Why Captain America, Fantastic Four, Mandalorian & Grogu And Supergirl All Bombed The Same Way - "Two quotes from Monday’s episode of The Town, and together they explain the last eighteen months of franchise filmmaking. While talking about the biggest losers of 2026, which includes James Gunn and Kathleen Kennedy, Puck’s Matt Belloni, on Lucasfilm: “They played it absolutely safe and it’s blown up in their face.” Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, on why he passed on Supergirl in the show’s box office draft: “I just figured, clearly incorrectly, that the floor on a superhero movie was still like 250, 300. This movie is not going to sniff two.”... Marvel, DC, and Lucasfilm have now all run the same play and gotten the same result, because the thing that used to make “safe” profitable no longer exists. The floor was the fanbase. The floor is gone. Look at the shape of these runs, not just the totals... That shape means the same thing every time: general audiences show up once on brand recognition, do not come back, and there is no fanbase underneath to catch the fall. For decades, the fanbase was the safety net that turned mediocre franchise entries into $600 million grosses. Every one of these movies fell straight through where the net used to be. Shaw’s number is worth sitting with. The floor on a superhero movie used to be $250-300 million, not because the movies always earned it, but because a core audience showed up out of loyalty and habit no matter what. That was the subsidy every studio quietly built its budgets on. That subsidy is dead, and it did not die by accident. We have documented the erosion for years. Star Wars lost as much as 85% of its audience, and the fix made it worse. The Mandalorian’s own Nielsen ratings dropped nearly 40% before anyone thought putting it in theaters was the answer. Marvel’s Disney+ era trained its audience that nothing is essential. And after a decade of franchises lecturing the customers, the customers did the one thing studios never modeled. They left. “Playing it safe” was never the disease. It is the last symptom. Safe means programming for an audience you assume is still in the seats. These studios kept making the safe play for a fanbase that had already walked out of the building. Here is where the usual defense falls apart. The reflex answer to every bomb is “just make good movies.” Fine. Thunderbolts was the well-reviewed one, sitting at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and 93% from fans, and it could not even manage the front-loaded opening the others got. If quality were the variable, Thunderbolts performs. It did not. Same story with The Mandalorian & Grogu. Belloni himself stipulates “the movie was fine. Favreau did a good job.” Fine did not matter. Two decently made, well-reviewed (at least by fans) franchise entries produced the same outcome as the maligned ones because the problem was never just one bad movie. It is the burned relationship underneath all of them. You cannot review-score your way out of a decade of alienating your own base. The kill shot for every excuse — superhero fatigue, theaters are dying, streaming ate the business — is that the overall market is healthy. As noted on the same episode of The Town, the box office is up roughly 15% this year and on pace for the first $10 billion domestic year since 2019. Look at what is actually winning. Obsession just crossed $400 million and became Focus’s biggest movie ever, an original horror film from a YouTube director. Likewise, Backrooms is nearing $350M. Project Hail Mary is a big hit that, per the same episode, “reasserted [Ryan Gosling’s] primacy as a star who can get movies made almost on his own.” The Michael Jackson biopic is heading to $1 billion. Audiences did not stop going to movies. They stopped showing up out of obligation. Originals and star vehicles are thriving in the same marketplace where legacy IP is dying, because they never had a subsidy to lose. They were built to earn every ticket. That is the new rule for everyone now: every franchise film performs like an original. The brand gets you one weekend. The movie has to do the rest, and “safe” earns nothing. Which brings us to the two biggest bets on the calendar, because Marvel and Lucasfilm have answered the same crisis with opposite plays. Marvel’s answer is Avengers: Doomsday, the biggest safe play ever constructed, nostalgia stacked to the ceiling. Lucasfilm’s answer is Star Wars: Starfighter, an actual movie-star vehicle with new characters, fronted by the guy the industry just crowned a winner of 2026... The floor does not come back on its own. You rebuild it one earned ticket at a time."
