Links - 23rd January 2020 (1) (Get woke, go broke)

Will "Get Woke, Go Broke" Save Us Now? : KotakuInAction - "A very common argument that is made here, and an argument I wish to be true, is "Get Woke, Go Broke." Or more specifically, that entertainment products made to flatter Social Justice Warrior sympathies will have a hard time attracting a large, devoted audience willing to spend a lot of money. Thus, SJW-themed products will be driven out by marketplace competition.There is, however, a flaw in this argument which was brought to my attention through a paper by Roy Shapira, published in the Fordham Law Review Volume 80 in 2012. The paper is titled "Corporate Philanthropy as Signaling and Co-optation."A basic summary of the paper is that Corporate Philanthropy, which is taken to mean a business engaging in expenditure on "pro-social" causes that don't seem to contribute to the business's actual business at all, can be interpreted as a form of Costly Signalling. Costly Signalling is when a party tries to mitigate information asymmetries about whether or not they possess a certain quality in a situation where that party has an incentive to lie about them possessing that quality; this party needs to do something to prove that they are telling the truth, which means typically that they must engage in a demonstration of them having that certain quality in a way which is much harder to fake for a party which in-fact lacks that quality... Shapira argues that corporate philanthropy is a kind of costly signalling... Typically, charity expenditures by companies are thought of as buying customer goodwill. The data on this is quite weak. To quote the paper, "while some survey and experimental evidence shows increased willingness to pay for nicer companies’ products, evidence of actual buying decisions is rather tenuous"... So what if Corporate Wokeness is actually a costly signal? Let us take a look at Marvel Comics vs. Marvel Studios. The latter are a huge moneymaker, but the former have been sacrificed on the altar of wokeness. What this shows is that Disney is able to quite literally run an unprofitable loony-bin of wokeness, because Disney is so financially strong and stable and makes so much money from selling princess shit. Disney, in other words, tolerates Marvel Comics' wokeness because it serves as proof of just how good an investment they are (they're so financially invulnerable they can afford to hire affirmative action babies, neurotic hipsters, and keyboard warriors)... it provides an explanation (other than Sharpton Shakedown) for why diversity departments are simultaneously not productive and hugely popular in very large corporations (and broadly explains why corporate America can have such a long and sustained flirtation with leftists who seem rather critical of corporate anything). It provides an explanation for why we are seeing corporations like Google happily alienate roughly half of the entire US population even though they're in a business where Network Externalities are a thing ("we don't need their business!"). It also provides another explanation for the fact SJWs are getting hired not to make their own IPs but destroy pre-existing IPs with pre-existing fanbases; it seems a very efficient way for a business to give itself a self-imposed handicap. It also seems to explain why these businesses tend to have one or two very non-"woke" core businesses (for instance Google has Search and Advertising, and Disney has Marvel Studios as well as all the princess shit) which generate a lot of the revenue, but willingly embrace wokeness in a few specific parts of their firms... Of course there are implications of this theory which can perhaps be tested. If it is true that corporate wokeness is a costly signal, such wokeness will tend to be contained and efforts will be made to stop it from metastasizing too much (although as the company grows, more metastasization will be allowed). Another implication is that the management of the firm does not actually believe diversity to be productive; indeed the opposite is the case. Another implication is that the investor class also see diversity/corporate wokeness as unproductive... Costly Signalling exists to mitigate information asymmetries in an environment where there is an incentive to lie; mandatory disclosure requirements with legal penalties for lying may thus help to lessen the need for costly signalling in the first place (and thus allow all the resources that would've been used to engage in costly signalling to be redirected towards something else that is productive, now the information asymmetry is taken care of)... "get woke, go broke" will only ever be fully realized when the business in question is dependent entirely on the nerd market. Or, in brief, it will only work on businesses who cannot afford to alienate the nerd market as a costly signal.The way forward is small business, indie, creator-owned, and closely-held private corporations.But the other way forward is simple but harder; we make diversity and social justice too costly even for large corporations to entertain. No one will hire nazi-consultants or white-supremacy consultants because even the mainstream finds that utterly repugnant. In short, the opportunity cost of social justice has to get so extreme that not even large corporations with broad markets and stable core businesses can afford it... Stigmatizing social justice is one way to do this, and the obvious way. But, perversely, there may be another way; if social justice is allowed to get worse, to get more extreme, to toxify itself even further, it will eventually only increase its own costliness"

