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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

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

A lot of people think it's because they're woke. It's not even that - they're just bad movies. I watched Moana a few times and 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.

We really need Disney to slow down and understand that the story comes first with these movies and that good stories take a long time to develop. Frozen took like fifty years to finally make. BatB took four plus numerous failed iterations over decades.

I highly recommend that everyone read the Katzenberg memo[0] from the 90s that was sent out right before Disney went from middling studio to international powerhouse.

[0]https://sriramk.com/memos/katzenberg.pdf

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> 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.

What are some "woke" movies and shows, by your definition?

The accusations I see are almost always aimed at either the basic and valid choices of theme, or complaining about some character's demographic when it doesn't come at the cost of anything else. And for the latter, often complaining about over-representation when that is not in fact happening.

> 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 think the idea here is that "woke" is a loaded and controversial term. Even people who agree that "woke" movies are, by definition bad, can disagree on what exactly "woke" means.

But for these movies we can skip that whole argument because even if you forget about the wokeness argument, the movies are still bad. Even if all woke movies are bad, you can have bad movies that aren't woke, or are both woke + bad for other reasons. By removing the wokeness argument it makes it easier to form a consensus that the movies are still bad.

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."

> critic reviews

Irrelevant. You can buy a thousand glowing critic reviews for <1% of these films' budgets.

"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?

"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.

"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.

What was woke about the Chronicles of Narnia movies?

The books are famously super-Christian, and the movie adaptation was produced by Walden Media, owned by the ultraconservative Philip Anschutz.

I don't think this is actually what most people really think when they throw out accusations of films being "woke", but if you take GP at their word:

> "Woke" movies end up being greenlit like sequels are, on the basis of something about them not on their individual strengths.

Then pretty much any Christian movie that is primarily marketed on the basis of being a Christian movie would be woke, and Narnia was heavily marketed in Christian circles and I remember Christians at the time certainly feeling that this was a Christian fantasy movie that was made for them that was going to serve as an alternative to more secular fantasy movie series.

Modern Christian cinema is basically the definition of prioritizing a message and a demographic over any other cinematic feature or quality; these are films that get greenlit because they espouse a Christian ideology and because a subset of the market will pay to see any movie that explicitly espouses a Christian ideology regardless of its quality or how obviously the film is shallowly pandering to them.

The broader Christian entertainment market even captures the sense of cynicism in that definition. A lot of Christian media is made by non-Christians not because of some holy purpose but because it's easy and profitable to pander to certain Christian denominations. If you don't know how to make good movies, a good fallback is to quote some Bible verses in a bad movie and then see if you'll get support from an audience that mostly just cares about being represented on a movie screen.

----

Again, I'm not saying that I think this is a great definition to use. I think it's kind of reductive: good movies have themes, that's part of what makes them good. And good movies get made because people care about the themes and care about the finished product and how it will affect viewers. The idea that films having a message or political point of view is intrinsically counter to their quality -- it's just not a great way to approach film criticism. Theme/telos can't be fully separated from a film's quality.

But if we're talking about message over substance, it's not at all surprising to me that someone would call a Christian or Conservative movie woke. It's only surprising because we know deep down that generic criticism of "message over substance" is not really what most people mean when they call a film "woke".

Art transcends conservatives-versus-liberals and so does the principle of substituting propaganda for art. That's why I don't like what Hollywood has taken away from itself; people who would accept the bad movies if they were preaching who-knows-what-else can speak for themselves. It's a common refrain that people criticize these new movies as a way to secretly criticize what they represent, but to be honest, it's just a lot of really bad movies...

Hollywood doesn't accept the bad movies just because they're preachy.

You speak of Hollywood as if it were a monolithic entity, but it's not. It's liberal, and conservative, socialist and libertarian, worships the rural life and the urban life, tells stories of heroes and villains.

Hollywood isn't even united by the desire for profit. While the major studios are driven by profit, a large portion of Hollywood makes movies to be "art" (which usually means serious character-driven movies that aren't about anything in particular.) The smallest portion of Hollywood makes movies to preach...which is the part you seem to be opposed to.

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

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