 A lot of movies bombed in 2023, or they didn't quite live up to expectations in the financial department, mainly on the Disney side of things, but that's just because they own pretty much everything. But other studios too are feeling a little bit of the weight, feeling a little bit of the pressure because of bloated budgets, or poor direction, unsure demographics, and a bunch of other stuff is at play. And you know what? I think it's about time I address some of this, give my two cents, and you can take it for what it's worth. Maybe, maybe only two cents, but here we go. I thought of this idea, as I often do, based on an article I saw on the artist formerly known as Twitter, the thriving hellscape full of bots and porn, as we all wanted it to turn into. This article stated that an anonymous executive or person up higher is blaming the fans for the bad performance of the Marvels and other films that Disney's come out with lately. Now, journalism has died of course over the years, but I also see a lot of shenanigans from websites just trying to get articles out there and make a name for themselves. So they might just kind of conjure up a story. When I see a mysterious person, an executive that's higher up, that's unnamed, that a source tells us, said this, I find that's not the greatest amount of information to go off of and maybe there's a little bit of bad faith stuff going on. But I also know history and the idiots over at Disney have not said the greatest things out loud. They haven't had the best ideas in the last couple years. I like to be in a comfortable middle department. There's people that get very upset with Disney. They get very upset with Hollywood. There's people that love Disney and Hollywood and they praise everything that comes out. Usually I just get rooted in place and kind of listen to my own thoughts and kind of make up my own ideas based on what I'm seeing. And what I have seen in the last four or five or six or seven or eight or ten years is that Disney owns so much shit now. They just don't have time to parse through it all and they're making a lot of terrible decisions based on what they think is going to give them the most incentive. And what I mean by that is the following. They own Fox Studios, all right? They own ABC Family. They own a lot of little, they're an umbrella company that owns a lot of other companies underneath, a lot of which we probably don't even know about. But massive studio with a lot of different departments and configurations at play. One of the things they decided to do in the last few years was take a lot of the Fox catalog, shake it around in a box, and pull out whatever they think will get them some sales on Disney Plus. These are the perk offerings, the sad little attempts. Disney's hoping to do that by giving you Home Alone 45 with a dumb little British kid that's annoying beyond all reason. You know what? That kid's awesome and JoJo Rabbit. Actor's great, but that performance in that show or in that movie sucked ass. That was a terrible movie from top to bottom. Or they will say, all right, what do we have in our chest over here? Since Fox properties have already kind of buried themselves with alien and predator and die hard. Well, we'll get to you die hard. We'll find a way to ruin you yet. But over here we have Enchanted. Remember Enchanted with Amy Adams? Let's bring that one back. We'll call it Disenchanted. We'll make it terrible. What else do we have in our bag of tricks? We have Mary Poppins. Remember Mary Poppins? Let's bring her back. Let's make that terrible. What else do we have? We have Hocus Pocus. People like Hocus Pocus. I think someone did. Let's bring that back and make it terrible. This is kind of the thing. This is the playbook. You take something old. You shake it up. You make it new again. You add in some social commentary. You try to tip your hat to different walks of life to get them to like the video. And this is where the big mistake was made. Disney mainly, but Hollywood in general, has been racking their brain, trying to figure out how do we pull in more audience types? We already have the dudes. We have the guys. Now, this is where the guys over here, this is where I will agree to an extent, but also very much disagree. They will use this term, the message, the woke-ism, all that stuff. Woke is a disgusting word to me because it's a catch-all that grabs everything and every one and it says, all right, if there's a female in this film, it's woke. It's terrible. If there's a black guy in this film or it's a black-led film, it's woke. It's terrible. And I know they don't all do that. And there's justification for what the word could mean, but it's just so vague and loosey-goosey and interchangeable that it has lost all meaning. It's like what people did to the word literally. You know, I used to be able to use that word in a joking manner 10 years ago, but now everyone says literally like it's a stopgap. Like it's just breathing. I was literally at the store the other day and I saw this guy, oh, you were literally at the store the other day. I'm sure glad you attached literally to that. