When you can't live without bananas

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Friday, June 21, 2024

Links - 21st June 2024 (1 - Get Woke, Go Broke)

Meme - Amazon: "BUT.. BUT I'VE BOUGHT THE RIGHTS"
FANDOM: "AND THIS GIVES YOU POWER OVER ME?"

Meme BEZOS as Saruman: "The Tolkien fans review bombed my show! They drove the ratings so low, we had to bring in you activists! Attack every fan!"
Dunlendings: "Racists!" "Tolkien is just a dead white guy!" "You just don't like black people!"

Amazon CEO Asks His Hollywood Studio to Explain its Big Spending - Bloomberg - "In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen’s list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season... With Bezos’ blessing, Salke went on a spending spree that she hoped would shift the studio in a more commercial direction. She spent almost $50 million on three films in one year at the Sundance Film Festival and signed overall deals with Get Out director Jordan Peele, Atlanta creator Donald Glover and Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, among others. They all agreed to bring Amazon their best TV ideas in exchange for funding.  Many of these deals yielded no projects or duds, as chronicled in a THR story by Kim Masters. The article also noted that a minority of the viewers who started The Rings of Power, Amazon’s most expensive project ever, finished the series. Her report prompted Amazon to limit what viewership data its own employees can see. Salke’s supporters dismiss criticism of her reign as a mix of sexism and elitism... Even Salke’s biggest supporters acknowledge Citadel hasn’t panned out as intended"

Meme - *Rings of Power* "Do you know why a kilogram of paper boats float but a kilogram of stones doesn't? That's right! Because stomes are heavier than feathers!" Meme - Aragorn: "What does your heart tell you?"
Gandalf: "That not even the left enjoys Rings of Power. They just pretend to like it, because they are mad at the right for disliking it for the wrong reasons"

Meme - "Remember: They don't care about Tolkiens world. It's all about the agenda.
Our favourite Silvan elf returns for #TheRingsOfPower Season 2 and to find out what he might be getting up to in the second season make sure to check out this Sundays TSAS with all the latest scoops!
Silvan Elves
Skin Color: Light"

Meme - "The new Lord of the Rings show having it's chief lore expert depart is a sure sign the show is Dead on Arrival. Tom Shippey is regarded by tolkien enthusiasts as the biggest authority on Tolkien Legendarium alive. If you watch a documentary on the matter he will probably be in it. The fact that this man was happy to be a part of the PJ trilogy despite all of its adaptations and retcons to the books, and left the Amazon Series because of "creative differences" tells you all you need to know. Instead, they hired a Diversity & Equality Officer from University of Glasgow. She's pretty much of the opinion that Tolkiens works are the favorite books of neo fascists. That - and the failure of the Wheel of Time- should tell you everything"
"Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Galadriel
Amazon's The Rings of Power Galadriel"

Meme - "But they were all of them deceived, for another wig was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master wig to control all others. And into this wig he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life."

Meme - "Galadriel: No man can fool me.
Sauron: puts on wig* I am no man."

Meme - "5 years ago at Amazon: "We want to make an adaptation of the Second Age using the appendices from LOTR. Who wants to run with it? Who's read the source material?" *crickets*
Amazon: 'Who's read LOTR?"
Guy: "The movies?*
Amazon: 'No the books."
Guy: *lowers hand*
Amazon: "Anyone?"
Amazon: "Ok. Who's seen the movies?"
*a smattering of hands go up.*
Amazon: Who of you wants to write the show?"
*hands fall down except for one*
Guy: "I like Game of Thrones. I can do that... but with a mix of Harry Potter style magic and poor fan fiction. Oh, and I can leave out the nudity and blood too"
Amazon: "Can you add topical social issues like race and gender identity to make it relatable to people who don't like fantasy?"
Guy: "You bet"
Amazon: "Ok. Write like it's meant for CW or Netflix, but with a big budget. Don't actually use the budget on worldbuilding props and costumes though."

