode to show two gays for no reason. It added nothing to the story. It was weird and odd to include it. Besides, if it was a straight couple instead of a gay one, the episode wouldn't even have existed in the first place since there was no reason for it anyway.
I think what is really Disney's problem is that they have become too reliant on nostalgia bait and are willing to recycle old ideas hoping that the consumers will give them more money. But eventually you will run out of old ideas and you cant recycle a movie for a second time.
As a result the company started to become less creative which in turn makes bad writing more frequent.
But the company will not give a poop as long as it gives them triple digits.
"you cant recycle a movie for a second time" How many Spidermans we got now?
The problem with Disney is that they're banking on nostalgia while at the same time completely disrespecting the original and changing way too much of the story for it to actually be a true live action adaptation. They would have been better off just writing a new story after making so many changes. The Little Mermaid and the upcoming Snow White are prime examples.
Exactly.
@@lorenrb80 Spider-Man is Marvel being smart by using the multiverse to hide behind
They are not recycling when they are making everything that’s great about that original movie to more “modernized” ideals.
For clarity though, "Go Woke Go Broke" is not just to do with a film or series 'going woke', but more that a studio would emphasise on this point before trying to actually make a good story or likable character. People want to see good story and characters that are relatable and fallible, it is why characters that follow "the hero's journey" are some of the most loved because it follows the formulaic fall and rise of what makes a film hero great. To top this off, yes the point of Disney rehashing their IPs into live action is now both stale and uninspired. It worked for the first few movies because people were not expecting it, so it had that 'wow' factor... now it is just showing its true a colours: Disney trying to cash-cow older movies to milk whatever is left of them (and to justify reselling old merch with high cash values)
I agree.
Hence why stories with "strong female leads" have been popular before (The Terminator, Tomb Raider, Alien). But that was because the stories were the points of the movies. The fact that the "hero of the story" was in fact "heroine of the story", was not the important part.
Which is where the new movies are going wrong. As the point of the movie is, that it is a strong and independant woman, which is in the lead, and then there is a story around that.
The classic point of failure can be identified by removing the woke component when done correctly the story still stands. But in the case of those stories with a woke agenda the story collapses.
disney was always this bad. theyre on site child trafficking scandals have been consisten since before me and you were born. further... go rewatch pinocchio... literally about a pedophile and drugging kids. go re watch pocahontas, her song about the white man is pure CRT. disney hasnt changed, you just started noticing.. they didnt "go woke"
I have said before that Disney's biggest problem is lack of fresh new stories.
Same. Way back in in my junior year back in like 2015 I remember first reading about Disney trying to make a live action remake of Jungle Book, Mulan, Mermaid, Lion King....I was already saying that it was a bad idea lol. The original movies were PERFECT as they were they didn't need to be trampled on
That is true however I would've gone to the movies for the Little Mermaid for sentimental reasons, I used to love it as a child, but when I saw the black chick in the trailer I said: no thanks. And I roll my eyes every time they force a gay couple into a movie.
Yeah, it's not as simple as 'go woke' then do poorly. Lot of factors influence or converge to turn down audiences. This video perspective is too 'investigative to disprove wokeness damage' and sees things too superficially with numbers. Reminds me how game companies make patches based on numbers and turns out people hate the patches lol
People used to gobble anything Disney regardless of how bad the story or over played. Disney stories were always woke but Nobody cared as it was traditional to watch anything Disney. I know too many people that are avoiding Disney during their battle with Florida policies. Now supporting Disney means supporting a political agenda. It was a totally avoidable bridge to cross but they did and a side was taken. Never take a political side.
They don't write first, but instead push an agenda. The story comes second or third, and it shows.
I think the movie industry as a whole is just not as profitable as it used to be. I think more and more people are entertaining themselves in other ways rather than watching a movie.
Basically, yes. There are much more entertainment sources and many of those you don't even have to pay for (if you pay for the internet already).
Movies todays are packed with CGI, fall victim to studio interference, rewrites and reshoots plus the occasional celebrity name attached that their cost simply explodes. Add the add-money and movies have to make just an absolutly absurd amount of money to break even. Ofcourse movies are not "profitable" if they need to make like a billion$ just to offset the cost.
Yea...that's what you do when movies aren't good - you find other entertainment. But some movies still occasionally make over a billion, which means it is still profitable if you make something people want to see.
Correct.
Too many players because tech made it feasible to tell a story compellingly with less budget.
Avatar is the opposite of that of course, but still. There’s so much to watch, it’s not that special anymore to go all the way to the city to go see a movie with overpriced popcorn etc etc.
Rotten Tomatoes pulled negative reviews for Little Mermaid (and other movies) at the studios request. There was a paragraph about it on the website...that they're pulling or hiding certain reviews. Not sure if it's still there.
Yea, Disney movies get special treatment where Rotten Tomatoes simply disable 1 star reviews and only count 2-10 star. Meanwhile all paid bots who give 10/10 are always kept, because it isn't review bombing if you bot a high score.
because its illegal to be honest about black people, or about white erasure
@@beepboop-o5s I'm old enough to remember when Disney hired lesser beings to be trained by their white employees and then terminated the white employees ... a short while later, Disney was no longer creative and merely recycled old material
What is breaking Disney is the fact they are pouring like, half a dozen 200M+ budget movies and expecting all of them to make a profit.
Even if you liked Elemental, how the heck did this movie cost 200 millions to produce?
They're Woke in their production as well -- they had to send stuff back for rework over and over again, because they weren't using the best people for the job.
This survey does not include income outside the United States. where if there are LGBT characters the film can immediately be banned in many countries
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa It also doesn't include merchandising revenue, which is what made George Lucas a billionaire.
No one wants to buy merch from Woke movies. Get Woke, Go Broke.
@jimluebke3869 if wokeness was so important to you folks in the states, then ron desantis wouldn't be so low in the polls
Most of the recent Pixar movies cost about that much. Computer animation at Pixar quality is expensive.
Corrolation vs Causation. I think the percived wokeness is a simptom of a different issue. Disney is not taking any big risks anymore, not allowing super daring creative individuals to do there thing like in 'Everything Everywhere all at once'. Rather it feels like they have a checklist of things that worked at some point or another or have come out of focus groups. We get a little wokeness, little bit nostaliga bait, amazing visuals and a more generic version of a story we already heard before like if it was written by AI. You can feel its a corporate project and doesnt have as much soul or is the vison of one individual.
It would've been a possibility if every other company hadn't been doing the exact same thing...
Exactly. Everything Everywhere all at once is also a woke movie and also made gangbusters money and also won the Oscars.
Every other company like WB is doing precisely that. It isn't "perceived wokeness" it's activism pretending to be entertainment. Their writing is trash because the views behind those writtings are trash. To quote the girl who played remade Ariel "it isn't about love, it's about what she wants" aka it's about me. It's about ego and nobody cares about your egoisms other than yourself. This wretched view that in order to matter you need to search for power for power's sake makes their characters at best unrelatable and at worst into detestable villains prettending to be heroic or complex characters when they're in fact just one shade of black away from being as evil as Dio Brando.
@@leos.2322 I personally dislike the live action remakes and think they've often missed the point due to executive pouncing on shallow criticism, or misunderstanding nuanced critique, but, uh . . . Yeah the original Little Mermaid was like . . . Aerial falling in love at first sight with a person she doesn't know, due to her infatuation with the surface world and proceeding to voluntarily strike a deal with a literal sea witch who sang a song about the consequences of her deals if you can't keep up your end of the bargain.
That's not love, that's childish naivety of a teenager. It always was.
Like, did you not see the original movie?
Jeez, the old standby analysis about the Disney renaissance was that they are movies overwhelmingly about their protagonists seeking their identities. Which is the definition of ego.
There's plenty of valid criticism to be had. The live action films don't really justify their own existence, except as a cash grab. They add nothing and often break things while trying to ineptly fix critique. But this one just comes off as kinda weak to me and a character assassination of the actress.
@@Bustermachine It's woke crap.. being attracted to someone is usually how love begins.
Almost all entertainment have become activism/political.
But you can keep ignoring the obvious.
Many people I know including me aren't spending money on most of the things being made because we are of the opinion it's all gone woke, and apparently many more do as well.. so why not take that serious?
What you are missing is that the bad story telling is happening because disney is carelessly dumping all these woke topics into their movies for what they think is an easy win while simultaneously wrecking the original story.
Did you actually watch this video? The whole point was woke isn’t hurting the film, bad story telling is.
@@1and3ll I think you missed the point too. The stories are bad, especially in Disney's case BECAUSE their focus is pushing gender and woke politics.
@@hasnaindev You see woke things everywhere because you want to see woke things. For you a James Bond from the 50s would be woke if it was from Disney
@@_Dibbler_ My boy giving me a free psychoanalysis? Wokeness is largely a western problem, not mine. If I pay for a ticket to watch a movie, I don't want blue haired individuals pushing their liberal ideologies onto us instead of producing an actual entertaining movie with a story :)
Youve hit the nail on the head! Disney is a brand where you used to be able to rely on a certain amount of quality in their films. The last 10 or so years that quality of story telling has gotten progressively worse each time they attempt to shoe-horn in another woke moment or ideology just for the sake of doing it. The wokeness itself kinda sucks, but in order to get it into their stories they are sacrificing more and more actual quality story. Take the little mermaid, they swapped races - for what reason other than just because... then instead of following the story they changed the emotional attachment by making it so that there was no pay-off at the end.
