Disney Has Lost Nearly $1 Billion on “Woke” Movies

[CivilDiscourse]

Maybe I ignored it because it's a pointless claim and not even worth responding to, let's say. Like "reverse racism" or even "woke ideology", "Afrocentrism" is a snarl word and very much likely doesn't even exist.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrocentrism#:~:text=Afrocentrism%20is%20a%20scholarly%20movement,methodological%20studies%20of%20the%20latter.

Afrocentrism is a worldview that is centered on the history of people of African descent or a biased view that favors it over non-African civilizations.^[1] It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history.^[2] Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.^[3][4]

Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities. It takes a critical stance on Eurocentric assumptions and myths about world history, in order to pursue methodological studies of the latter. Some of the critics of the movement believe that it often denies or minimizes European, Near Eastern, and Asian cultural influences while exaggerating certain aspects of historical African civilizations that independently accomplished a significant level of cultural and technological development. In general, Afrocentrism is usually manifested in a focus on the history of Africa and its role in contemporary African-American culture among others.

What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African American intellectuals in the U.S. civil rights movement and in the development of African American studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography.^[5] A notable pioneer is the professor Kenneth Dike, who became chairman of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard in the 1970s.^[6] In strict terms Afrocentrism, as a distinct historiography, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s.^{[citation needed]} Today^[when?] it is primarily associated with Cheikh Anta Diop, John Henrik Clarke, Ivan van Sertima and Molefi Kete Asante. Asante, however, describes his theories as Afrocentricity.^[7]

Proponents of Afrocentrism support the claim that the contributions of various Black African people have been downplayed or discredited as part of the legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history".^[8][9]

Major critics of Afrocentrism include Mary Lefkowitz, who dismiss it as pseudohistory,^[10] reactive,^[11] and obstinately therapeutic.^[12] Others, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, believe that Afrocentrism defeats its purpose of dismantling unipolar studies of world history by seeking to replace Eurocentricity with an equally ethnocentric and hierarchical curriculum, and negatively essentializes European culture and people of European descent. Clarence E. Walker claims it to be "Eurocentrism in blackface".^[13]
Terminology


The term "Afrocentrism" dates to 1962.^[14] The adjective "Afrocentric" appears in a typescript proposal for an entry in Encyclopedia Africana, possibly due to W. E. B. Du Bois.^[15] The abstract noun "Afrocentricity" dates to the 1970s,^[16][17] and was popularized by Molefi Asante's Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980). Molefi Kete Asante's theory, Afrocentricity, has been one developed in academic settings and may incorporate the terms Afrocentric to describe scholarship and Afrocentrists to describe scholars, but does not use Afrocentrism. According to Asante, though the two terms are often confused to mean the same, Afrocentrists are not adherents of Afrocentrism.^[17] This has caused confusing notions about who is considered an Afrocentrist, as various scholars who may or may not be associated with Asante and his works have been erroneously given the title, even by other academics.^[18] Asante has written that Afrocentricity and Afrocentrism are not the same and neither do they share the same origin:

By way of distinction, Afrocentricity should not be confused with the variant Afrocentrism. The term “Afrocentrism” was first used by the opponents of Afrocentricity who in their zeal saw it as an obverse of Eurocentrism. The adjective “Afrocentric” in the academic literature always referred to “Afrocentricity.” However, the use of “Afrocentrism” reflected a negation of the idea of Afrocentricity as a positive and progressive paradigm. The aim was to assign religious signification to the idea of African centeredness. However, it has come to refer to a broad cultural movement of the late twentieth century that has a set of philosophical, political, and artistic ideas which provides the basis for the musical, sartorial, and aesthetic dimensions of the African personality. On the other hand, Afrocentricity, as I have previously defined it, is a theory of agency, that is, the idea that African people must be viewed and view themselves as agents rather than spectators to historical revolution and change. To this end Afrocentricity seeks to examine every aspect of the subject place of Africans in historical, literary, architectural, ethical, philosophical, economic, and political life.^[19]

...