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known if you were at the store. It could have been a figurative way of speaking. Of course you were at the store. You don't need to put literally on there. It was used to add emphasis, to add truthfulness to what you're saying. Moving on from literally. Woke is, that's where woke is for me. Oh, the movie's woke. Okay, I don't actually know what that means. You gotta be a little bit more, a little bit more clear. What the studios have done in just again, my opinion from where I'm sitting at is they have the male demographic. They've had that locked in for decades, for centuries, as long as movies were being made, maybe not centuries, as long as movies were being made, they had the male demographic. That's how the video game industry is too. Guys like going to movies, guys like playing games. Now of course women do as well, but that shrinks when you start talking about specific types of films. You want a rom-com? The guy and the girl are going. You want a just emotionally sad, depressing film. The male and the female are going. You'll notice the male's always with though. They never lose the male demographic unless it's something like way out there. Hell, I think even the notebook probably had a lot. I went to the notebook. That movie was great. Devil Wears Prada? I wear Prada. I've seen that movie like six times. I fucking love it. Meryl Streep is a beast in that film. Don't even get me going. Don't get me going. Devil Wears Prada, it's a film. But you're not really losing the male audience for the most part. But when we get into films in the action sphere, uh-oh, suddenly that number becomes 60% male, 70% male skew. When we get into the comic book superhero franchise, 70% male. And what Disney and other companies have been trying to do over the years is bring that number into an equal middle. To be fair, they've done exactly that because they lost the men and they didn't really gain the women. So, oh, suddenly that 70 becomes 50 to 40 to 30. What I meant to say was they want to bring the women number up, the gay number up, the trans number up. They want every type of individual. They can get to go to their movies. So they do a good old-fashioned thing called pandering. Netflix doesn't more than anyone else on the planet. Netflix looks at this stuff and goes, okay, how do we separate ourselves? How do we diversify our content? Well, we got a white dude in here somewhere. He's wandering around. Maybe we'll make him a villain or something. It doesn't matter. Guys are going to watch this. We got a woman in this. We got to have a trans person in this. We got to have a gay person in this. And people are sick of love stories between men and women. What about man and man? Because there is a demographic of gay people. There's a gay culture. Let's bring them into this film. Let's shoehorn it into this movie. Let's put it into this animated kids' film. Let's just trigger people and get people pissed off so that they're talking about the movie and that translates to people going to the movies. No, it doesn't. That's the problem. I don't talk about religion or politics or anything on this channel because there's enough of it in the world. And I generally shy away from even having this kind of conversation because for the most part, it's so overbearing and so overdone. Again, there's channels dedicated to covering this 24-7. I don't know how anybody's watching it anymore and not just bored out of their mind. How they're not sick and tired of the same conversation coming up every fucking week. Oh, this woman said this about this demographic or this studio executive said this about that. Yeah, okay, cool. Let's summarize it as Hollywood executives are idiots or Hollywood executives are maybe out of touch because they're living in their own echo chamber, their own bubble where it's all peace and happiness and everybody is everything and they're all banging everyone no matter what it is and they're just all kumbaya over there or they're all miserable over there together pretending that they're happy. I don't know, I don't really care. My stance personally, I got a short amount of time on Planet Earth. I don't know what's next. In my opinion, probably not a whole lot. So I'm gonna try to make good use of the time I have here. I know that's ironic because I'm doing a YouTube channel and I have a full-time job and all that stuff but whatever, it's what I'm doing. I'm working on me. I'm a work in progress as they say. I'm trying to be a happier individual. I'm trying to be positive about things even if things don't seem positive. I mean, I was born in America. I was born white. I was born a guy. I'm pretty happy about all three of those things even though nothing's perfect about any of them. That's a pretty fucking good start. All right, I already have it very good and I just want other people to be happy so that they don't shoot me so that they don't push me in front of oncoming traffic so they don't take out of school. I don't care