Elon Musk's Exposure Of Disney's D.E.I. Memo Shows Deeper Issues - "X owner Elon Musk on Feb. 6 revealed a Disney document entitled, “Disney General Entertainment Content Inclusion Standards,” that outlines the corporation’s hiring and creative diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies as he prepares a class action lawsuit against the company for racial and gender employment discrimination, which fired Mandalorian actress Gina Carano will be participating in.  The document reveals apparent racial and gender hiring quotas in what would be a clear violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex and religion.  In publishing the document to his X account, Musk wrote, “An anonymous source just sent me this from Disney. It is mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism!” As it turns out, Musk did not need an anonymous source to expose the policies, as the documents are published publicly on Disney’s website for Disney General Entertainment in its pitches to investors. An identical guide for ABC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Disney General Entertainment was also published... These appear to be racial and gender hiring quotas, which are an explicit violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of race or sex... if these are not racial and gender hiring quotas, then why is asking if these are quotas a “frequently asked question” in its CYA FAQ? Here Disney is admitting outright that it “frequently” must defend its racial and gender hiring quotas as not being quotas — because they are. You can’t make this stuff up. As Rehnquist would have noted, this is Orwellian Newspeak propaganda... Now, Musk is pursuing aggressive litigation against Disney for its allegedly illegal hiring practices"

Disney+ Loses 1.3 Million Subscribers As MCU Fallout Continues

Meme - "*Indiana Jones swap meme* Disney
Anything Profitable
*Trans Pride flag*"

Meme - "DISNEY IN 1996:
Protect me, Maria
Don't let this siren cast her spell
Don't let her fire sear my flesh and bone
Destroy Esmerelda
And let her taste the fires of hell
Or else let her be mine and mine alone
DISNEY IN 2023:
And this is the thanks I get?!
This is the thanks I get?!
And this is the thanks I get?!
And this is the thanks I get?!"

Meme - "DISNEY EXCITED FOR THEIR 100TH ANNIVERSARY
RACHEL ZEGLER CONTINUES TO EMBARRASS THEIR UPCOMING SNOW WHITE REMAKE, LEADING TO ITS DELAY
THEIR ONLY PROFITABLE FILM THIS YEAR IS GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 3, WITH CHRIS PRATT AS THEIR LEAD
THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA HAS TURNED AGAINST THEM, REPORTING ON THE COMPANY'S REPEATED FAILURES
MICKEY MOUSE WILL BECOME PUBLIC DOMAIN ON 01JAN24"

Meme - Rachel Zegler AUGUST 2023: "I mean, you know, the original cartoon came out in 1937 and very evidently so. There's a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her. Weird!"
Rachel Zegler DECEMBER 2023: "The cartoon is so beloved - it's like a monumental moment in film history. All these amazing things that happened for that film... made Disney what it is."

‘Silk: Spider Society' Writers Room Scrapped by Amazon - "The hotly anticipated Silk: Spider Society has let go of its entire writers room, minus its showrunner and one of the co-executive producers, as the show gets a developmental overhaul, a source close to the show tells The Ankler... One source close to the series claims that Silk was being refocused with a more male-skewing audience in mind.
Weird how they don't know that diversity is the way to make bank

United Methodist Church slashes budget to smallest in 40 years after mass exodus from denomination - "Go woke, go broke: Church Edition.  The UMC is going to have its smallest budget in 4 decades thanks to its unbiblical stances."

Leyna Bloom - Wikipedia - "In March 2021, it was announced that Bloom would appear as a model in the July swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, making her the first openly transgender Black and Asian-American Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue model."
Kim Petras Featured As 2023 SI Swimsuit Cover Model - "As a transgender woman, Petras has become an icon in the LGBTQ+ community."
Sports Illustrated Actually Said Coaches Praying In Public Would Erode Democracy 🤡
Report: Sports Illustrated lays off ENTIRE staff after AI controversy, using trans models on cover of Swimsuit Edition

Meme - "Guess which one won 2023 Sport Illustrated Swim Search? *fat black woman, 3 thin white women, 1 thin black woman*"
Actually all the finalists were co-winners, but still

Meme - "*Mystique lesbian kiss with Destiny from Immortal X-Men* does this scare you?"
"Not in the least . I could care less. it's simply not going to sell many comics. That's the current reality."
"good! we're pirating anyway since disney is supporting isr*el!"
Why catering to SJW demands is a disastrous business strategy - they won't buy your product anyway