My friend and I recently went to see Oppenheimer (great movie, too long) and were both turned off by the trailers at the very beginning because almost everything presented was really just a rehash of old movies or a continuation of old franchises.
Examples include a new Exorcist film, a new Conjuring/Nun film, and a handful of others that were honestly so forgetful that I'm having trouble recalling them.
Wonka
There is at least one major red flag in this video - saying that Rotten Tomatoes is a good metric. It's horrible in fact, they were caught red handed manipulating user reviews few times, like deleting 'bad' review bombs, but leaving 'good' ones. Also if movie is under performing, but handful of hardcore fans watch it and they like, while cinemas are almost empty - that will create Fresh on a bad movie. Rotten Tomatoes should never be trusted.
Yea
exactly
No you should just use Rotten Tomatoes with an understanding of what it is. Of the people who saw the movie what percentage would recommend it.
When looking at online ratings generally, you have to account for the fact that the less people leave a rating, the less reliable the ratings are.
"We asked a random sample of people, who were attending an all expenses paid promotional weekend retreat at a 5 star resort, if they liked the movie. The majority, without bias, said YES!"
Wokeness is one factor that I look at. Other important factors for me include poor writing and bad CGI, and fan baiting (ie actors and writers who seem disconnected with what their audience wants and decides they need to fix the story. These actors and writers call anyone who says their movie or TV show are bad an ist, regardless of what people are actually saying is bad. People don't like being called names or being told what to think or feel.)
These people get mad literally because a movie contains someone who isn't white, or isn't a man, by any reasonable measure that is an ist
very interesting, they just did the same to Netflix, Apple+, Universal and Sony.. is it a factor there too?
@@AshAshAshAshAshAshAshAshAshAsh @stevenstrain283The showrunners of The Rings of Power seem to have called the Lord of the Rings fans racists because they don't like their show. I looked at a ton of comments and reviews about the show across social media, and maybe one person out of thousands said they weren't watching the show because it had black people in it. Everyone else said that the costumes, writing, wirework, etc looked really really bad. I think the message the showrunners are trying to send is "Say something negative about our show, and we'll call you a racist." I realize that some people deserve to be called out because of their opinions, but it looks like the showrunners are being bullies and trying to use their platform to silence people. It isn't working. When I see examples of what they did elsewhere when it comes to media, I believe that people with influence are essentially saying that other people's feelings and opinions don't matter, even if they are constructive, kind and true, and that is not okay for anyone to hold them or express them.
@@HeatherVerhagen Sure, people are complaining the show is "woke" because of "bad wirework" by the way I watched the show, I'm not even certain what scenes would require wirework let alone work that looks silly.
no they don't. a group of morons harass a black actor cause he must be white. That actor ignores them. Then in one interview he decides to say something like "c'mon guys, you believe dragons exist in this world but not black nobles?"-->Cultural warriors make videos titled "actor so and so attacks the fans", "studio so and so says if you hate the show then you're racist". You go and watch these videos and come here and make this comment.
Reality: the guys who harassed that black actress on Obi Wan calling her the N-word, are the ones they called out, not the fans. Stop self-victimizing.
Since the theaters take about a 50% cut, the little mermaid lost money, and that's before you factor in advertising.
Theaters take
Way less of a split. Closer to 10 percent.
@@benadkins2801 No its 50% in US markets ... its a fact in Europe theatres take 45% ..
The problem isn't so much that Disney went 'woke', its that they went about it really stupidly. Rather than tell stories that would represent various types of people naturally, they decided to change existing stories which was very irritating to long-time fans. Also, since the characters no longer fit the situations in the movies coupled by a lack of development time leading to poor writing made a lot of these films a bad time for all involved.
Mulan and Star Wars sequels are prime examples of the mistakes Disney has been making. In Mulan the main character was made overwhelmingly powerful from the word go leading to a lack of any character development. In Star Wars the main character, Ray has hardly any lines and seemingly becomes overwhelmingly powerful with no training. Add to that the actress playing her was so poorly rehearsed in fight scenes that weapons just 'disappear' from foes hands so that she is not prematurely killed off.
Some legacy characters were killed off at points that make no sense at all while one particular character is kept alive despite their death being what the movies needed and that the actress behind the character had already died (so Star Wars fans had to watch as Princess Leia became Mary Poppins in space). Also every male character left in the films were made to look like either a coward or a gung-ho idiot before the second movie of the trilogy was complete made the films a prime target for conservatives while the resurrection of Palpatine was a lazy and stupid move that made little sense in context to everything that had happened before (in universe) and would not have been needed if Disney had not allowed Rian Johnson (writing and directing 'The Last Jedi') to move away from the trilogy plan that JJ Abrams had drawn up. To be fair, 'The Force Awakens' was hardly a master class in film making, mainly consisting of plot elements copied and pasted from the original Star Wars trilogy but it made a lot more sense than 'The Last Jedi'.
I remember this and a great example is the real-life alladin. The fact that they changed the story itself to have the woman become the sultan, and alladin (the character for which the entire story is supposed to be about) into just a secondary character to the leading lady (while woke), is just a complete misrepresentation of the story. I also think the stats shown in this video somewhat misrepresent the problem. If you buy into the notion that people who arent woke are "being silenced", and are even scared about speaking out, then it also follows that the numbers themselves would be skewed, as statistically, the only people putting out reviews would be those speaking favorably (or aligned with the, today, more socially acceptable message). Also, I would imagine that you generally would only be getting "ratings" from people who are going to see the movies. If ticket sales are down, then those that WOULD have seen the movie simply have not seen it, and thus don't have anything to review. In other words, the statistics don't account for people who just didnt see it, didnt review it BECAUSE of it's wokeness, or that the numbers are simply positively biased. The reviews never ask people who DIDN'T see it why they didnt. Those numbers are close to impossible to capture.
@@rrshier Those differences show up everytime in the difference between critic and audience ratings.
The part I hated was when they made Han Solo and Princes Leia divorced. That killed the entire love story of the first three films. It seems they were so woke they just couldn’t stand having a popular female character be married to a man. It was that love story that made the original movies tolerable by women.
Yes, - but if Milan and Rey had actual struggles to overcome, were portrayed flawed from the beginning, and had an actual character arc - they wouldn’t be the fem bosses they were intended to be and wouldn’t be in the woke category. The message in both those movies are “women are perfect and don’t need help”. That’s text book woke and also makes for a very boring movie. So yeah, Disney is absolutely losing money because the themes are to push woke ideology which makes for boring and uninteresting movies regardless of how you vote.
The glory days of Disney(animation & live action) ended in the early 2010s
With Disney the issue is not just wokeness, it's also the fact that it's all sequels and remakes
But that is precisely why it's wokeness.
Trying to use famous products to sell a political message is an integral part of the process used in Marxism, where Wokeness, intersectional Feminism, Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory all come from.
that’s literally what he said in the video
they didn't watch the video lol. they say "nit just wokeness" as if it's a factor and the vid clearly proved its not a factor.
@@SappySadLoveShit The video clearly states that the data is rudimentary, it clearly proves nothing lol
That is literally the RESULT of wokeness. They're hiring unqualified and untalented people and making identity a priority
I think it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation of JUST Disney studios films over the past 20 years, instead of only recently, as looking at only the past 2-3 years, doesn't provide a whole lot of context or big picture information.
even now the correlation is bad. R2 that is not going up = bad for business...you have to understand that people's salaries are going up, inflation etc. Any trend that is now going upwards or maintaining a high level of engagement is seen as a failure. Especially since the untapped population/market is always increasing. I think the data suggests what is likely happening: i.e. the industry is stagnating despite the enormous efforts to be inclusive and increase market share through that instead of better movies lol.
this would definitely change the r2 number
Force awakens is an outlier - it was early movie, and new release of bellowed brand. So box office would be higher 🤔 and audience weren't as allergic to this as it is now. Show just recent 2-3 years - that would show up more correlation imo🙂
I thought the same thing.
Force Awakens is an outlier because it was the first installment of the new Star Wars franchise so people didn't yet know how bad Disney was going to mess it up.
Barbie is an outlier for two reasons:
1. Misleading marketing (similar problem to Force Awakens)
2. There are very compelling arguments that it is actually an anti-woke masterpiece and therefore may not belong on the woke side at all.
Adding my reply so that this comment gets pushed up
So is Barbie, the marketing around it made it seem like a normal movie made just to have a good time. No one knew it was woke until after the first weekend when it had gotten most of the conservative and normal peoples money.
Yeah Force Awakens made a shit load. But there are no movies that got a HALF of that tho.
Yep, it was pretty stupid to put both the first two new disney star wars in there. They are going to skyrocket the statistics towards one side.