Viewers Blamed After Pro-LGBT Batman Spinoff Bombs - "When a television show failed to impress viewers in years past, it was back to the drawing board. Storylines were rewritten, characters were improved or cut entirely, and the producers gave it another go.In the brave new world of 2019, however, a show’s failure isn’t the result of bad writing, but the fault of viewers, apparently. Case in point: The CW network’s “Batwoman.”... The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the show’s first season are a study in bad television, with a dismal audience score of only 12 percent. Although the critic rating sits at a lukewarm 70 percent, many of those reviewers are simply celebrating a “superhero in step with the times.”  Oh, did I forget to mention that Batwoman is a loud and proud lesbian?... many reviewers said they didn’t like the show’s relentless and blatant pushing of its agenda. Even LGBT supporters said they grew tired of the constant focus."
Get woke, go broke

CBC completely omits refugee claimant surge in Toronto homeless story - "CBC’s The National aired a report on the homeless crisis in Toronto, where the shelter system is currently overwhelmed with people needing a place to stay during the harsh winter nights, with many being turned away because of lack of beds at many locations. The CBC story failed to include any mention of the thousands of refugee claimants who have illegally entered Canada from the U.S. border and sought shelter in Toronto over the past few years that is the major factor in the system being overloaded... While doing investigative reporting for True North in the first part of 2019 on the Toronto homeless shelter system, I discovered that the many millions of dollars the City of Toronto spent on accommodations such as hotels, motels, other buildings and multimillion dollar tents were predominantly for refugee claimants, many of whom stay at these locations for six-month periods in order to be eligible for a housing allowance that lasts up to four years, even after finding a job. These types of accommodations are the better part of Toronto’s two-tier shelter system... none of this vital context to the homeless shelter system crisis is mentioned in the CBC reports that can only be described as journalistic negligence or malpractice... CBC journalists would rather show Canadian homeless people devoid of any of this context, say there’s a crisis, and then ask Canadians if they care, implying taxpayers should be doing more; Taxpayer-funded CBC journalist’s mission accomplished.  Credit, where credit is due, though. The CBC did take time to humanize several homeless men, people dehumanized daily by a public that often pretend they don’t exist. However, a journalist’s job is not to tell a story based solely upon emotions, devoid of the most pertinent facts,statistics and context on why this is happening."

CBC lost more than half its ad revenues over five years: Report - The Post Millennial - "The public broadcaster’s shrinking audience and relevancy has led to ad revenues dropping 53 percent from 2014 to that of 2019... The CBC cut 35 jobs at its HQ in Toronto in November due to the continual downturn"

Woke Emmys Fail: Ratings Hit Record Low - "The 71st Primetime Emmy Awards on Fox drew a record low viewership on Sunday as TV fans opted to tune out of the telecast that featured woke celebrities lecturing America on issues including the gender pay gap and transgender rights."

How Irn-Bru got woke and (almost) went broke - "Its share price has plunged 45 per cent since June, and it expects annual profits to be 20 per cent lower in 2019 than they were last year. How different the mood at the company was 18 months ago when it boasted that it had ‘exceeded our original commitment on sugar reduction’ by spending £1.4million reformulating its products. Having once denounced the sugar tax as ‘a punitive and unnecessary distortion to competition in the UK market’, the company became the blue-eyed boy of the public-health lobby by taking more than half the sugar out of its flagship product Irn-Bru. ‘The vast majority of our drinkers want less sugar in their Irn-Bru’, a spokesman claimed, ‘so that’s what we’re now offering'... How serendipitous, then, that Robin Barr – great-grandson of the eponymous AG – recently stumbled across a dusty book buried deep in the company’s archives which contains the original recipe written out in longhand. As luck would have it, the 1901 version of Irn-Bru contained even more sugar than the fabulously popular version that Barr took off the shelves last year... let us not ask how Barr’s recent decision to launch Irn-Bru Energy, with 36 grams of sugar in every can, fits in with its ‘commitment on sugar reduction’."

