I highly doubt that most of Disney's fan base is actually fed up because their movies aren't "edgy" enough. Perhaps some of the Lucasfilm fans, but Kathleen Kennedy (the target of the South Park ribbing), seems to be doing fine. I believe at least one of her Star Wars movies is the 2nd highest grossing Star Wars movie ever.

It's exclusive to Paramount+ so I expect that a lot of people, Disney or not, won't be watching South Park: Into the Panderverse

>> Alot of executives must believe it's due to piracy.

> 100% guaranteed said execs won't be watching South Park

Oh, really? Well, did you know that over one fourth of the people in America think that 9̶/̶1̶1̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶s̶p̶i̶r̶a̶c̶y̶ random metrics are meaningful? Are you saying that one fourth of Americans are r......?

Lots of the genre TV shows these days—like the Netflix Marvel stuff, or most of the Star Wars or Disney Marvel tv shows—can only be saved by fan edits because of the absurdly slow plotting, used to stretch a bit over a movie of plot to fill three or more movies worth of time. The scripts and editing are beyond flabby, they’re morbidly obese. Even if you’re paying for the service, the best version of the product’s usually coming from pirates.

Watched all marvel movies up to endgame at the cinema. After that watched a few at home and gave up. It's not piracy it's repetitive uninspiring plots, bad special effects, and characters that we don't care about.

The Critical Drinker has a series of videos about what's wrong with movies these days, even if he's always exaggerating his points are spot on. https://youtube.com/@TheCriticalDrinker?si=IwnFx_y3YCA-zBzU

Same. I don't subscribe to any services and honestly, if it wasn't for my SO I wouldn't watch much of anything. They don't know how to appeal to me and I finish most movies wishing I had written some code instead.

Even gaming is going that way with the bad business practices and over-reliance on filler content like crafting to extend a game's life.

So it'll be funny when these media giants blame piracy, it gets studied, and found that even pirating for their stuff is less common than it used to be. Sometimes markets just shrink. Hollywood wasn't going to bust blocks forever.

They are now producing a product that isn't even worth minimal effort to steal.

> Content so bad it's not worth stealing.

Even torrents take time away from something else I could download that's better -- like all the movies made before it all went to shit.

Naturally the solution is to erase the past by memory-holing old content so people will not have anything for comparison to make the current content look bad.

The underlying assumption here is that their accusation has to make sense, but that's not the case. It only has to sound reasonable to Wall Street, so the managers can get money for a bit longer, until people are fed up.

Unsurprisingly, I think that piracy - whether blueray or streaming - isn't in any measurable way relevant to the current woes of Hollywood or even more specific Disney. They've made their bed, now they have to lie in it.

"Woke" movies end up being greenlit like sequels are, on the basis of something about them not on their individual strengths. That's why spiritually correct movies (Lionsgate makes them too, it's not just Disney) and sequels are often worse than one-off productions that slip through the extremely challenging filtering process. If you combine ideology and sequels, you get some of these remakes. The only thing saving us from a live action remake of Chronicles of Narnia is that it was live action to begin with.

"realized they're making fundamental story mistakes. Characters never resolve their conflicts, jokes are prioritized over theme, and important character traits are shown too quickly to the point where you can miss it if you blink."

Isn't that a common theme, in allmost all mainstream hollywood movies?

You might have the wrong movie. Moana spent 5 years in development, made almost $700m at the box office, and has a 95% RT rating (critics rating) and an A CinemaScore (audience rating). Nobody else seems to have noticed the "fundamental story mistakes."

Consider that moana was before they went completely downhill. Give elementals a try and you'll see what I mean.

> A lot of people think it's because they're woke. It's not even that - they're just bad movies.

Every time I hear this claim "It's not that it's 'woke', it's that it's a bad movie" I ask myself: "what does 'woke' mean, then?"

I don't consider myself to be a conservative. I lean left on a lot of issues, especially social issues. I love Star Trek and a lot of left-leaning art. Yet I can't stand "woke" movies and tv series.

Why is that?

In my opinion, part of being a "woke" movie IS being a bad movie. It's not that it has a message or a point of view. There is tons of great art out there has a left-leaning message. To me, "woke" suggests that any combination of character, plot, theme, development or production design was neglected in favour of tokenization (or "pandering" as South Park put it). The implication being that the movie was supposed to do well because, allegedly, "modern audiences" are seeking titles with heavy handed messages and tokenization because that's what they are looking for, versus well thought-out writing and production. A "woke" movie is one where bad reviews can and are blamed on various *ists.

"A lot of people think it's because they're woke. It's not even that - they're just bad movies."

That may be just an aftereffect of woke.

The younger generation is heavily exposed to ideas like "you must not offend anyone ever, otherwise your career is over" or "teams must be diverse first and foremost, results don't matter as much, but you must tick all the required identity boxes".

I can see how combination of those two results in production of bland, superficial art, regardless of the genre or medium used.

I think one of the reasons people are so tired of wokeness in movies is that they can sense the fact that it's fake justice corpo-speak.

It's what happens when you vacuum any substance from the original justice movements leaving only identity without any critique of the actual power brokers of the world; the war machines, the financial exploitation, the industrial complexes.

It's more sinister than having no social commentary at all.

Its not 10 outright failures in a row, but they've been doing poorly for most of 2023.

Keep in mind that ~2X the official production budget is roughly the minimum threshold for a movie to break even, after factoring in marketing and the theater take:

Elemental was a modest success earning $495.9M against a $200M budget.

The Little Mermaid maybe barely broke even at $569.6M against a $297M budget.

Indiana Jones bombed hard, earning $384M against a $300M budget.

The Marvels is trending towards about $200M against a $274.8M budget.

Wish opened terribly this weekend, pulling in $49M in its first weekend against a $200M budget (will likely finish between $120-150M)

Edit: Forgot about Haunted Mansion, earning $117.5M against $150M.

I think you might be on to something. People already paying $XX/mo. might be more inclined to wait for the streaming release. I'd love to see some stats on viewership split by streaming subscriptions.