IMHO, that list of "things that make a movie woke" needs one more piece: the thing needs to be included for social reasons not related to the plot.
A chunk of dialog that seems out of places and mostly their to make it pass the Bechdel test would be a prime example.
Not necessarily to make a movie woke in the neutral sense, but rather to make a movie woke in a lame way. _This_ is what really annoys people and can lead to financial damage. When wokeness is just superficial posing to check boxes, it becomes ridiculous and even tends to have a counterproductive effect. It's cargo cult, ritual over substance.
I dont know since when you watch movies ... but having a political statement for not plot reason has been a thing since at least the 90s. I guess what upsets people is that social reasons are political statements people are not as used to.
@@informatikabos5481 for me, it's the virtue signaling aspect; as often as not, they aren't even doing a good job of convincing me *they* care about the thing, but rather it looks more like they feel stapling it on will win them points somehow.
Well said. The analysis misses a lot of nuance.
@@benjaminshropshire2900 That is a very valid criticism that people across the whole political spectrum share. At the same time, big budget Hollywood movies were never known for a lot of nuance or thought.
The biggest reason why I'm not going to the movie very often is not due to being Woke! It's due to the cost of going to the theater! I took my daughter to see Barbie and it was over $50 for two of us! That means for my whole family it would be close to $100 or more to see a movie! Hollywood hasn't had a new idea in 40 years!
Then go on Tuesday’s and Sunday’s: it’s half off. Plus, bring ur own food to the theater, since u have to grab ur bag with you anyways to not be burglarized
Liberal voters support inflationary policies. So it’s not due to woke content, but due to woke supporters
Wow Is that expencive in america ?!
Here in Italy it's still arownd 11€ 😅
that why I don't go the first week or so, then the tickets normally go on sale.
This. Imagine spending this much for a 2/3-hour movie when a video game isn't that much more expensive and a single game sometimes gives me 200+ hours of playtime.
We have gotten a FULL DECADE worth of movie FLOPS. If that doesn't send them a clear enough message then they are beyond redemption.
CGI.
Wokeness is directly linked to bad writing, that's what this video is missing. The reason franchise are rebooted and revisited is partially because of wokeness, the reason characters are bland and badly written is wokeness, the reason for certain subjects and morals being overrepresented in films is wokeness, and even plot holes and bad writing can be attributed in large part to allow wokeness in movies. So yes wokeness definitely play a huge part in the decline of the movie industry.
No it's not. This started once the Chinese market became large and affluent enough to appeal towards. Trying to target too many demographics watered down storytelling (woman, men, USA audience, Chinese, age etc.) and had studios leaning in to both de-risking (pulling in their old catalogue, proven brands, i.e. Star Wars, Marvel) and targeting too many audiences. They want to appeal to families, gay people, young people, old people, multi-cultural people, etc. The idea of wokeness carries with it a connotation that there is some agenda. That is insanely naïve. They want to make money. On paper this is the best way to make money. Unfortunately on paper business decisions have very little to do with good storytelling. This is simply a cycle. Disney went through this before in the 80s.
@@gtwucla There is an agenda, is Disney the only corporation going trough this? absolutely not. There is lobbying in corporate america to push this ideology, i would say that it's you who are naive if you don't see how wokeness has infiltrated corporations at every level. Why is there DEI framework and organisation in every departments of practically every corporations. Why BlackRock and other special interests invest and infiltrate every boardrooms to push ESG and multinational organisations agendas ?
Seriously at this point if you look at it and don't see how many people and organisations push this agenda you are either blind or you just refuse to see it.
@@gtwucla untrue, they do have an agenda and apparently they don't want to make money. Google "bob iger grilled at shareholder meeting".
@@gtwucla That is a curious argument because if it was connected to China they have traditional non-woke gender roles. If you take your argument at face value, the influence of China would have pushed the film industry towards a non-woke agenda. But it didn't. "On paper this is the best way to make money". How many gays and transsexuals are there? Surely the easiest way to make money would be to make films of universal appeal but again they don't do that.
@gtwucia, I'd say that you make a reasonable assessment of HOW woke ruins art, but not why so many organizations are blindly following the lemmings. The only thing naive is not being suspicious that there is an agenda. Keep thinking and you can see it.
The problem with Disney is they're spending way too much on these films.
Yes. I recently saw a TH-cam video that explained that directors and reshooting movies up yo 3 or 4 times and that this is causing the cost of the movies to skyrocket. Disney needs to hire more experienced directors with clearer visions for their projects.
Or at least directors who will listen to the writers when they say "don't start shooting before we're done writing!"
They are spending too much, but it's more the fact that they are willing to spend so much on such incredibly poorly written content!
Some of the TV shows, were reshot over a dozen times to appeal to their test audiences....coating the company millions of dollars vs regular TV shows
A big problem, but when the experience was consistent enough that everyone would go and bring their kids, it mattered a lot less
While quality storytelling is a big part of the problem I have noticed a different problem that may prove to be even more impactful. The fact is, many big media companies today are not understanding their target audience or they are trying to target the wrong audience with their product. A prime example of this was the Amazon show Rings of Power. Amazon didn't seem to realize that the LotR fandom is quite possibly the most rabid fandom in existence and to change a beloved character and story from the source material would awaken the rage of said fandom.
Woke Boardroom hires woke writers and cast staff for woke purposes leads to most people not returning for a second view equals less money
Just a thought: people who have claimed "go woke, go broke," as an explanation, might also have stopped supporting Disney with their money... kinda like me... You know, that's just a thought, but my whole family tries to avoid giving them money because when we do, Disney turns it around and insults us.
Yea so in this video he shows that what you claim your family does is not happening on a large scale.
I don't know woke or broke. What I know is that I paid for $80 yearly subscription and watched Moon Knight. Then spent $40 for a family to the new Indiana Jones movie. Ok, so now for me DIsney is a brand that I give money to, to make me feel stupid. Will make sure it does not happen again.
@@ronaldthered6650No, he doesn't. He's lying by statistics by using outliers like Star Wars 7 & 8 to shore up his argument. Everyone knows those movies effectively killed the franchise and any lingering good will from the audience, as seen by Solo's market failure immediately after. He's oversimplifying his analysis by ignoring the fact that two decades of movies have crutched on franchise reboots/remakes in lieu of actual marketing, and some "woke" movies succeed based on the good will of their franchises' previous installments.
I think Disney made the mistake of putting too much focus on its streaming service which has resulted in them needing to generate a huge increase in new content. The need to try guarantee success has resulted in Disney going down the route of remakes, even if that damages franchises like Star Wars in the future.
That was my opinion as well. Remake after remake after remake. Nothing new, just the same story with improved CGI, sound or music. While interesting at first to see how technology could improve the original, that nugget has lost its luster. If studios want to succeed they need to get a good story well written for film and shot in a descent way without breaking the bank and limit social messaging in the movie.
@@SciFiGrinchDisney needs to make new movies that are not part of its animation movies
I think over saturating the market is also a problem. I mean I'm a fan of Star Wars, but even I don't watch every single new mini-series Disney puts out anymore. Plus, how many more of these things can they really make? I mean what's next, is Jar Jar going to get his own mini-series? Or a sequel to the Star Wars Holiday Special?
@@catdogmousecheese Some KoTOR movies or shows might be interesting. But, I think they need to set the Skywalker Saga characters down for a few decades.
"... in the future." *????* Their story telling was so horrid, I lost all interest in their future ideas after they killed off the Skywalker bloodline and brought back Palpatine because they couldn't figure out a good antagonist character. Not to mention, the story circulates around characters, not the world they live in. What ever happened to the "world building" concept?
"Wokeness" is a modern day part of bad writing and mishandling of iconic properties. They can't be separated.
Disney: *race swapping only white characters
TLDR: Its not wokeness guys its just bad storytelling.
@@ryandylan6946 wokeness is a sympom of bad storytelling
@@ryandylan6946 race swapping has nothing to do with storytelling. It has everything to do with Disney making supposed attempts at being somehow "representative" and that's pure wokeness.
@@akiyajapan But if the old little mermaid had never been released this one still would have bombed; it was a crap movie.
The aspect of wokeness I hate the most is that in historical settings, the script reflects the writers attitude in 2023, and not what people would have thought in the historical period.
One of the issues I see in a lot of the movies that are underperforming. Is how studios are interacting with audiences. When someone in your movie goes out and starts calling people racist, homophobic, bigots, or toxic males if they don't watch their movies. Turns a lot of people off. Even many on the left don't like it.
Many on the left agree, they just are broader consumers of media so if a movie has poor storytelling or just looks like poorly (as was the case for most of the Disney remakes) they'll just skip them, instead of showing support for the idea with dollars. In addition, a lot of progressives still haven't returned to the theaters, and streaming pretty much cannibalized that industry.
The 'murican POV about what is "right" or "left" is fun. It is almost like it is inverted for the clueless Americans...