what you are. I don't care what you identify as. I just want good fucking movies at the end of the day. And when I look at what Disney puts out, what Hollywood puts out, what Sony puts out, what Paramount puts out, what Warner Brothers and Amazon and Apple and Netflix and Fuck Fix and all these places, I can't help but be cynical and think, you know what? I don't think that was the best movie you could make. You know what? I think you're just trying to reach broader audiences and you're alienating the audiences you have. So let's get in some real-world examples and see where things shake out. Ghostbusters film, all-female cast. People were already pissed when we heard a new Ghostbusters was going to come out and it was going to be a reboot. The film was lightning in a bottle. It's about as beloved as a franchise can get. A single movie that almost universally is beloved by nerds everywhere. The sequel I even like, but I understand that there's a rift there. There's a rift. But that first one is basically gold. Nothing outside of Back to the Future really even hits that level of nostalgia and love. So when it was announced there was going to be a new Ghostbusters. Holy shit, were people upset and freaking out. And this is when it was going to be Judd Apatow and he was going to have Seth Rogen in it and Paul Rudd and all this stuff. And this was years and years ago. And that didn't happen. That fell through. And then we heard it was going to go this way and that way and eventually it landed on the all-female Ghostbusters. And so you took a bad situation and you amplified it. You made it worse. Why? Because you made it about sex. It was stunt casting on all-boy Ghostbusters. Well, let's do an all-girl Ghostbusters. And then let's make the guys the butt of every joke. And no, this isn't hyperbole. This really is how the movie plays out. It's terrible. The movie is miserable from top to bottom. And it really was one of the first ones that snowballed this whole idea of let's put women in films. Strong female leads. And let's make that the core message. Let's alienate the guy audience that we know is going to these movies because they just like going to films for some reason. And let's just push them out the door. They don't want to do that, keep in mind. The message is pandering to make money at the end of the day. Yes, there's a lot of people working in Hollywood that think a different way than maybe you do or even I do. And that's going to come through in the writing. That's going to come through in the hiring. That's going to come through in some of the performances or the characters or the actors they pick to play these parts. That's definitely in play for sure. But there will always be a financial incentive to get buckets filled, to get people in the seats. And when that starts to not work, that's when shifting. That's when changes happen and we're starting to see that. But I don't think for a second and maybe this is where you and I disagree that Hollywood is some deep state cabal that's trying to brainwash everyone to be trans or gay. I just, I'm sorry. That's ridiculous to me. It's absolutely asinine. I think what it is is forced representation so they can pat themselves on the back while also popping off on their socials and saying, look what we did because a lot of people live on the internet now. A big portion of communities is done online and that's where they make a name for themselves. So there might be some casting director who was able to get a gay couple in a film with a kiss in a Disney movie and then they can say, I did this community. I brought this to you. You're welcome. And then they get the likes and they get the hearts and they get the follows and they get the attention and that's really what it's all about at the end of the day. But the movie not necessarily better for it, not necessarily worse. It depends. We take it case by case. The last of us, for instance, a lot of people were pissed off that there was an entire episode dedicated to a gay couple. That entire game is gay as shit, especially the sequel. All right, there's a lot. There's more gay people in the last of us than there are straight people. It's remarkable. It's absolutely remarkable. And I love the last of us. Not so much the sequel. Second game. I did not like the story at all. The show was pretty good too. I like the show. I thought it was I thought the casting was not the greatest, but the show did a decent enough job. But this is where things go off the rails and get loony tunes because there's an incentive for people for channels for individuals to get outraged and upset about everything. There's an incentive for studios to get people outraged. They kind of feed off of each other. It keeps the dialogue flowing. It keeps the marketing going organically. Let's take another example. The Little Mermaid. Ray Swap. Ariel's Now Black. People lose their shit. I reviewed the trailer and I said this movie looks terrible, but Halle Bailey looks really damn good and she can definitely sing Halle Bailey smoke show. Wow, that's a very, very