Seriously…aren’t most people at a point of apathy regarding Disney and their product?
I know I am.
The Marvels (2023)
- Thread starter renaissance_man
- Start date
Seriously…aren’t most people at a point of apathy regarding Disney and their product?
I know I am.
cboath
Master Member
Well, right iff the bat you knew they were building to the avengers, so there is the initial big drive. After that it was basically stated with their long range plan the were doing infinity wars, attention and hype level 10, and the delivered every step of the way. Post endgame, we got new characters but no clear or even fuzzy path of what they were building to. Then they show the new big bad and peopke are somewhat interested, the he is arrested and mire fuzziness ensues. They arent building on the new characters it seems short if Ms Marvel. They brought back level 2 characters from the 1st 3 phases and people were lukewarm. They used 2 tentpole characters. Spiderman was great, Thor a dud. Guardians was good but a clear ending. Everything seems in dissarray for some reason. If these were stanalone flicks it may be different, but we know they are connecting them but they seem to have not thought that far ahead. If they have, they are obfuscating way too much. I mean, no pandemic and kang dynasty was supposed to be '25, right? We still dont see him as a threat to anything. Ant man took him down. I think if you want to use a bu ch of very much unknown characters for the generzl oublic, you have to tie things together a bit more. 30 second cut scenes dont cut it anymore. We know they can do group movies so pulling it off isnt a sell anymore, you have to give us reasons to see it and they havent done that yet.
Deadpool and Wolverine are their best bet. Forget all the connected universe stuff. Just make rated R DP and Wolvi flicks. You don't need a lot of CG for those, just old school blood and guts.
NakedMoleRat
Legendary Member
I finally realized that they simply made the same movie 34 times.
"The messaging" is only a small piece of the problem.
Before being acquired by Disney each IP built its strength on the backs of visionaries. After being acquired a lot of these folks left or were made to leave because of Disney's internal political culture.
For a while Disney could ride the momentum of success behind productions in progress at Marvel, Lucasfilm and PIXAR, but it was only a matter of time before Disney's team had to hold the reigns without the training wheels. With the serial flops now coming from Lucasfilm, Marvel and PIXAR the desert of creativity and imagination at Disney has revealed itself.
So what if they strip out the "messaging"? They don't have the creative juice to pull together anything original anyway. PIXAR, Lucasfilm and Marvel have been bled of their individual characters and merged with the Disney identity.
In retrospect, Iger probably acquired these IPs in the first place because Disney had no original ideas. This is what happens when Disney forgets about universal human experiences (hope, love, loyalty, faith, courage ...) that unify people across culture/gender/race in favor of social activism that divides people by culture/gender/race. Unfortunately it seems he acquired the IPs for little more than the branding and discarded the rest.
Disney ain't going anywhere. Welcome to the Dark Ages.
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Yes. Absolutely.
De-Woking Disney would help. But it would mainly be damage control. It's not enough to make them successful again. It's still applying surface fixes to structural problems.
Half the reason why they went too hard on Wokeness is because they don't know how to do anything else. That becomes painfully obvious every time they try.
Riceball
Master Member
What Disney really needs to do is learn how to make movies for less. Most of what they've released recently have done fairly well at the box office in terms of raw numbers, but their budgets have been so high that it means what would have been a success for just about anybody else but Disney is a flop because they only made back like half of their budget. So getting rid of heavy handed messaging in their films is going to help but they have to learn how to trim their budgets for it to make a difference. As it is now, they have to make the most incredibly popular films, like the first Frozen or End Game, every time to make their money back and actually see a profit, which is very unrealistic. They need to produce a lot more smaller, simpler films and fewer $300 million+ tent pole blockbuster style movies in order to turn things around.
That's true, but I think it's all sides of the same coin.
The lack of creative mojo is a big part of what runs up the budgets. They fall back on CGI spectacle because it's considered reliable (it used to be) and they don't know how to write anything better.
The productions go out of control because they are making it up as they go along. They do that because they don't know a good idea from a bad one, and they have to wait for test audiences to tell them which 30 days of shooting have to be scrapped and redone.
Of course it all has to be redone at a frantic pace to meet a release date. That date was barely sensible to begin with, and only if they were competent enough to get the movie done on the first try. Which they aren't.