Edit: That explains why they are so bad at geography
I believe the reason barbie did so well is because it is a brand that actually fits that kind of woke narrative. Its does not feel forced and does not stick out like a sour thumb in the storytelling.
and the hid the wokeness in the marketing!
yea it actually didn't seem that woke to me tbh. You have to consider the context. It's a fake toy world where the Barbie's as construction workers and trash collectors don't actually do these things because nothing is constructed and there's no trash. The men are side characters because they always have been in a doll marketed to girls. I thought it was a pretty decent movie
you think Barbie fits a woke brand lol the thin blonde white woman
It's also an original movie. Not another remake
One thing I want to add to your point is that Barbie even though woke, it was not woke in a radical way like Disney. It still focuses on storytelling, with each character having their own flaws to overcome and most importantly it does not attempt to force the "Strong female character" trope into it. Unlike Disney, who often sacrifice storytelling and character development for the sake of wokeness
You forgot that 50% of the Box Office goes to the cinemas 😅
This was great. Love the use of stats to have a more objective discussion. Good job TLDR.
Lol, the circle-jerk is out in full force.
Did you write all of these comments, or do you have a bot to help you?
the graph "Rotten Tomatoes - Wokeness" doesn't consider that the score by critics and the wokeness index have a cofounding variable (woke movies on Rotten Tomatoes tend to receive higher ratings) so if there this negative correlation existed it wouldn't appear on the trend line or would appear much less clearly.
Indeed. Critics on RT fall over themselves to rate woke movies well. The audience score is more useful, though that is skewed by the opposite where woke films are review bombed. Maybe somewhere in between the two is the real number.
@@IAMShteve Even audience scores are "fortified" -- the studios pick a number, maybe 85% or similar, and put their thumbs on the scale to make it stay there.
Rotten Tomatoes ratings can't be trusted.
@@jimluebke3869 The best example of this is the infamous Rise of Skywalker RT score that was locked down to 86% for years.
When you have Disney execs proudly admitting that they are promoting their "not at all secret gay agenda" in every movie and kids show possible, it tends to turn normal people off... The kind of people looking for family friendly entertainment to watch with their kids. This used to be Disney's target audience but no more.
Woketivism is clearly far more important to corporate DEI merchants than good writing and good story telling. It's obvious in every woke Disney product, especially with Star Wars, MCU and Indiana Jones, and we the people are sick of the rubbish.
I gladly cancelled my Disney+ subscription months ago. It felt so good, I wish I could cancel it again.
It may not be sufficient to look at how "woke" a movie is perceived after the fact, but how it was perceived before its release. For example, The Force Awakens benefited from the positive Star Wars brand value at the time but contributed to the erosion of that brand non the less.
Absolutely, a bad movie will impact future movies.
Agreed... the fact this fella included Force Awakens which was literally riding the golden chariot of previous Star Wars movies with all new main characters while also including previous beloved characters proves the fella hosting this video doesn't understand basic logic.
Except The Force Awakens was a great movie, unlike JJ Abrams' subsequent attempt, in part because it went after the nostalgia for the previous films, which was the right thing to do. Too great of a departure from the previous films would've caused the entire franchise to tank then and there. That said, I think he kinda blew his wad on his first Star Wars movie and was right to leave the franchise then. If only he'd stuck with that determination instead of rejoining for the third instalment.
@@Alan_Duval The Force Awakens... Rey literally learns her Jedi powers without any training... that's not good writing. It was the beginning of their Mary Sue character and as Kathleen Kennedy began saying "The Force is Female".
The Force Awakens was a big success because their was no Star Wars movies or shows for a very long time which were not cartoons.
@@NTJediThat didn't really become a criticism until later on, a lot of fans gave it the first one some grace believing the writers had a plan. Once the later films came along and showed this writing was all bad and being rewritten on the fly the first got reassessed and its weaknesses became mainstream points.
TLDR missed a two main points: (1) studios do not get 100% of the box office, rather about 50% of domestic and 30% foreign); (2) there needs to be a plot over time (for example the Star Wars sequel trilogy box office decreased as the anti-woke sentiment grew).
Star Wars sequel trilogy box office decreased because the movies are bad. Even if you ignore or change the woke parts, Disney movies are still bad.
Replace Rey with a guy, make the "gender studies" admiral a dude, remove all traces of wokeness, and the movies are still bad.
It's not just Star Wars, it applies to all Disney movies.
I'm sure a corporation like Disney does market research, and they know the audience gets less intelligent by the day ( that has been empirically proven ), so they create content geared towards a retarded audience. The problem is that they went overboard with the retarded part.
yea, he forgot to inject bias into his math. Since when do we say the team which scored the most goals isn't necessarily the winner, we have to check how much the club spent training them first??? I love how you guys invent new metrics: Star Wars under Disney became the 2nd largest film franchise in history, but you twist that into "plot overtime" just to get the outcome you want.
@@aishaalamoudi599 "Since when do we say the team which scored the most goals isn't necessarily the winner" - since the team retired 4 years ago.
Star Wars is now a streaming-only franchise, since even disney knew better than to burn money on a Ryan Johnson trilogy, or a D&D trilogy, or any of the other movie projects they announced and quietly scrapped.
@@jeronimo196 Wow; another NEW metric; to judge a studio we ignore the films the studio actually put out, and start riffing about movies they could've put out but didn't ! Using this metric, you can claim James Cameron is a huge failure.
5 Star Wars films in 4 years; 1 made over 2bil and is still the biggest domestic in history, 3 made >1bil. pffff what a disaster !
@@aishaalamoudi599 new metrci/old metric - disney lost momie on Solo and haven't greenlit another SW movie since.
"The greatest franchise since MCU" and they dare not produce a movie for fear of bombing. Which is where the MCU is also headed for - "The Marvels" is going to be a spectacular failure.
As a mathematician I love to see journalists doing statistical analysis! Really good job.
Can you make your data set public? I think that the analysis is missing a few hidden variables (such as mow much money the studio gets, as well as the total movie sales of the year), so I would love to include that.
As a mathematician, you probably also recognize that there is no accounting for the true negatives in this case. Those being the people who simply didn't see the movie, and thus didn't have anything to review in the first place. Why didn't those people see the movie? You also could thus see the positive bias in the data, as generally those who went to see the movie MAY be only those simply OK with what they've heard about the movie's messaging in the first place, and would thus more easily give it a more positive rating in the first place. Statistics are tough, because it is always sooooo easy to bend them to output any message, and many of the times, we don't even completely understand which variables truly drive an outcome.
Yes. That is the most important thing.
Are you really a mathematician? If so what branch of maths are you doing research on?
@@rrshier If your "the true negatives" is linear, it only changes the wokness scale, not R.
It's always enjoyable to watch how someone might try to quantify a complex claim, but it often falls short. In this case, there are many factors not taken into account: brand degradation over time, age/demographics of target audience, budget and marketing budget, etc.
It was just revealed in a Vulture article this week that film studios use Rotten Tomatoes to BUY critic reviews. So using RT as any gauge of movie quality is a joke.
The definition of woke is narcissism
Midway through. It doesn’t matter if Disney is a bigger “offender” than other studios, it is that they cater to kids and if they have recently shifted, parents (who are more conservative than the average person) have responded by spending less money on their products.
Yeah he misses a lot of really obvious points which weakens his case.
Actually, as a parent, I sought out stories with more inclusivity. I want to raise humans who give others respect and them with dignity even if they are different.
@@wyldflowerchyld What exactly is a "story with more inclusivity" to you, though? A lot of people like reading folktales from different cultures, for example, but those stories aren't "inclusive". The diversity comes from you choosing a German folktale followed by an African folktale followed by an Indian folktale (for example). In spite of that, some would call that "inclusive" while others use "inclusive" to mean stories that explicitly tell us each character's race and sexual orientation and are specifically about race, racism, GLBT, etc. Many parents also draw the line at the GLBT stuff but are open to racial diversity.
The biggest problem is that the amount of money going unto producing a movie is ridiculously high, and there's too many if them coming iut at any given time.
Furthermore, movies tend to remain in cinemas for very little and most people simply prefer to wait a few months and watch them at home.
The theater going experience can be excruciating.
They should keep the best performing movies in cinemas longer. Maybe people don't care enough to see it now, but later on a friend or date might want to go see it.
@@leonidas14775 If it isn't in a cinema with a huge screen and superb sound I simply won't bother to go. The cinema is too expensive for a second rate experience.
@@leonidas14775 the problem is the next shiny movie comes along and the cinema needs to push the older movies out to make room. also the cinemas only really make money on older movies ( 2-6 weeks old ) and off the candy bar.
@@loganmedia1142 Yeah, we're spoiled for entertainment options these days. Why waste my time and money on a movie unless its one of the best?
CGI ain't cheap. Even BAD CGI is pricy!!!
What is this... You're using the ratings for a movie which most people didn't watch? That's like surveying the number of fans entirely inside a fanclub.
I really wish you guys had added a third scatter pivoting the Rotten Tomatoes score to X against profit Y. I wonder what the correlation there is. I'd expect it to be significant
Rotten Tomatoes tends to get review bombed by idiots which makes it an unreliable parameter.