“Wokeness” is Now Almost as Dangerous as “Racism” for Politicians and Businesses - "Which is stronger, the accusation of racism or the accusation of wokeness? And to what extent is one more powerful than the other? This is an important question because the Left has wielded “cancel culture” to great effect, and their primary charge is “racism.” Therefore, anything that undermines the Left’s cancel culture or promotes the rise of a cancel culture of the Right could significantly alter America’s culture war. Furthermore, in the economic realm, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 70% of all buying power in the United States in 2020, and are projected to have 68% of US buying power in 2025...
61.9% of respondents said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being racist.
But only 41.8% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being racist if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile.
43.7% said they are less likely to support a business if it is accused of being woke.
But only 29.1% said they would be willing to follow through with boycotting a business that is accused of being woke if they had to pay 10% more or drive an extra mile...
many Republicans and Independents think that it is not just theoretically possible to be racist against whites, but that anti-white racism does in fact happen in real life and is even increasing. Therefore, anti-racist sentiment should be understood as oftentimes also encompassing racism against whites... A 2023 NYU report stated that the average net profit margin for businesses excluding financials was 7.77% as of January, 2023, with some sectors being significantly less. Therefore, a business with a slim profit margin could potentially be just as devastated by an accusation of being woke as of being racist, as illustrated strongly by the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco.   Therefore, the Right clearly has substantial parity with the Left in its potential for an economic cancel culture of its own. Blue America has long terrorized Red America with cancel culture, even going so far as to cancel a NASCAR driver of all people for merely liking a meme which was critical of George Floyd.If Red America is to defend itself, it has no choice but to go on the offensive.  What do these numbers mean for the upcoming elections? Much of the outrage from a charge of racism comes from voters who were unlikely to vote Republican anyways... Republican candidates who pander to minority groups will not only waste precious capital trying to obtain a few extra votes which were probably never in the cards to begin with; they could also lose votes if their pandering leads to a charge of being woke. If Republicans are accused of or perceived as being woke when they behave like Democrats, this could very well end their political careers. This phenomenon could in part explain why the “red wave” of the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be a “red puddle.” RINOs and RINO hunters take note.  Moreover, 7.2% of white Republican respondents said that an accusation of racism would make them more likely to vote for a political candidate. The 2022 Blake Masters campaign is a possible example of this phenomenon."