attractive woman. Anyway, I was destroyed in the comments by people calling me racist, even though the only positive I said about the trailer was Halle Bailey. And that doesn't mean I agree with what Disney did. In fact, I fully disagree because first off, my thoughts on the trailer was it looked way too dark. You couldn't see shit. And yes, I know they're under the sea. They're in the ocean. It's dark down there and it's live action. So they're trying to be more realistic. Well, colorful and exciting and fun music and whimsy. That's what's exciting to kids and adults, believe it or not. They want to see colorful animated films. So when you take all these classics and you darken them up to the point where you can barely see shit. What are we doing anymore? I had a problem with how it looked. I didn't like the way the film presented itself visually or from a musical standpoint, just notes coming in differently, music not hitting the same. That bothered me. If Disney would have done a different mermaid that wasn't Ariel, the red-headed white-ass chick, you could have done one of her sisters and told that story. Hell, you could have so called it the little mermaid. So you get that cash grab off the title. Maybe this character, Halle Bailey's playing as Miranda or something. I don't know what the hell her name is. It doesn't matter. She's going on her own adventure on a different part of the ocean with a different villain or maybe she too is facing off against Ursula up to her old tricks, doing something else years later, years earlier. It doesn't fucking matter. Just tell a new story is the bottom line. If you're going to do a remake of a film and it's almost shot for shot the same with the same music, the same exact plot, the same characters, race swapping makes no sense outside of outrage casting to get people pissed and that's honestly what it's about and people will push back and say, well, Adam, maybe she was just the best one that tried out and they weren't looking at the skin color. It was all just the performance and yeah, okay, but let's flip that, right? Let's take it the other way around. What if it was Black Panther and the trials for T'Challa? I doubt they were really casting for white dudes. Okay, this is so ridiculous. How far we have to go to not appear racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever. Just you know what I'm saying? Like this is ridiculous. There's common sense at some point. I think that there's a lot of shilling on this side of the aisle too and it sucks kind of being in the middle more because you don't get the fan clubs on either side. You don't get the hardcore audience, which is the one, they're the ones that watch everything. They're the ones that throw money at things. They're the ones that are just sycophantic to a point. In the middle here, kind of just looking at things and saying, yep, I agree. Yep, I can agree with that too, but not just pushing so far into outrage or pushing so far into adore. So when that article came in, it was like a higher up exec said, you know, guys ruined the marvels, guys ruined this and that, but it's unnamed. We don't know who it's from. It's like, this is just stoking the fire and it's such a boring conversation. But I felt like I should finally address and go all in on some of my thoughts for once. Because I've been critical of course of Disney and Hollywood and all that stuff, but I can also find the good. I can find value in some of the stuff that's come out. I personally had no problems with the marvels. I've said this notoriously. Said that I planned on going to the marvels and shitting all over it. And I walked away thinking this was a fine movie for kids and families. This was not made for middle-aged dude, Adam. This was made for a younger audience, but I happen to like some of the schlocky fun action. It was a shorter movie, which was nice. The ladies, Brie Larson looked good. She was in a tank top, which was nice. That kind of sold me right away. And I think that that's a way that to kind of get back to what I wanted to focus on at the end here was how studios can think about things going forward. When it comes to superhero stuff, when it comes to anything really, if you want to pull in the broadest audience possible, just take a look at the marketing Barbie did. A billion dollars at the box office. Oppenheimer was one of the biggest movies because we were interested in both. Women love Barbie. Guys love looking at Barbie, especially when she's played by Margot Robbie. They did not desexify her. They didn't tone her down. Margot Robbie looked like a smoke show. The trailers looked very fun and comical and something everyone could be happy with. And the final result was definitely a movie that had a lot to say and wasn't just kind of a surface level film with jokes. It had more meaning behind it about the patriarchy and whatnot. And I found it to be overbearingly preachy. I'm a big fan of showing and not telling. And this movie told over and over and over again to the point of nauseam. Overall, it was fine, I thought. It