Hollywood Does A 180: Studios Now Courting The Very Fans They Shunned - "For the better part of a decade, Hollywood had a message for its core audience: this isn’t for you anymore. Star Wars didn’t need you. Star Trek didn’t want you. Marvel figured you’d show up regardless of what got made. Who knows what happened to Doctor Who (we know). And if you objected, you weren’t a customer with a complaint, you were the problem. And they blamed you. A “toxic” fan. A review-bomber. A relic waiting to be replaced by the fabled “modern audience.” Except the modern audience never showed up. The old one left. And now — billions in write-downs, canceled shows, and franchise-low openings later — the very same studios are tripping over each other to win back the exact fans they spent years lecturing... Lucasfilm responded to the sequel trilogy backlash not by examining the movies but by branding the audience toxic. Alex Kurtzman’s Star Trek made sure you knew it wasn’t your father’s Trek, and that this was the point. Marvel flooded Disney+ with content aimed at everyone except the fans who built the $30 billion machine, then reached for “review bombing” as the all-purpose excuse every time an audience score cratered. The playbook got so predictable that South Park turned it into a Panderverse punchline. Even Bob Iger eventually admitted, back in November 2023, that Disney’s creators had “lost sight” of the job — entertain first, message second. It was the closest thing to a confession the industry produced during the entire era. Then the confessions stopped mattering, because the numbers started talking. Star Wars went nearly seven years without a single theatrical release after The Rise of Skywalker. Read that again: the biggest movie franchise ever created spent the better part of a decade afraid of theaters. And then when it came back, 85% of the fans didn’t return. On the streaming side, The Acolyte burned through a reported $180 million and got canceled after one season. Marvel’s decline is documented on a spreadsheet. The Marvels: $206 million worldwide, the lowest-grossing MCU film in history. Captain America: Brave New World limped to $415 million. Thunderbolts couldn’t crack $400 million even with reviews on its side and the “New Avengers” rebranding; proof the brand itself no longer sells tickets. Disney’s live-action pipeline delivered Snow White: roughly $205 million worldwide against a reported quarter-billion-dollar budget... Star Trek hasn’t been in theaters since 2016’s Beyond ($343 million). Section 31 arrived as the worst-reviewed Trek project ever made, Discovery and Lower Decks are gone, and Paramount+ spent two years contracting. Box office and Nielsen don’t lie, don’t apologize, and don’t care about your press release. The audience didn’t organize a boycott. They just quietly stopped showing up, the most expensive silence in Hollywood history. Enter David Ellison, who bought Paramount and immediately started doing the unthinkable: courting the shunned. As we broke down, the receipts are everywhere: a storytelling-first mandate, Bari Weiss installed atop CBS News, DEI programs formally scaled back. And it’s Star Trek, of all franchises, serving as the proof of concept. Per our insiders, the Trek reboot in development is being built on Wrath of Khan and Next Generation DNA, the exact eras the Kurtzman regime treated as baggage... A former Disney employee revealed after the layoffs that DEI has been quietly toned down since Trump won. A leaked Netflix mandate showed the streamer ramping up faith-based programming for the viewers it once ignored, just as we first reported. And then there’s Lionsgate, suddenly the most popular girl at the dance. Disney and Paramount are at war over its legacy IP library, Netflix is circling despite the denials, and Disney’s interest, as we reported, is explicitly about winning back males and families. Look at what that library actually is: John Wick, The Hunger Games, Saw, The Expendables. Meat-and-potatoes, male-skewing, four-quadrant IP. Three of the biggest companies in entertainment are bidding billions for the privilege of programming to the demographic they spent ten years calling toxic... the next regime will not be built on telling the fanbase to get lost. Don’t wait for the apology tour. It’s not coming. What you’ll get instead is investor-call language. “Underserved audience segments.” “Broadening our appeal.” “Four-quadrant storytelling.” “Returning to our franchise roots.” Translate any of it and it reads the same way: we were wrong, you were the customer, please come back. The tests are already on the calendar. Star Trek’s 60th anniversary and the direction of the reboot. Star Wars: Starfighter in 2027. And whatever emerges from DC once Paramount–WBD closes. Here’s the thing about trust: it’s a lagging indicator. It takes years to burn and even longer to rebuild, and the audience Hollywood shunned has heard pretty words before. They never stopped wanting Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman. They stopped believing Hollywood wanted them... the case that Hollywood’s message-first era is ending just got firmer, as GLAAD’s new study reports declining LGBTQ character counts in studio films for a third straight year."
Meme - ""Star Trek was always woke!" Here's Picard telling Worf to fit in or fuck off when he abandons his post to commit a revenge killing and then tries to hide behind the customs of an alien race. Please explain how this aligns with modern multiculturalism."
"Do you wish to resign?"