Why Old TV Shows Are Beating Hollywood’s Billion Dollar DEI Machine - "Even as streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Disney+ are spending almost incomprehensible amounts of money creating the movies and shows fueling the Peak TV wars, the numbers show that audiences are turning down much of that content to watch old television shows instead... according to Nielsen... “the most minutes last year – more than 57 billion – were spent watching ‘Suits,’ a legal drama that premiered 12 years prior.” The show had more than double the number of viewing minutes than Netflix’s race-swapping woke usurpation fantasy, “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.”... the “top 10 overall titles in Nielsen’s year-end rankings are all acquired shows, the first time that’s happened in the four years streaming rankings have been publicly available.” Acquired means the library of older shows that Netflix bought after spending $17 billion on content, much of it on new shows like “Bridgerton” whose three seasons cost $168 million, only to lose to the estimated $200,000 per episode that it paid for “Suits”.   In 2023, more people were watching “NCIS” reruns than the top two streaming programs combined. And more are watching old episodes of “Friends” than either “Ted Lasso” or Star Wars’ “The Mandalorian” despite an estimated $120 million per season budget.   In 2022, Amazon had spent $500 million to buy the rights to Tolkien’s world in order to produce a woke multicultural version of “The Lord of the Rings”, but twice as many people watched “Seinfeld” reruns (not to mention “The Great British Baking Show”) as “The Rings of Power”.  After an unfathomable $238 billion in Peak TV spending that year, most viewers were comfortable dialing up old episodes of “NCIS”, “Criminal Minds”, “Gilmore Girls”, “Seinfeld”, “Supernatural”, “The Simpsons”, and “Heartland”: a show about a horse ranch set in Canada...   The issue isn’t just “wokeness”. Apart from ‘Heartland’, the old shows that are popular now are not traditional or conservative, but they were generally popular in their own time. Some of the shows were made with a more male audience in mind, a demographic that is no longer serviced by the current streaming industry with rare exceptions like Amazon’s ‘Reacher’.  (‘Reacher’ now ranks as the number two series on streaming, vastly outperforming anything else on Amazon, suggesting that male audiences have been deprived of programming.)  But another issue is a radical demographic transformation in the industry that began with #MeToo and the BLM hate movement. Hollywood made DEI commitments and carried them out, whether it was locking the Oscars behind racial quotas for participating films or dumping white male talent in favor of affirmative action quotas... While you don’t need to be a white man to write, such a massive industry demographic turnover could not happen without bringing in a whole lot of unqualified personnel for the wrong reasons.  The demands of DEI and the need to produce massive amounts of new content for the streaming wars led to a hiring surge of writers, directors and other creative personnel who were not actually qualified. The impact of that is all around us.  Disney has lost a fortune on movies staffed by inexperienced DEI hires. “The Marvels”, its first comic book universe movie that didn’t even hit $100 million (amounting to likely losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was written and directed by Nia DaCosta, hailed as the first black woman to direct a superhero film, with one previous low budget horror film to her name. Her fellow writers had little more than a few episodes of Disney+ Marvel shows under their belts.  “Madame Web”, a recent effort to launch a Spider Man movie franchise without Spider Man, performed even worse for Sony. The movie was helmed by a TV director based on a screenplay originally written by an otherwise mostly unknown minority writer/director, and crashed badly. The decline of animation quality at Disney has been chronicled in features like Film Threat’s D-Files which put it down to an urgent need to hire new diverse staff while purging the “old white guys”  The new diverse hires “understood very little about actual animation and bringing art to life”, and “struggled to succeed at a job they weren’t qualified to have in the first place”. Their ineptitude was blamed on an intolerant workplace and the veterans were forced out.  Something similar has been going on across the industry and no one is allowed to talk about it...   Why are shows from the 1990s beating billion dollar projects at Netflix, Amazon and Disney?  One answer is that Hollywood purged or sidelined a lot of its own talent leading to productions that have ten times the cost of their old forebears, but are badly written, acted and directed...   The issue is not just wokeness onscreen, but wokeness behind the scenes. A lot of the old movies and shows were woke for the level of the time, but they were also competently written, directed and acted by some of the best talent that money could buy. That is no longer true.   Sam Goldwyn, an immigrant and former glove salesman who never learned to speak proper English, yet was responsible for some of the greatest films of the forties, had a simple formula. “You get yourself a great story. Then you get the best writer available. Then you get the best director. Then you hire a first-class cast, the right cast, and a great cameraman.” Not anymore.  Now you get a story that conveys an important socially relevant message about a minority group. Then you get an inexperienced writer from an oppressed group, a BIPOC director who has done nothing except four music videos, a TikTok BLM influencer as your star and a cameraman who is also the only white male on the set and prays all day not to be fired... TV shows were ‘woke’ ten, twenty and thirty years ago, but the message was, except for some artsy projects, a subtle addition rather than the entire purpose of every single movie and show. Hollywood hypocritically pushed wokeness, but was careful about adopting and internalizing it. And while the upper ranks of Hollywood still mostly consist of white men, the creative talent was fed to the sharks leading to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger overseeing a sinking DEI ship.   Last fall, Disney was being congratulated for landing Ahsoka, its latest woke Star Wars series, in the number two spot of original streaming shows, but it didn’t even break the top 10 overall. Disney had spent as much as $25 million an episode with more special effects than many movies only to lose to Suits: a show from 2011 with few effects and a budget of $3 million."

DEI Quotas Have Created Garbage that Turns Off Most Viewers - "This reminds of a time several years ago, when Dan DiDio was still publisher of DC, it was told the audience preferred a lot of older stories over the newer ones he’d produced. And that figures. He made the DCU so insufferable, and it was said he’d told in interviews he didn’t think superheroes should have happy lives. That kind of mandate was exactly what brought down the DCU in many ways, and it’s still suffering badly as a result. Some of what DiDio turned out seemed to have served as a template for movie screenwriters to go by, and we’ve seen the results in the years since, with many consecutive film adaptations faring worse at the box office than the previous ones."