I enjoyed watching a demonstration of something too few news outlets do: testing a current often-voiced belief with appropriate surveys and simple statistical tests.
Also, a great content-to-advertisement link.
Well done. 🎉
Surveys are junk. The harsh reality is, profits versus expenses. And these movies don't appeal to most people so they make a lot less money and the money spent making these movies is very high so...they go bankrupt! No matter how many clever graphs and charts and yapping by leftists, the harsh reality of profits versus losses remains: Hollywood hates most of us, want us to go away, we went away and lo and behold, Hollywood is going bankrupt! Who could have guessed! Well, all of us knew exactly how this would end. Ask Budweiser.
Um. Trusting Rotten Tomatoes, which hasn't been trustworthy since Captain Marvel (if not before)? Splitting off Marvel and Lucasfilm from Disney, when they're all run by the same people? Failing to note that if it weren't for _The Force Awakens_ taking advantage of pent-up demand for Star Wars (and the subsequent collapse in the Star Wars audience), his whole argument collapses?
You don't have a clue about what's going on here, do you.
@@jimluebke3869 The basic principle holds: woke does not equal broke to a statistically significant degree for recent films, for the box office c.f. movie wokeness as described.
@@old_grey_cat Include the costs of buying LucasFilm, and the goodwill that came with that, include the billion(S) in losses for the Galactic Star Cruiser debacle? Yeah, Get Woke Go Broke indeed.
Seriously, just look at a very simple graph of the Disney Trilogy. Down, down, down, and all because Wokeness demanded old white men get killed off to make way for Mary Sue.
(Who, by the way, is really an archetype of a woman discovering how the power of having babies changes life around her.)
@@jimluebke3869 The costs of buying Lucasfilm are capital investment costs, add to ongoing company value. Different part of the ledger.
In the box office profit/wokeness index, I think star wars single handedly distorts the picture. We can see (presumably) 3 movies on the right side, skewing the average greatly with it's huge budget, profits, and legacy nature luring in people. All in all, as you are comparing different budget size movies, I think the right way of comparing them would be in profit%, not a simple amount.
Not really, because profit accounts for company performance while the amount accounts for audience intent, that is what this is all about.
Star Wars skewed it because it was early days in this phenomenon. Woke wasn’t even really a thing when The Force Awakens was released; it was pre-Brexit and pre-Trump. The Last Jedi went SUPER hard on the woke because it was in the immediate fallout of major cultural and political shifts - but it did well because by and large The Force Awakens was considered good, very refreshing compared to the prequels and people were invested in the unresolved plot points, all of which round headed Rian Johnson crucified. Then the only people who went to see Rise of Skywalker were the very strange people who liked TLJ, the few who hoped RoS would course correct and a reduced proportion of normies. So while the box offices were high (2.1bn, 1.3bn and 0.9bn), it’s clear that going woke was a notable factor for the decline in the Star Wars box office. Now we have Lizzo in Mando and a dying Disney+ 😂
@@angelochoameirelesWe are talking about flat profit (that TLDR used) vs profit %, both is profit.
An issue with star wars (or any series of movies for that matter) is that it takes time for any drop in quality to reflect in viewership. If you go for a first movie in a series and get less than what you expected you can't unsee that movie. Your only choice is to not see the next one. This is a trap movie makers (and game makers) can fall into. They see an initial good result from a reboot/continuation of a popular franchise and think that they did well. Then when another follow up releases with lower numbers they blame the way the second one was made and not the first.
YES! Glad I'm not the only one who was waiting for profit%. The Budgets of these movies are wildly different, but if investors/companies make a 10x return vs 5% return, its a whole different thing. Appreciate the work put into the video though.
So basically rehashes , under advertising, and bad writing ruins a movie ?
Makes sense. But sometimes over advertising can affect it too. The live action Lion King movie from 2019 was advertised like it was going to be this spectacle when it was really a lazy rehash of the animated classic.
The reason why I think people are thinking that going woke is the reason why Disney is struggling is not because the movies are woke in general. But rather, that Disney prioritizes woke ideologies over good storytelling and writing.
They’re not even prioritizing it though, what Disney movie has really had anything to say, truly, about society and it’s issues? It’s performative and it doesn’t resonate because of that. If they made good movies that just happened to have diverse casts that reflect our modern reality, that would also be a way to go. It’s so insincere and pointless you can just smell the marketing quants forcing it in to try to lock in an audience that segment that doesn’t super appreciate shitty pandering.
@@UnsolicitedContext people are sick of the far left nonsense in everything
@@UnsolicitedContext Nobody would care if the movie was good first, but we both know that they're not made to be good. You got the people working on.. I think it was the Proud Family reboot saying they have a "not-so-secret gay agenda" . Pair that with statements doubling down on messaging from Bob Iger and it's pretty clear that they *are* prioritizing putting out propaganda over actual content. Disney is A-OK with that because it gets them a higher ESG score, which means more investments from Blackrock to make up for them hemorrhaging subscribers from D+ and seeing record low attendance at the parks, and all the movies that bombed.
Except they aren't making up for losses. They're hovering dangerously close to bankruptcy. There's even been rumors of them prepping to sell off IPs they own. Take those with a grain of salt, mind you, but it paints a pretty grim picture for the House of Mouse.
I think the lesson here is that it's not so much "Get woke, go broke" as much as it is "Go broke, get woke, then croak."
that is not true at all
@@MrNickPresley "Nobody would care if the movie was good first" - BS
The thing is, wokeness and extreme incompetence at your job _always_ seem to go hand in hand, so its really a double whammy, you dont just get force-fed *"THE MESSAGE"* you get force-fed it in a very badly-made and ham-fisted way.
The irony is, when brilliant stories have progressive politics interwoven into them really well, the vast majority of conservatives and the anti-woke mob don't seem to notice it. It's only when the wokeness is hamfisted (so it's bad writing, not wokeness, per se) or really, really in your face (i.e. not subtle) that it gets picked up. And have you seen the writing and moralizing in the 'God's not Dead' series? Now there's a masterclass in bad writing in a thoroughly non-woke, moralizing franchise.
Meanwhile, many conservative music fans complain about Rage Against the Machine "getting political" when they were super-political from album one; what's changed is "fan" awareness (it seems that they originally ignored, or indeed agreed with the lyrics, 'What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that is your enemy!').
Similarly, you seldom hear complaints about wokeness or progressive politics regarding the Star Trek franchise, even though it was racially diverse from day one in the 60s, and presented an egalitarian (possibly outright communist) future. There was even an anti-Vietnam episode. Uhura's role on The Enterprise was so unusual for the time that MLK begged Nichelle Nichols, in person, not to quit after the first season because she was such a role model for black girls and, along with Sulu, was an example of racial equality.
Actually, I found this article, correcting an article on Fox suggesting that Star Trek had gone woke:
www.inverse.com/entertainment/fox-news-star-trek-woke-politics-wrong
@@Alan_Duval I'd agree that leftist messaging is not intrinsically a bad thing. It only becomes "Woke" when THE MESSAGE overrides _any_ other consideration including plot, character and entertainment value, which - sadly in modern media - are often entirely absent, leaving only THE MESSAGE to bore you to tears.
@@kerravon4159 Fair enough.
PS I LOVE Blake's 7 :D
@@Alan_Duval You have great taste in Sci-fi!
I took my 9yo son to a Disney movie and I was very disappointed half way through exactly for the same reason. It was too woke and practically an advocate for homosexuality! I was like, seriously!? An animated movie that’s targeting little children, why does it need to cover stuff like this!? Shame on them!
Yea, I think that the problem is more complex, if you ask me even wokeness doesn't have to be with those movies being bad, being bad has to do with the movie being bad, wokeness is just something that they use as a topic to try to disguise that the movie is bad, basically wokeness tries to be ketchup.
using wokeness as a disguise or KETCHUP would only work for a progressive viewer. for a conservative wokeness is less ketchup and more diarrhea over your fries
Wokeness and good storytelling aren't mutually exclusive, but they act like it.
A lot of times, tho, you can't separate the woke from the bad, especially when you have beloved characters being bashed on by younger, more "diverse" counterparts.
also, you should never look at the critic scores. since no one listens to them. its like taking reviews of a product from the staff that made it.
The big media companies OWN the critics/ large review sites. take IMDB for instance
I know rotten tomatoes is one of the only benchmarks you can use, but history dictates some of their data has been heavily doctored. That being said, I like the way you guys do your videos. Keep it up.
They’re leftists what did you expect
I think ignoring Rotten tomatoes is a good idea, After the Woman king, I lost all faith in that site
Yeah, I was going to point out that RT wasn't a good metric.
Only this point destroys all their arguments, or in mathematical talking, their sample is erroneous
Yes, we had IMDB saying explicitly that they were changing the rating of the little mermaid because the score was too low..... no longer those scores can be trusted.
I think their biggest issue with the movies is their budgets are too high. All the reshoots, after effects, and rushed productions aren’t cheap.
It’s probably too hard to measure, but I do believe some people have written Disney off for being “woke” and its effecting their bottom line.