Terminator Dark Fate Review: An Unoriginal Hostile Takeover Of The Franchise - "Terminator: Dark Fate is the 3rd attempt to reboot this franchise and retcon the events of the previous Terminator movies... Terminator Dark Fate is an unoriginal disgrace on just about every level. The very fiber of this film comes off as someone who is ashamed that the foundation of this franchise does not fit their current day intersectional feminist worldview, so they decided to change it by repealing and replacing everything they felt was problematic with more progressive friendly elements.Let’s start with John Connor. The character who is the primary protagonist of the Terminator franchise is killed minutes into the film and is completely removed from the equation only to be replaced by the new hero of Daniella “Dani” Ramos. This is why progressive think tanks are killing cinema and entertainment as we know it. Because in the world of intersectionality, the only thing they see is a white male action star who just doesn’t fit the bill of the modern Hollywood diversity and inclusion agenda so he must be replaced. If you thought it was bad enough that they made John a villain in the last movie, the progressive Gods decided it was time for him to die thus rendering the plot of multiple films completely and utterly useless. At no point does anyone stop and understand that John Connor is the glue that keeps this entire franchise together. The character who both Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese sacrificed life and love for in the only two movies that are worth a damn because he symbolized humanity, leadership, and hope. Dark Fate gets rid of John and replaces him with Dani, a 5-foot, 110 pound Hispanic illegal immigrant female who learns that she has become the newest threat to the machines. In short, she has become the new leader of the resistance. In a lazy attempt to transfer John Connor’s story arch to Dani, the film remakes the 1st movie by making Dani the new chosen one that everyone must fight to protect against the all-new version of Skynet. This reset retroactively makes The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day a complete waste of time, everything that happened in those films means absolutely nothing now.During the progression of the film, Dani slowly strips away her femininity in order to become, the more masculine leader of the resistance aka the role that was always meant for John. This is progressive agenda 101, we must replace all strong male characters with strong female characters, but the women must first reject traditional femininity and take over the masculine role of men, thus contributing to the eradication of gender roles and gender identity. This is how they progress to the vision of society that they want. Sarah Connor’s entire purpose of the franchise was protecting the life of her son, but now that John is dead, Sarah has become a bitter childless old woman with no purpose in life outside of vengeance, also known as the 3rd stage of feminism... Instead of Dani learning the same lessons that Sarah did, she discovers that she is the hero the world needs and there is no need for her to lower herself for the sake of a man and humble herself for the sake of a child. You don’t need those things because progressivism says, you are already perfect as you are. Love and relationship which built the backbone of this franchise are torn away and thrown in the trash because how else is this film going to pass the Bechdel test?... Once you realize that this film is nothing more but a feminist reboot of a franchise that should have never lived on past 1991, you see Terminator: Dark Fate for actually what it is, empty calories. Every impactful scene is an unoriginal retelling of an event that has already taken place in a prior movie that did it far better. The endgame of Dark Fate is to hand the movie over to progressive women so that they can be given something that they could never achieve on their own merits…a successful franchise. Make no doubt about it, there will be members of the media who will try to shame you into liking this film by accusing you of being a misogynist if you don’t like it, but that was always their gameplan. Tim Miller knew this from the start which is why he began attacking ‘Misogynistic Internet Trolls’ when this film had nothing more than a trailer to sell itself."

Get Woke, Go Broke: ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Bombs At The Box Office - "Despite the return of producer James Cameron and the reunion of Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forbes reports that the sci-fi action sequel pulled in a horrific $10.6 million on Friday and is now tracking for a lousy $27 million opening weekend on an inflated budget of $185 million (not including another $100 million in marketing costs). That makes it the lowest profiting “Terminator” in the franchise’s history... even the film critics agree, awarding the movie a tepid 69% on Rotten Tomatoes with a current IMDB score of just 6.6. Aside from the politics, the consensus is that “Terminator: Dark Fate” treads no new territory and treads it rather lightly."

‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Will ‘Scare the F*ck’ Out of Internet Trolls - "“If you’re at all enlightened, she’ll play like gangbusters. If you’re a closet misogynist, she’ll scare the fuck out of you, because she’s tough and strong but very feminine,” Miller said. “We did not trade certain gender traits for others; she’s just very strong, and that frightens some dudes. You can see online the responses to some of the early shit that’s out there, trolls on the internet. I don’t give a fuck.”"
If your movie is gonna suck, pre-emptively blaming the audience seems to be a common strategy
Does he give a fuck that the movie bombed?