The lack of creative mojo is a big part of what runs up the budgets. They fall back on CGI spectacle because it's considered reliable (it used to be) and they don't know how to write anything better.
The productions go out of control because they are making it up as they go along. They do that because they don't know a good idea from a bad one, and they have to wait for test audiences to tell them which 30 days of shooting have to be scrapped and redone.
Of course it all has to be redone at a frantic pace to meet a release date. That date was barely sensible to begin with, and only if they were competent enough to get the movie done on the first try. Which they aren't.
Cephus
Master Member
What Disney needs to do is learn how to make good movies again. They need to figure out who their potential paying audience is and find out what they want to see. It's not going to be what they're making now. The only thing that limiting the budget is going to do is reduce the amount that they're losing. They're not going to improve until they figure out how to make movies anyone with money in their wallet wants to see.
If we are all being prescriptive on what Disney needs to do (as apparently unpaid consultants shouting in a vacuum 
) I would like to suggest that they thaw out Walt and demand that he take over the company.
) I would like to suggest that they thaw out Walt and demand that he take over the company.
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firesprite
Master Member
If you think Marvel comics aren't "woke", you haven't been paying attention. Social justice was a big deal to Stan and the other early creators, and that's been fairly constant over the years. There were certainly missteps in the early attempts at diversity and the comics frequently suffered from being a homogenous "white male" perspective, but there were generally good intentions.
There are definitely issues with the franchise, but being socially aware isn't really one of them, if you want movies that are true to the source material.
There are definitely issues with the franchise, but being socially aware isn't really one of them, if you want movies that are true to the source material.
Cephus
Master Member
There's a difference between being socially aware and ONLY being socially aware. Stan knew how to tell a good story. The idiots in charge at Marvel today don't. The people they're hiring are only whining about the message. They can't write worth a damn.
firesprite
Master Member
Stan Lee was certainly very socially conscious. In fact, he even argued that simply swapping the gender/race of a principle character was actually lazy and divisive. In the service of true diversity, he thought it was better to introduce characters such as, The Black Panther, with their own agency and stories. I wish Disney had the chutzpah to do likewise.
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CB2001
Master Member
Except, he's waking up to the wrong thing. Instead of "We should be listening and focusing on entertaining audiences", he's saying, "We should focus on predicting the changes in taste from audiences." That's not the same thing.
Solo4114
Master Member
As to what they're building towards, I still haven't seen Marvels (I just don't go to theaters anymore, really), but my sense based on Loki Season 2 and Ant-Man Quantumania is that they're building towards an "Avengers vs. Kang" showdown. Not sure how effective that'll be, since the stuff I've seen hasn't exactly built towards the formation of a new Avengers team. There are some legacy guys (Falcap, Ant-Man, War Machine, Thor, Capt. Marvel), but nobody's really been brought together as a "team" and there hasn't been quite enough crossover to actually justify such a team yet. Maybe that's supposed to happen in Phase 6, but right now, it doesn't seem like they're building towards anything other than Kang.
I think audiences got used to building towards something, though, and part of their annoyance is that the franchise seems...unfocused and not like the stories are part of anything larger. This, by the way, doesn't bother me in the slightest, because I'm used to comics existing simultaneously in their own isolated worlds, and in interconnected spaces.
But for better or worse, for more than a decade, and especially in the last 5 years, Marvel built its MCU brand on "We're building towards a big finish." It's what people expect now, and when they can't see where things are going and it doesn't seem like there's a clear sense of things...yeah, it's harder to hold their interest.
I think audiences got used to building towards something, though, and part of their annoyance is that the franchise seems...unfocused and not like the stories are part of anything larger. This, by the way, doesn't bother me in the slightest, because I'm used to comics existing simultaneously in their own isolated worlds, and in interconnected spaces.
But for better or worse, for more than a decade, and especially in the last 5 years, Marvel built its MCU brand on "We're building towards a big finish." It's what people expect now, and when they can't see where things are going and it doesn't seem like there's a clear sense of things...yeah, it's harder to hold their interest.
firesprite
Master Member
Yeah, Kathleen Kennedy frakked that up big time. That's why Filoni is now in charge of Star Wars.