I mean it could be that or even in liberal spaces people are tired of Disney for just releasing the same movie over and over (i.e similar stories and/or live action)
@@cencent2189you can think that. But my grandkids are now the perfect age for starting Disney movies. But you won’t find a single one in my house. I tell everyone not to support their theme parks. Since it’s out about the ped of that work there that got busted. Not a safe place
I’ve known quite a few people who dismissed seeing a disney movie because of woke writing making their eyes roll. So i think you’re right
Rather than wokeness in movie being the main factor in movies underperforming, I believe trying to excuse bad writing by trying to make movie more woke is the reason.
Also trying to recreate old movies for people in 25-40 years demographic to invoke nostalgia isnot working now.
Nostalgia is when you feel something while seeing something you liked in the past once in a while.
But now, we are seeing most of the movies trying to include the nostalgia factor.
By infusing the woke into the movies, they're destroying the nostalgia factor they're banking on. If they stopped inserting modern agendas, they could capitalize on the nostalgia better. It's easy to tell now in most cases which movies are changing to suit narratives and which aren't, so people can choose accordingly.
Exactly that's why I've been trying to say a movie being bad. It's just a movie being bad it doesn't mean that it's "woke"
The 'wokeness' of a movie in many ways drives the bad writing, because you can't have old privileged people writing stories for 'modern audiences', so the writers rooms are devoid of experienced proven talent and are instead stocked with fresh faces often on their first significant writing gig. Settling for lesser writing talent with the correct mindset is the issue, IMO.
@@XxxXxx-lr7vo completely understand your opinion because if they are pushing an agenda, they do have to change the way they write the movie completely understand just don't belive that lazy writing implies that people call a movie woke but completely understand you're opinion
@@lamontpounds2917 cultural warriors are willfully blind.
3:55 "So called race swapping"....
The most important thing to say right now, storytelling is what matters, no one is going to enjoy a story with bad storytelling, and since media industry is all about enjoyement, well, I do not need to explain further. Honestly I found better hobbyist fanfic writers than writers wich corporations hire, those guys really would fit the role better, but they write to enjoy it in itself, and most do not want to work as writers and stay with this as they hobby. Some of them are true masters in this. They just do not feel need to enter this industry.
I'm a writer, both hobbyist and professional. The things you can write for yourself and for your audience are very different from the things the studios or executives or editors or publishers will let you write for their audiences. It's mostly people with no business writing telling writers what they are allowed to write and then still making constant changes. Studios and publishers don't like "creatives".
Edit for typos
@@autumnleaf2263 How much they are telling what to write? How much they are interfering to the core of the story?
This practice seems off, considering that the best and most well-selling books were writed without anything like that, like the Lord of the Rings.
The interviews with the actors during the promotion of a film should be taken into account as well.
Yep, Snow White looks like it’s going to be the most insufferable film known to humanity. This is purely because of the conduct of the actress playing Snow White.
Michael Jordan said it best: "Republicans buy shoes too."
independent voters buy too.
Sure, but what percentage were buying Air Jordans?
@@brianfoss571 possibly quite a lot, you dont need data to see it (but to confirm it). Air Jordans are by far the best sneakers brand of Nike (if not directly the biggest brand period), so it follows that their biggest brand is quite possibly the biggest brand if you focus only on their Republican fan base, and thats true no matter the demographic: black people, democrats, adults, young. The biggest brand overall will likely be their biggest seller if you focus on smaller demographics.
Thats not necessarily true, to confirm that you need data, but you are asking as it is not the natural thing that the majority of Republicans are buying Air Jordans.
@@lobachevscki Seeee, the problem with looking at this as a numbers game is that you are forgetting the psychology side. Republicans and Conservatives dress like ass, and most conservative guys thinking caring about fashion is too feminine for them. Anything that's not the silhouette of cargo shorts or a three piece suit, will not be something they'll consider.
They're not going to buy air jordans when tennis shoes and sketchers are way cheaper and are just as "functional."
@@lobachevscki My point is that Republicans were never the target market and core demographic for the product. So Jordan's comment didn't actually mean much. He knew that the vast majority of conservatives would be fine with a simple pair of New Balances, but the ones willing to buy Air Jordans would do so because of his reputation as the best basketball player ever, on and off the court.
Adults complaining about race-swapping in The Little Mermaid are forgetting that they are NOT the target audience for a Disney princess movie! Their kids are. This isn't about reselling adults' childhoods back to them - the original's on Disney+ for those who only want Jodi Benson's version. It's about ensuring that the demographic born after 2008 - which is a bit more than half non-white - has characters who look, talk, (and sing) like them, so they see themselves in those movies and can have merch marketed to them. Merch is where the real money from a movie's made, and Disney's playing the long game on that with Halle Bailey.
One thing I don’t think you took into account is when you approach making a movie with an agenda (in this case wokeness) quality will suffer. You cannot make a good movie when you’re too busy trying to check boxes. For instance picking a director and writer based on DEI rather than their talent. Nobody cares if either is gay, a person of color or whatever, however if they were chosen because they are gay rather than their talent, then you have a problem, because then you have a bad product.
I went to see barbie as a conservative, it was really a one time thing though. Hearing about feminism, patriarchy, and how hard it is to be a woman in every movie would be really annoying- it was really just the hype around the movie which lead me to go. Disney keeps remaking old movies for "modern audiences" instead of making new exciting ones and there's a lack of interest for it. They have destroyed the reputation among the right and when they release a new "woke" movie, it gets slammed to the point where if you search up their name in youtube it's mostly videos about how they're destroying their company.
Exactly.
One can roll their eyes on the overt lecturing, but the movie is supposed to be silly.
Then there’s literal women I know who definitely do have experiences of being treated as lesser because of their sex.
The thing is, one can watch a movie and not necessarily agree with the message.
But the outrage over Barbie is both hilarious and sad. It’s not that big of a deal
I just want to enjoy a movie without being lectured to
Barbie marketing campaign made sure to hide the movie's political messaging. That was crucial to its success I think, and movie studios will definitely be taking notes.
@@jtgd It's not that big a deal in the context of one new, original movie, though the messaging was hidden until the week it came out, so many people saw the movie without ever knowing about it beforehand. The marketing was brilliant, even combining Oppenheimer into it (Barbenheimer) to give both movies a bump in sales. Greta Gerwig, the person involved in putting that message to screen for Barbie, is also in charge of the new Snow White movie, which we've been told by cast will be just as woke and will be a complete re-imaging of the story altogether. So people expecting to see a live-action telling of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves will see something completely new with overt political messaging.
Most search engines are trying to find content that appeals to the user searching. You're finding mostly videos about how Disney is destroying their company because that's what youtube thinks you want to see. It's not an accurate sampling of the videos on the platform.
not being woke. but MEDIOCRITY is killing Disney and cinema in general. Barbie is what the incels would call ¨woke¨🤪, but it's extremely successful because it's good. that simple
Loved the set design.
I'm sorry but the message at the end was such a waste. They could have set the example when the Ken's asked for equal power. They said they'll only give it to them when men give women equal power in the real world. They had the opportunity to be better and set the example for people to follow. But no. Also the way they took the Ken's was nothing smart or using their genuine skills, just using blatant stereotypes of what men and women "act" like.
@@SASMADBRUV7 you missed the point completely. Ken was fixed in the idea that ¨It's Barbie and Ken¨ meaning he could not find his own identity without her. All he did throughout the movie was a constant attempt to get her attention. Barbie rejecting him was a way of letting him know that before becoming someone else's something, he has to find his own value, as an individual, not ¨as a man¨ ( a generic stereotype¨) by his own. that's the message
Actually most movies don't make much money , and many big money losers actually made a ton of money they just cost too much to produce.
TLDR: There's no correlation between "wokeness" and a movie's success
Well, a weak to no correlation using this approach. I know myself and many other comments are suggesting alternative approaches or other definitions for "woke", and we'd really like to see the raw data too
Already knew that would be the conclusion before watching the video. That's TLDR for you.
@fubar12345
The methodology used is not definitive, as there is no definitive method of measuring wokeness, and there are multiple measures of a movie's success.
If you've got an alternate measure that produces statistically significant results, that would be interesting to see.
@oriontigley5089 The correlation presented in the video was not weak correlation. Weak correation looks different. They said it was not significant. And anyone who knows statistic would confirm that the number they showed is really tiny. It is much more probably caused just by random fluctuation. "Not significant" means that it is not possible to be distinguished from random fluctuation - that is the deffinition of "Not significant" in statistics. Saying that there was a relationship between wokeness and success based ont this data is like seeing 51 men and 50 women in one museum during one day and making a conclusion that men like museums more than women. It just doesn't make any sense.
@@fubar12345 Where's your deep analysis on 'go woke go broke' that proves TLDR wrong?
You even forgot to mention Disney calling their fans racists, massagenists, etc. Great way to fill theaters.
massagenists? lmfao. holy shit dude, log off and go to school.