was fine. I tried watching it again at home. My wife hated it. My daughter loved it. My son doesn't watch things with women in it really because he's 11 and doesn't care. He just wants to see cool dudes doing cool stuff. He's really in a dragon ball. And I guess that's my point on the other side of it. So Barbie attracted people because it didn't repel anyone. Guys will go into anything if there's at least a hot woman in it. That's sadly the truth. We're simple creatures. You're not going to be able to tweak us that much. You can change a little. You can tinker a little. But a full reboot is not going to happen. Let's look at a recent one. Madame Webb bombed miserably at the box office. Why? Well, you put Sydney Sweeney in there and you have her in baggy shirts and pants. She's not showing off the girls. She doesn't look good. They're barely in their outfits. It was just a terrible decision all around. You have a horrible script. You have an unknown character. I mean, like legitimately no one knows who this is. Women have no reason to go to this film. There's no good looking guys in it. And there's no good looking. I mean, there's a lot of good looking women in it, but they're not being shown up. Wonder Woman understood this. You got Gal Gadot looking like an absolute stunner. Super popular character. Girls were interested in it because believe it or not, they want to see a good looking strong woman kicking ass just like guys want to see a strong good looking dude kicking ass. That's why Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth. That's why Captain America is played by Chris Evans. That's why all the superheroes are played by dudes named Chris. I mean, they look good. They look good. They're in sculpted outfits. It's not like they're hiding away in baggy shirts. That's not fun for anyone because we want to be able to project ourselves and pretend like, you know what, I could do that if I just hit the bow flex a couple of times. It's just not hard. And what Hollywood has tried to do is pull in audiences that they didn't have before and they took it the wrong. They got the wrong message. They got the wrong idea about what women wanted to see and what guys would continue to put up with in films. Madam Webb didn't know the audience at all. Kids aren't going to go to this shit. They don't have the women. They don't have the men. Not even the men that just want to see good looking women because they didn't portray that. So if you have a terrible script and you don't have like any sort of goal, then at least make it like Barb Boyer with Pamela Anderson. That movie at least knows what it is. It's terrible, but it knows what it is. I guess I would just leave it at that. It's not brain surgery, folks. And now we have the money getting out of control in Hollywood. The Joker 2 is $200 million. Are you out of your fucking mind with this? What are we spending this money on? And then they scratched their head why they didn't get the return on investment. I could go on and on all day about the weird practices they're doing and how to fix it, but I think I've said enough. I've rambled for like 30 minutes. Hopefully I kept your attention a little bit. I know I was all over the place. This is a rant. I've recently been bringing them back and just having fun and a loose conversation with them. If you like the conversation, I know it was a one-way street. Let me know. Please like the video. Comment your thoughts. I would appreciate a super thanks if you could throw one out. There's just an item there. You can say like, hey, Adam, here's five bucks. Good job. This was a breath of fresh air to hear honest opinions that doesn't seem like it has a slant or an agenda in mind or it's just doing it to pander for more views or subscribers. I just like movies, folks. I really do. But it's hard when there's so much noise coming out. Terrible marketing, terrible ideas, terrible movements and people and it's just, it's a disgusting, gross time out here. I miss the 90s, man. I miss just getting on my bike, going to the theater, paying a few bucks to watch the fucking game with Michael Douglas and getting mind screwed for two hours. And then I leave the theater and it's the middle of the day still because I went to a matinee and it was awesome. The sun just smashes on me. Like a vampire. I continue on my merry way. I miss waiting in line for a midnight showing of the Matrix 2 or Spider-Man. I miss being excited for a Star Wars film without having to hear in the back of my mind that Kathleen Kennedy's ruining it and propping up the women and ruining the men and that this person on YouTube said this about the movie three weeks ago or this actor said this and now I don't want to see it. I'm boycotting it because that person has, is pro this or anti that. I just, I don't know. You're watching me have a complete mental crash right now about movies. This is where I'm at. I have a pretty good life. All right, I better get back to it. I got a wife and kids that want to play some cards. So hopefully you enjoyed the video. I'll see you next time.