Elizabeth Banks: ‘My film is loaded with sneaky feminist ideas’
Box Office: ‘Ford V Ferrari’ Wins Friday With $11 Million As ‘Charlie’s Angels’ And ‘Good Liar’ Both Bomb - "Sony’s Charlie’s Angels revamp is (domestically) a complete disaster. The Elizabeth Banks-directed action comedy, starring Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska earned just $3.15 million on Friday, including $900,000 in Thursday previews. That positions the $48 million flick for a mere $8.2 million opening. That’s on par with the $7.8 million opening of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which ended with just $17 million domestic and $35 million worldwide on a $42 million budget.  I guess it could save some face overseas, but this is the third time in three weeks, after Terminator: Dark Fate and Doctor Sleep, where prized IP has vastly underperformed in terms of expectations and financial requirements."
Get woke, go broke

Gingerswappingresponse - Posts - "Elizabeth Banks: “If Charlie’s Angels bombs it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies”"
"Man, would it kill people in Hollywood to have a shred of dignity? Be a woman and just own your failure. There’s nothing “strong woman” about using politics to evade fact this movie was just not good."
Comments: "Clearly this director is not even half aware of these successful female characters from film and tv"
"Ah, the good old last Jedi and Disney star wars defense."
"Why would we, it wasn't made for us."
"Ok the half of the population is women and why don't you womens watch the movie and make it boxoffice hit ? 🤣🤣"
"Hummm Wonder Woman seemed to do ok, maybe it has more to do with if the movie is any good or not."
"ALIENS was great, because it didn't suck and because it wasn't political propaganda."
"Translation 2: this movie sucks. Before I start blaming the men part of the production, my last hope is to blame it on patriarchy, so that we get some support from simps . regardless, i don't plan to own my failures."

Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel Were Hits Because They Belong to 'Male Genre,' Says Charlie's Angels Director

‘Charlie’s Angels’ Goes Ultra-Woke With Feminist Lectures And Climate Change Messaging

Why ‘feminist’ films flop - "[There] seems to be a lack of public interest in ‘feminist’ remakes. Recent films like Charlie’s Angels, Ocean’s 8 and Ghostbusters, all sold purely off the back of their female-led cast and (in some cases) female-led crew, failed to attract an audience. And some have inevitably claimed this is because we live in an inherently misogynistic society. Indeed Banks had this excuse lined up before her film was even released... her explanation doesn’t account for why her film’s target audience – young, empowered women – have also stayed away from the cinema. The more mundane truth here is that the whole concept of this feminist Charlie’s Angels reboot is fundamentally flawed. It wants to keep the silliness of the original TV show and be a modern high-tech spy thriller, and it wants to make feminist points along the way. Inevitably, the po-faced feminism of the film sucks the life out of the silliness and the thrills.The 2000s Charlie’s Angels movies worked because the stars – Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu – made fun of themselves. They knew they were playing ludicrous characters and embraced this. The new Angels, by contrast, are humourless and woke – adept at lecturing, sneering and putting down unreconstructed men. And no one – male or female – wants to be condescended to during their afternoon out at the cinema. This points to an underlying problem with today’s feminist identity politics. It tries to understand social relations almost solely through the prism of gender relations. And when this theoretical model oversteps its boundaries and starts to inform how culture is made, it creates untruthful, uninvolving and banal art... individuals are reduced to an identity – one based not on their totality, but on only a small part of who they are. This inevitably makes for shallow, two-dimensional films, in which identity, rather than busting ghosts or carrying out heists, drives the plot and motivates the characters. Reducing people to identities turns fictional characters into unrelatable caricatures... These films also tend to feature lots of clunking expositional dialogue, which expresses the filmmaker’s agenda rather than the characters’ inner life. People instantly recognise this as bad storytelling."

Verizon seeks buyer for HuffPost website - "Since the time of the deal, digital media groups once hailed as the future of the news business have struggled to meet the sky-high expectations for the sector, especially as online advertising revenues have been swallowed up by Google and Facebook.   Some companies such as Rookie have closed while newsrooms at HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox have faced job cuts. Consolidation has swept the sector as financially-strapped digital media groups seek scale. In just the past month Vice Media acquired Refinery29, the women-focused millennial website, while Group Nine bought PopSugar and Vox acquired New York Media, owner of the namesake magazine."
Looks like wokeness doesn't pay the bills