4:02 Actually, many progressives and lefties ALSO criticize wokeness or rather pseudo-wokeness, corporate pandering and neo regression. It's not just conservatives. Conservatives are just against EVERYTHING woke while many of us are against pseudo-wokeness specifically. And we get a lot of that everywhere now. You can have very woke movie done well and you can have pseudo-woke movie that only has surface-level wokeness but it's actually empty, pandering or even toxic.
Hearing a journalist say things like "below the standard to be statistically significant" restores my faith in humanity.
Unfortunate that what he said is utterly wrong from a statistical perspective -- the coefficient of determination doesn't test the relationship statistically.
I think it just doesn't understand its audience anymore. They want good writing, fresh stories and, if classics are revived, don't tinker with them so much as to lose their nostalgic value. Occasionally it feels like they've been very performative in their progressivism, which makes me want to roll my eyes, but I think most people don't care if there is more diversity in casting and characters (something which your survey also shows).
The bigger problem is that the movies seem to be about nothing besides diversity . They put all their effort in diversity and not into the story.
Strange worlds had bad dialoges and the charackters felt pretty 1 dimensional, the whole island beeing a turtle is also not something new....or in other words, you just didn't know how they were able to put so much money into such a bad movie, you just didn't see it.
The tinkering & original bits are often regarded as the only redeeming parts of most of the live action remakes though.
That is the problem with this study, they are just calling woke anything that merely has diversity elements etc. which is not accurate at all
You lost me at the P-word... INSERT MY EYEROLLS...
Again you lost me at using the D-word as an epithet.. EPIC FAIL!@@blablup1214
I have never heard of either Elemental or Strange Worlds. And I am sure I have only heard about the other Disney movies because of the controversy. I used to go to the cinema alot, but I became fat up with remakes and superhero franchises.
Movies kind of depend on you to go to the movies so they can tempt you with their 10 trailers for new movies.
If you stop going, that is already 10 trailers less you are watching.
2 things I want to discuss:
Firstly, it's not simply the inclusion of different characters, but how one dimensional they are. People who are gay aren't just gay, they're full people with many parts to them, and writing them based around just that one identity is very boring.
Secondly, when it comes to race swapping characters, many who are frustrated want to see genuine stories about different cultures and races. Putting a black person in for Cleopatra, as an example, does not share more history of Sub-Saharan Africa. It's just black face for a place that was, at the time, a mixture of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian.
Another little note: rotten tomatoes has been accused several times of changing disliked movies' scores to make them higher. People have been talking for some time about seeing scores overnight suddenly jump up by 20%. Not saying it's true necessarily, but it does make that metric controversial.
I really hate the term 'woke', its an umbrella term whose definition is colloquially ill-defined. There's this pernicious idea that if you agree or disagree with one aspect then it all applies to you and it becomes a straw-man argument
What the hell was so "woke" about _Turning Red_ ? Just the fact that it featured an Asian family and focused on young girls? Is that all it takes?
yes, because periods are "sexual" to conservatives
I would have looked at your wokeness results over time too. When the Force Awakens came out, people were probably just hyped for Star Wars again. Also, I don't think many who complain of wokeness are against female representation etc. However, over time this might have shifted. The first example of wokeness may not have meant anything to many, but after years of examples, this might be a case of black female lead? Going to be woke. People's tolerances are stretched by this point and it doesn't help that Disney is remaking old content like the Little Mermaid where there is a clear race swap or men no longer the heroic prince but a creepy stalker - we can compare like for like. If it were an original story let's say it might not have had as bad of a response. Having examples of gay kisses cut out for China for example but front and centre for Western audiences also doesn't help and in cases where it just wasn't necessary. Looking back, people probably now see the force awakens as woke but that's with the lens of what films came after it. We now have Snow white and the seven dwarves who isn't white and dwarves who aren't dwarves.
Well said.
Nah people were complaining about the lead being a chick and Finn being black from the get go.
bad writing, piss poor remakes no one asked for combined with trying to cash in on the woke agenda led to their downfall. it's not either this or that, it's everything.
I think the way they tried to cash in is the problem. Making good movies which are also progressive makes money - making bad movies in order to be progressive doesn’t
I fully agree that bad writing and needless remakes are Huge parts of their downfall too
Weird thought but the people who tend to complain the most about movies being woke tend to be the audiences it was never for. Take for example the little mermaid the amount of mostly grown men and women who complained about the movies race swap in comparison to in person reviews from little girls is quite funny. Any kid who actually watched it didn’t even think the race swapping was that big of a deal.
that's because the "anti woke" crowd's ideology is fundamentally about total control. see also: school book bans.
Oh, children clamored to see the Mermaid do everything and the Prince do nothing in the new movie...yup. Good grief, you leftists are grasping at straws as you all drown!
While the race-swap was a problem for many (because it goes against the source material...not because the audience is "racist"), the themes in the movie were also a big part of the criticism (I don't need no man, etc).
@@josephupton3601 wh was upset about the "I don't need a man"? Men? The film isn't marketed for men
Men couldn't POSSIBLY have daughters and granddaughters whom they take to the movies now could they? As a man (whose adjectives are "feed up, sick and tired) I am perfectly capable of making judgements about movies and whether I want my young children to see it or not. Whoopie Goldberg says "it's a movie about a DOLL". Well, Whoopie, so was the movie "Child's Play" with "Chucky".
Another possibility is a delayed effect. Meaning for example, that the inherent power of a past franchise in terms of global reach compensates for deficiencies in the movies themselves. For example The Force Awakens was the first new official Star Wars trilogy in decades, so just via the franchise's past performance and marketing wins alone, it hides the blips. Many people disappointed with those movies went to see them at first due to past performances that weren't so much leaning towards the Woke side, but it takes time for people to be discouraged. A bit like the Roman empire's decline, it takes time for something that rose to this height in power, to erode itself into oblivion.
I wouldn't be in surprised if 10-20 years from now Disney doesn't excist anymore.
Basically every aspect of Disney is in decline, form the Toys to Theme Parks and everything in between.
I'm 43 years old. I live in Australia. I grew up with Disney. Disney cartoons used to air on Sunday nights after dinner. Myself and my three brothers would make a big deal of it, every sunday. We'd eat dinner then watch Disney for 2 hours. There was no politics, no racial quotas, no ideological pursuit, just entertainment. They were great memories.
35 years later, I find identity politics has seeped into and infected EVERYTHING. Not only do I have to deal with being told literally everything that exists today is "problematic", and needs to be changed, but I also have to deal with the happiness I found as a child in Disney's cartoons placed on the naughty list and substituted for something that's NOT Disney's cartoons as I knew them.
For this reason, I will not spend another dollar on ANY Disney movie, ride, cartoon, merch, anything.
They went woke, and because of that, they are without my money, that I otherwise would have loved to give them in exchange for what they once provided.
Use all the maths you like, and speculate on different reasons all you like. But they're not getting another cent from me purely and simply because they went woke.
But you have a kind of extreme reaction. In the other extreme, some will pay money just because they release "woke" movies. The important thing is where most people put their money. And it does not seem to depend on the wokeness of the movie.
@@fawzibriedj4441 No, I have the normal reaction. Those who pay money simply because the movie is "woke" are the extremists. People go to watch movies for entertainment, not for political correctness and woke ideology. And the majority is on my side. That's why Disney is losing money.
I'm sorry to be this blunt, but that's an extremely naive take on the matter! Just because you didn't notice the ideology in classic Disney cartoons, doesn't mean it wasn't there! If you're honestly interested, I'd advise you to read into critical theory and ideology criticism based on the German Frankfurt School. Most of their thinkers would despise the superficial liberal approach of virtue-signaling "wokeness" by all these corporations. Nonetheless, they would although very sharply analyze how much politics and ideology are hidden in old and modern media alike. To just name a few examples: Showing Monarchy and/or a ruling class as good, the only possibility and even natural (see naturalistic fallacy), the portrayal of women as mostly naive weak and with beauty as their defining feature as well as historical revisionism in terms of colonialism, slavery etc.
@@lostprophet8888 Im sorry to be this blunt, but that's an extremely naïve take on this matter!
35 years ago, there was more of a focus on entertainment than ideology. Businesses were money driven. They made profit. This is the first time in history that ideological pursuit has outweighed profit. The first time that what an audience WANTS has been dismissed for what a company thinks the audience SHOULD want, to the detriment of profit.
Your examples are ridiculous, the monarchy/ ruling class was both painted as good AND evil throughout disney cartoons (Queen of Hearts, Queen Grimhilde), the portrayal of women was often strong (Arial, Alice, Cruella De Ville, Fairy Godmother, Maleficent, Jessica Rabbit, Madame Medusa, Mary Poppins, Mulan, Pocahontas, Queen Grimhilde, Queen of hearts just to name a few). And there were no cartoons based on slavery or colonialism. That was Warner Brothers.
Stories were told for the sake of stories. Cartoons were made on the basis of what the audience enjoyed, NOT what the company thought the audience SHOULD enjoy. I'm not sure you're actually aware of the content of Disney cartoons through the 80's. It seems you're just making things up in order to satisfy your ridiculous psuedo-intellectual rant.