David Ellison’s Paramount Has The Receipts On Woke Hollywood As Fans Declare Independence (Exclusive) - "David Ellison and Paramount brass are sitting on internal data and analytics tracking the audience shift around “wokism” and DEI-driven content, hard numbers confirming what moviegoers have been declaring at the box office for the better part of a decade. Hollywood’s messaging-first era isn’t just unpopular. Per the data, it’s measurably, quantifiably over. In other words: Ellison has the receipts. You don’t need a leaked deck to see the pattern. The public numbers tell the same story the internal data does. Supergirl just delivered James Gunn’s DCU its Yorktown... Now the flop is being blamed on the fans. Right on schedule. And so is the backlash to The Odyssey. Marvel post-Endgame has shed audience at a rate that would have been unthinkable in 2019, with Nielsen data and box office numbers revealing that brands like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar have lost as much as 75% of their audience... Doctor Who: the same playbook, the same result. A legacy institution was retooled around messaging, and the audience walked. The pattern isn’t subtle. Per sources, Paramount’s data says the same thing the grosses do. That’s why you’re seeing figures like former X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo speak openly about feeling like he was a DEI hire. It’s also why voices on YouTube are now saying flat-out that woke culture destroyed Supergirl and is destroying cinema. Hollywood, sources stress, is very aware of the influence that Cosmic Book News, Nerdrotic, WDW, Film Threat, The Critical Drinker and others now carry. The influencer-shill screening model is collapsing in real time. Supergirl‘s screenings arguably hurt it, and The Odyssey quietly canceled its own influencer screenings. YouTubers who also shilled have been forced to change their tune... what works globally is rooted in the 1980s. Think Top Gun: Maverick. Think Michael. Big, earnest, crowd-pleasing tentpoles built for the entire world, not for a faction on BlueSky and Threads. It’s already happening. As Cosmic Book News reported, Danny McBride’s G.I. Joe movie is being taken seriously. Not comedic. Rooted in the comics... that’s the same template Ellison is applying to Star Trek: take the franchise back to what made Wrath of Khan through The Next Generation work. No lectures. No deconstruction. Optimistic, adventure-driven storytelling that made Star Trek a global institution in the first place. And now William Shatner just said he would come back. On the DC side, sources point to the Absolute Universe as proof the same energy sells right now. Absolute Batman is moving on the order of 500,000 copies a month, and sources tell us Absolute has revitalized DC the same way The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen revitalized DC in the ’80s. It doubles down on the themes and aesthetic Zack Snyder explored on film. Ellison and De Luca, we’re told, are very well aware of Frank Miller’s influence and how it extends into the worldwide phenomenon. It’s no coincidence the receipts run through Snyder, either. The first five SnyderVerse DC films grossed nearly $5 billion, compared to Marvel’s first five at $2.3 billion. And as Snyder himself just reminded everyone, the 2017 Wonder Woman he co-wrote and shepherded deliberately avoided political agenda, which is precisely why boys could love the character as much as girls did. That’s the model. It always was. Meanwhile, Gunn’s DCU is going the other direction... He’s well-liked in Hollywood, we’re told: a Democrat, but a centrist, who genuinely loves movies, understands tentpole filmmaking, and is filmmaker-friendly. This isn’t a culture warrior with an axe to grind. It’s a studio boss looking at the numbers. That distinction matters. When the data on the audience shift is coming from a centrist Democrat who wants to make crowd-pleasing movies, not from someone with a political agenda, the “toxic fandom” spin has nowhere left to hide."
Meme - JDPD @JDPD11618: "The main character in Dustborn uses her powers to cancel, bully, hoax, manipulate and gaslight others because they don't share her beliefs. You are the advocates of hate speech, harassment and threats. Pax is not a hero, she is a sociopath and you not recognizing this is insane."
Red Thread Games @RedThrea...: "A message from Red Thread to our community."
"To our community: Since we first announced Dustborn, we've read your comments and listened to your feedback, hopes and wishes for the game. Over the past four years, our team has poured their hearts into telling a story that's deeply meaningful to us; a story about the power of words, about building a world where everyone can feel safe, about love, friendships. ...and robots, of course. We expected Dustborn to spark conversation and debate, and looked forward to engaging with our players in a positive and constructive fashion. Unfortunately, that conversation has been drowned out by a tidal wave of hate and abuse. We welcome thoughtful feedback and respectful criticism. We embrace discussion and debate. But we have zero tolerance for hate speech, harassment, and threats of any kind. Those who engage in such behaviour will be removed from our community. To everyone else: thank you for coming on this journey with us. Your support means everything, and your constructive feedback continues to push us to learn and evolve. Together, let's continue building a world where everyone can feel valued and empowered to share their stories"
Kabrutus on X - "This is the most cringe opening I've ever seen in a video game ever. Did they suggest that people who don't want politics in their entertainment are... fascists?"