Benny Johnson on X - "DEADSPIN is a fake news media company that falsely accused a 9 year old boy of wearing blackface at a Chiefs game.   In response, the boy’s family is now suing them to hell for defamation.  Today, Deadspin was forced to lay off their entire staff and sell the company.  Fake News is the enemy of the people.  FAFO."

Miss Universe Judge Says Bankruptcy Due To "Outrage" Over Transgender Organiser - "Emily Austin, the 2022 Miss Universe judge, said at a Fox News programme called it "morally wrong"... The organiser of the competition, JKN Global Group, is owned by LGBTQ activist and one of the world's richest transgender women Anne Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip - who bought the pageant in 2022 for $20 million."
A lot of left wingers were shaming a meme claiming that there were no examples of "Get woke, go broke". How short and selective their memories are

Indiana Jones, The Marvels Confirmed Nearly $400 Million Loss For Disney - "Add another $130 million to that $224 million already lost by The Marvels and Wish, and with Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny, Disney has lost nearly $400 million on the projects in 2023."
So much for the cope

Meme - Wesley Yang @wesyang: "It's not a boycott anymore. The marketers told their main drinkership to piss off and so they did and found easily available substitutes no worse than the piss water they were drinking solely by habit. It's a new equilibrium that will not change."
"Super Slump. Change from year ago in U.S. case volumes for two weeks ended Feb. 17
Bud Light -30%"
I still see left wingers sharing a meme pretending no company has ever gone woke and gone broke

Meme - Jinkx Monsoon @JinkxMonsoon: "🤟🏻🖤 @Slate"
"Doctor Who's Newest Villain Might Drive Some Viewers Away"
Jinkx Monsoon, Doctor Who’s newest villain, has a message for her haters: “Who needs ’em?” - "I truly believe that for every fan we lose to transphobia, we’re going to have two to three more coming in because they’re excited for trans representation."

Ncuti Gatwa Doctor Who Posts Record Low Ratings With "Space Babies" and "The Devil's Chord" - "Doctor Who’s overnight ratings are out for “Space Babies” and “The Devil’s Chord” and they mark the lowest ratings for Doctor Who episodes ever, faring far worse than even Ncuti Gatwa’s prior record low in “The Church On Ruby Road” special. This follows a press tour from Gatwa and showrunner Russell T. Davies...   Russell T. Davies made it clear the show would be an ode to identity politics in his several interviews, with his now-infamous smug talking point, “If you’re not writing that [in 2024], what on Earth are you doing? I think our rights are in danger. I’m talking as someone who’s lived through gay liberation, all the way through the AIDS crisis, all the way through to the freedoms that we have now. I can see them spinning and being endangered, so there’s no choice in this. And if the most exciting and entertaining action-adventure show on television can also do that, I think that’s wonderful.” Ncuti Gatwa gave several interviews leading up to the program, paving the way for a failure, followed by a lecture to the audience to call them bigots for not enjoying the changes in Doctor Who, a playbook no doubt taken from Disney P.R. as we’ve seen time and time again starting with the Captain Marvel movie. The interviews consisted of lecturing fans on “white mediocrity” and finally culminating in telling viewers, “Don’t watch.” Viewers did exactly as Ncuti Gatwa commanded them, seeming completely indifferent to both “Space Babies,” an episode that appears to be wrapped around a pro-abortion message with the entire point of it to lecture viewers on it, and “The Devil’s Chord” which featured a hard-to-watch transgender person followed by a very gay song and dance routine to end the show in the style of Glee—something that doesn’t fit Doctor Who at all... Ratings for overnight for “Space Babies” was 2.6 million and “The Devil’s Chord” 2.4 million, marking the lowest premieres for Doctor Who ever.  As a contrast, Jody Whittaker’s first episodes of her final season, which was the prior low marker for Doctor who posted 4.43 million and 3.96 million respectively, nearly double what the Ncuti Gatwa era brought in for its beginning."
Once again, hating and having contempt for your audience and encouraging them to stop consuming is a winning strategy
I like the cope that the weather was too good

Meme - "HOW IT STARTED...
Sorry straight white men, Doctor Who was never made for you
...HOW IT'S GOING
BBC Doctor Who fans label new series 'woke' and 'unwatchable' as viewer ratings drop"

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