@@nated80 If you really think that the superficial wokeness virtue signaling by Disney and other companies ISN'T driven by profits (and profits alone), you're even more naive than I proclaimed. ;p The best example is pride month logos that all these companies just use in certain countries and not in others (were they are even more needed due to the absence of certain human rights). Those companies DON'T really and honestly care for about these topics! They just want to act like they do, because market research shows that that's the way to got right now (or at least was for the last couple of years).
Markets are global now and the world population is diverse. That's the only reason for all these superficial characters etc. Although many white US-Americans still won't believe that, since they see themselves as the center of the world. ;) That's also the reason why all these characters and stories are written so bad and superficial. The people behind them don't really care or understand something about the struggles of trans people, homosexuality, racism etc. They are just using virtue signaling to earn money with as many audiences as possible.
In regards to my examples: I wasn't talking about Disney alone or specifically. (And how isn't Pocahontas a story about colonialism!? ;p)
I'm sorry that you see my comment as a pseudo-intellectual rant. If you would read into anything I named in regards to critical theory, I'm sure you wouldn't think so. I just painted a picture in very broad strokes, because the TH-cam comment section isn't the place for a page-long in-depth discussion about very complicated topics in regards to capitalist propaganda and ideology. ^^
we lack movie premiers in German towns... no movie theaters here...
WOW I'm blown away by the amount of analysis and the level of thoroughness. You've really outdone yourself TL;DR!
The problem is that every single studio nowadays has millions of dollars budget and thus need to make even more than that just to earn anything.
The problem is that woke sucks rotten.
This. If your budget is 200 million, you'd need a really good film to break even in an economy where we have to make choices, where we can only afford one film in a quarter, one each month if we're generous and decide to eat one week less.
I admire tldrs dedication so much
Overall return on investment is obviously the metric you should be using. How is it possible that you spent time putting this video together and didn't get the basics right?
What if getting woke and going broke is a slower phenomena?
For example if all the audience in the world cand be divided into 10 groups and Disney makes a woke movie for each group, we all go watch it and dont like it but then Disney does it again, some of the audience returns but they also didnt like it. Eventually no one goes to watch Disney movies even if they become legitimately good because they burnt the audience's trust
I hope everyone recognizes the survey is self-fulfilling. It wasn’t an analysis of whether the movies in question are woke based on the presence of themes that respondents considered, “woke,” it’s literally just a reflection of their reputation. It’s not an analysis of whether the movie actually meets the equally arbitrary definition of woke; it’s just a reputation survey. People will of course rate movies that they’ve heard are woke/not woke accordingly so the results are exactly what you’d expect to see.
Reddit data ... lmao
Really appreciate this statistic attempt it was interesting. Two major caveats though:
1. Movie Critics and people who rate movies are also incredibly woke.
2. Disney’s wokeness is turning away Disney’s audience. Barbie might be woke movie that did well but the Barbie target audience is not the same as a Disney’s typical audience. The wokeness is turning away the Disney fans!
Some of these movies were projected to be huge hits based on their IP and then bombed, which was not taken into account. A modest earning may be good for one film and horrific for another. This is the case of many of Disney's films. The reputational damage due to "woke" over time can also have an affect on the entire brand if it becomes widespread enough so that a "not woke" film may also be skipped over. Barbie's advertising also made a lot of people feel that it was NOT "woke" which got a wide audience excited about it. It's impossible to say how it would have gone if the commercials had included the "patriarchy" references, for example.
Overall, this is an interesting analysis, but I'm not sure it necessarily hits the target.
It's a lot more than being woke. It's being woke and then blaming the paying customers for their failure. Obviously this is a known strategy to attract customers to your shop.
Critics are the center of the woke system. They haven’t been reliable in my lifetime and I’m 65.
More like you see everything you don't like because you're 65, not long for this world.
I don't think it's wokeness fully. It feels more like bad writing and shows and movies that audiences don't really want trying to make up for their writing via forced inclusivity or hand fisted social topics but that's just me.
Great video, insane animations!
Would be crazy if TLDR anonymized and open-sourced this data - perhaps some other interesting insights can also be found.
Considering that the Oscar's are pathetic and require woke ideology, all movies really suck now
What makes Disney look worse isn't the total profits, it's the profit margin. If a small studio spends $2 million to create a movie, and rakes in $128 million. That is considered vastly successful. Yet if a studio spends $400 million on a movie, and rakes in $526 million. That's considered breaking even despite the two movies raking in the same profit.
Very good analysis. Rehashing old stories which nobody asked for to cash in on nostalgia has to be a main reason behind this, and not only rehashing these old stories, but also retelling them (all?) undeniably worse than the original verions?
I dont know a single disney 'live action' remake (which doesnt even make sense of a term to apply to the Lion King they made a few years ago) which is overall better than its previous namesake.
please don't use the nobody asked for line otherwise you just sound like an idiot trumpster. none of this stuff is necessary. nobody asks for anything that we get except the snyder cut and did that really do the world any favors?
Cinderella is pretty good, and is really the only outstanding one in the remakes
What can you say? Stylized graphics are timeless; you don't need to update a style.
It’s not that Disney’s woke movies are causing people to turn away in an organised fashion like the Bud Light situation. It’s the consequence of the fact that woke writing philosophies lead to boring and internally inconsistent story universes that people don’t feel motivated to become invested in because better entertainment alternatives exist now. This leads to apathy in Disney’s other product lines. The target audience is a big factor in a movie’s success too. Barbie might be woke but it’s target audience is the most receptive to the woke message so it did well. Also movies with established franchises tend to do worse when a new entry is woke. Strange World was a new property so it went under the radar in terms of reputation but Disney live action movies are immediately compared to the originals which are masterpieces so the woke changes appear more striking.
I think the methodology of this video may have been flawed because the wokeness level was judged by survey respondents when wokeness doesn’t have a universal definition in the minds of everyone. It would have been better for the small team behind this survey to give the movies an objective woke score based on the criteria given in this video and then to survey people for their opinions of the movies with questions which don’t mention wokeness so that it doesn’t bias the movies in their minds. Many of these movies have been out for a while so people’s view of them now may be different to when they were released and more unknown. Mulan is the perfect example. It fits the definition of woke in retrospect but when it came out, the concept of woke didn’t exist and it wasn’t written with a woke philosophy in mind so I wouldn’t even class it as woke. A woke movie isn’t just the woke aspects in it, it’s the intention behind it which people object to the most. Making Ariel black wasn’t a writing decision made in a vacuum which just happens to fit the definition of woke in retrospect, it was an intentional decision made in service of an agenda for no other reason than that agenda.
Edit: I made a mistake with my Mulan example. I forgot there was a remake and I thought they were talking about the original because I have heard arguments before that the original was a woke movie. I think my point still stands because the Mulan remake was bad but it wasn't woke either and shouldn't be so highly scored in this video. It was made for the Chinese market which is notoriously non-woke and people say she was a Mary Sue in the remake but the Chinese government typically like their film protagonists to be stoic infallible super humans so it was all done in service of state propaganda and in the west, that type of story just isn't compelling.
I agree
And what is "woke"?
Still. We've seen this before for decades. The conservative 'anti-woke' has overplayed its hand and is already being associated with the general Nazi atmosphere of the right wing just like every other cultural issue conservatives wander into. Woke is only going to become more prevalent while "anti-woke" is going to be associated with things like tucker Carlson, trump going to prison, or the Nazis and all the current neonazi groups. One side is explicitly more dangerous and inappropriate and that dynamic is only going to be more extreme as society progresses.
@@ThePrinceofHisOwnKingdom of course, it's hard since it has no defined definition.
However, I, as well as many others consider something "woke" when it panders to the left at the expense of things such as creativity, originality and storytelling.
@@ThePrinceofHisOwnKingdom They gave a perfectly adequate definition in this video but my point is that this definition isn't universal for their survey respondents so I fear their respondent assigned wokeness scores are skewed by a mix of various uncontrolled factors due to bias and I think the presence of Mulan so high on the list is evidence of this. They needed to use their definition to assign the scores consistently otherwise comparing the scores is meaningless. Also, doing it this way means we only have to accept their definition to have faith in the result and if their definition is clearly wrong, we can see how the results are invalid. In general the respondents shouldn't know the purpose of the poll if you want accurate results which is why proper studies are blind.
@oriontigley5089 who responded to you had a good general vibe description of it though. The intention to pander and the decisions made in service of it usually subtract from the overall narrative cohesion of the piece. A hypothetical example being a European period piece with a black aristocratic family or a high degree of racial diversity in the citizenry who's origin isn't addressed by the story leading to questions of consistency from the viewer. Although wokeness doesn't always mean the story can't be creative or original, it does mean there is a lack of internal consistency almost by definition. The reason woke media is usually boring and lacking in originality, I believe is because the writers are more focused on the woke aspects.
I agree with the comments that the issue is poor writing by Disney rather than their 'wokeness' but one thing I'd add as an analyst is that I don't think Box office profit/loss is a good indicator. This is mostly due to the fact it doesn't take into account budget size and brand loyalty (such as star wars). You could do it as a % made or loss compared to the budget that I think would give more accurate data.