Former Team Lead For World Of Warcraft Mark Kern Explains How ESG Influences Video Game Developers And How The Industry Will Suffer - "“It’s very profitable. There’s an entire industry built up around DEI initiatives, consultancy, [and] sensitivity reading, [which] has plagued novels for a long time. I have many writer friends who were basically edged out of their publishing houses and went independent because of stuff like this.” “It’s a very profitable industry,” he reiterated. “It’s financially motivated and it’s as old as time. Consultancy is a very profitable business. There are huge firms on Wall Street that do this. And it’s exactly that. You create a problem, you go in and you say you’re going to solve it, but actually just move the deck chairs around the Titanic because if you actually solved it they would rehire you. And then you have a recurring business stream. And this is as old as time.” Kern then brought the conversation to Sweet Baby Inc.’s narrative consulting business, “The real question I have is why writing? Why are are these game companies hiring writers? It is the smallest portion of your game team. It is the cheapest part of your budget. It makes no sense to outsource it unless you’re after a specific expertise that you do not have in-house. And what is that expertise that is marketed by Sweet Baby Inc.? It’s wokeness. ‘We sell wokeness.’ Why is wokeness valuable to that company? “And for that you got to get into where I was: CEO level game companies, how games are funded, ESG, and why that matters to your credit score, and why that helps get your game funded when you can check boxes on hiring firms like this,” he said. Later in the interview, while discussing Sweet Baby Inc.’s involvement with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and how the game likely lost Warner Bros. upwards of $100 million, Kern said, “It’s not that gamers are upset about, ‘Oh, hey, we have some diversity in the game.’ It’s actually the way they go about it with pure tokenism, with phoning in weak characters instead of creating strong new characters.” “And more importantly it’s about a vindictiveness to destroy the past, to destroy the IP, to ignore the source material, and to tear apart these beloved characters in some sort of fitful rage that we don’t understand that is very disingenuous,” he continued. “And I think that is the tremendous reaction to Suicide Squad.” He then shared his opinion on how this will affect the way games are financed, “This is going to have an immense financial impact. The way games are funded, you don’t use your own money. Even EA. Games are hugely expensive to make. They are upwards of $250, sometimes $600 million for certain live games. It’s incredible how expensive they are.” “And to do that your CFO is your best friend,” Kern explained. “You’re counting on your CFO to get you tax breaks, to put studios in regions which are financially favorable, and you will borrow the cheap money. You will get the cheap money to do it.” He continued, “Even EA does this. I worked with EA. We were putting together a deal where they were taking bailout money from the banks in the last financial crisis that we had and they were applying that cheap towards games. Same thing with Covid money. They’re applying that cheap money towards games. And what has been the cheapest money while interest rates were still low a couple of years ago? It was ESG financing. And so they’re going to take this money and they’re going to put it into games.” However, Kern notes this landscape is changing, “But now that they don’t have that money anymore because ESG is either being diminished or rebranded because the returns on investment have been so poor on Wall Street for ESG funds that that source of revenue is drying up.” “This woke machine cannot continue in the way that it is now for AAA gaming,” he asserted. However, he believes it might be too late for many of the studios that bought in, “Unfortunately, it’s so entrenched that you’re not going to see much of an ability to course correct because the studios are so infected. They’re going to shut down. And this is truly the rise of AA gaming or what some fans call S-tier gaming like Helldivers, like Palword, [and Last Epoch]. Really incredible success stories in a period where game companies are experiencing significant losses.” “The bleeding will continue, and no one’s going to wake up from it, unfortunately. It’s going to be a total nose dive,” he concluded."
Activision And Blizzard Attempt To Rebrand "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" To "Inclusive Growth" - "This rebrand comes in the wake of a number of major corporations completely ditching their DEI departments including Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and Jack Daniels following pressure from their costumers led by Robby Starbuck. In fact, a Wall Street Journal report at the end of June revealed that diversity policies do not lead to growth and that a study by McKinsey back in 2015 has not been replicated and the firm’s methods to determine its results are being questioned... gamers have organized themselves against diversity signaling with various Steam curator lists, the largest created by Brazilian gamer KabrutusRambo called Sweet Baby Inc. detected. It has over 425,000 followers. He’s also launched an entire website to expose DEI in games called DEIDetected. Gamers pushing back against this have had numerous wins. Those wins include Warner Bros. Discovery taking a $200 million impairment charge on ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.’ Surgent Studios began laying off employees after gamers did not purchase Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. Remedy Entertainment’s Alan Wake 2 has still not broken even nearly a year after its release and their financials do not look like those of a healthy company. Sales for Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn are terrible and the developer, A44 Games began laying people off months before the game even released realizing the game was already dead. Activision’s rebrand comes in the wake of a report in May from Grummz that Activision was placing DEI officers on all of its projects. He shared that bonuses and reviews for Activision employees “depend on how hard you DEI.” He also detailed that “DEI Officers are installed on every dev team to ensure THE MESSAGE.” Furthermore, Kern relayed, “Of all the AAA Studios out there, my dev friends and contacts who have come forth tell me that Ubisoft and Activision are the very worst.” To top it off, Grummz shared an internal document that he alleges was sent to Activision employees last week that details all the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives the company engaged in over the last year. He claims that this is just “one of MULTIPLE DEI emails sent out weekly in a deluge of propaganda.”... There are also some suspect bullet points that appear to indicate the company is engaging in quota-based hiring and contracting... While the document claims that XP Equity is open to all employees, on the company’s Diversity & Inclusion website, a brief overview of the program makes it clear it has a certain focus on individuals based on their race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and disability. The overview states, “Mentoring proves to build skill, networking, and confidence. The XP Equity Mentoring Program is a program open to all Activision employees with special focus on supporting individuals who are part of diverse groups (including race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, etc.) within our employee population.”"
From 2024
5 Ways The Legend of Korra Went Wrong
Rax on X - "You can tell how much LoK was written in the "Girl Boss" Era. One of the reoccurring themes is to have the previous male characters turned into losers while the females take all of the spotlight. Aang ended up a shitty Dad, Sokka just died off and the writers didn't seem to care, Zuko just sits around and then loses his fights. They did the same thing to Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Somehow it never clicked into any of these dip shit writers brains that defiling beloved characters doesn't have new characters gain a following. Aang becoming a shitty Dad who neglected his kids while Katara somehow let it happen, but she's too busy being a Korra cheerleading cameo character rather than who she actually was. Korra is an abomination constructed from a dead era of trash reddit writers"
Dave Greene on X - "For some reason modern Millennial (female) writers find successful older men threatening."
Isaac Young on X - "The interesting thing about woke culture is that’s it’s constantly stuck in the hand-off phase. Psychologically, this is akin to young writers breaking into their skills with fanfic, written or otherwise fantasied in their heads. You’ve yet to really come into your own, and you’re playing in the older generation’s sandbox to figure out how everything works. Usually this terminates around high school or college, and the talented writers then make their own original IPs. You’re not supposed to stay in the sandbox. You’re supposed to explore and grapple with the world in your art, and this is where creativity emerges. But Progressives are constantly trying to reboot everything. They refuse to leave the sandbox, and while you can say this is due to financial reasons, as a cultural experience, it’s like watching artists trying to imbibe the creative fire of past generations and failing each time. Yes, you updated the franchise with your more Progressive fanfic characters, and yes you turned the older cast into skinsuit sycophants, but each time it never sticks. Not a single woke reboot successfully passed down the torch to where we could move onto a new cultural vogue. The new discourse never takes shape. It’s like the opposite of the refusal of the call in the Hero’s Journey. A world of origin stories that terminate at the origin and go nowhere. Progressives desperately want the fire of the past—and the status it derives—but the Muses aren’t choosing them."
Fandom Pulse | Facebook - "Avengers: Doomsday star Simu Liu on Hollywood's retreat from DEI casting, on Threads: "Put some Asians in literally anything right now. The amount of backslide in our representation onscreen is f---ing appalling. Studios think we're 'risky.'" He followed that with The Copenhagen Test on Peacock. Critics gave it 71%. Audiences stopped watching after week one. It's now canceled. Liu is still in Avengers: Doomsday as Shang-Chi, releasing December 18. Does Marvel franchise cover protect actors whose solo work audiences reject?"