Afrocentricity book

Main article: Afrocentricity (book)
In 2000, African American Studies professor Molefi Kete Asante, gave a lecture entitled "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium,"^[26] in which he presented many of his ideas:

• Africa has been betrayed by international commerce, by missionaries and imams, by the structure of knowledge imposed by the Western world, by its own leaders, and by the ignorance of its own people of its past.
• Philosophy originated in Africa and the first philosophers in the world were Africans.
• Afrocentricity constitutes a new way of examining data, and a novel orientation to data; it carries with it assumptions about the current state of the African world.
• His aim is "to help lay out a plan for the recovery of African place, respectability, accountability, and leadership."
• Afrocentricity can stand its ground among any ideology or religion: Marxism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism. Your Afrocentricity will emerge in the presence of these other ideologies because it is from you.
• Afrocentrism is the only ideology that can liberate African people.

Asante also stated:

As a cultural configuration, the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five characteristics:

1. an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals, and signs.
2. a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions of sex, gender, and class.
3. a defence of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of art, music, and literature.
4. a celebration of centeredness and agency and a commitment to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people.
5. a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of African people.

However, Wilson J. Moses, said of Asante: "His second book, The Afrocentric Idea (1987), was a creative and in some respects brilliant but rambling theoretical work, much influenced by the revolution in "critical theory" that occurred in American intellectual life during the late 1970s and early 1980s." Some also assert that the definition of Afrocentricity has never sat still long enough to be properly described and accurately critiqued.^{[citation needed]}
Afrocentric education

Main article: Afrocentric education
Afrocentric education is education designed to empower peoples of the African diaspora. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by limiting their awareness of themselves and indoctrinating them with ideas that work against them.^[27] To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-determination in relationship to others.^[28] Like educational leaders of other cultures, proponents assert that what educates one group of people does not necessarily educate and empower another group–so they assert educational priorities distinctly for the Africans in a given context.
Afrocentric theology

Further information: Black theology and Black church
The black church in the United States developed out of the creolization of African spirituality and European-American Christianity; early members of the churches made certain stories their own^{[citation needed]}. During the antebellum years, the idea of deliverance out of slavery, as in the story of Exodus, was especially important^{[citation needed]}. After Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy, their hope was based on deliverance from segregation and other abuses^{[citation needed]}. They found much to respond to in the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus, and shaped their churches by the growth of music and worship styles that related to African as well as European-American traditions.^{[citation needed]}

Twentieth-century "Africentric approaches" to Christian theology and preaching have been more deliberate. Writers and thinkers emphasize "Black presence" in the Christian Bible, including the idea of a "Black Jesus".^{[29][page needed]}

© Copyright Original Source

[Seeker]

The term "woke" was similarly invented by those who adhere to the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy foisted upon modernity by Critical Theorists and similar ideologies like Marxism and Critical Race Theory. All of these ideologies are dependent on each other and are all dangerous.

Wrong. "Woke" was a term originally used by the black community to address real problems they had re racism and so forth, but now is used pejoratively (snarl word, as I said) by the far-right, a political group/spectrum which you seem to belong to.

To elaborate:

It's a term that arose out of suffering and the pain of segregation and was exclusively used by black people to describe how they must stay vigilant against threats to their lives and livelihoods.

There's a good article here:

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879...on-controversy

and another one here:

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/202...opted-politics

Both of them describe nicely how the word woke has been co-opted in order to attack those people who once exclusively used it. There's a good quote from a law professor in there which summarises it perfectly.

“Slang amongst Black people is a love language and I am frustrated when that slang becomes appropriated and used by others and the meaning morphs. There’s something really sinister about this term not only being taken from us but also deployed against us. It’s a double violation.”

[Seeker]

Anyone rewriting things to favor themselves is wrong. It doesn't matter how long they've been doing it. If whitewashing is bad, then so is blackwashing. If blackwashing is meaningless, then so is whitewashing. You get to pick one of those two statements you can't mix and match them. You can go ahead and enable this vengeful mindset you display, but you can't do so while claiming to care about people because you just continue the cycle of hate.

You missed the point, Cerebrum. The issue here has always been hipocrisy, since the debate started. There have been tons of whitewashing through Hollywood's history, yet none/rare/seldom complaints. When the raceswapping happens and it's blacks on the roles, the world falls apart. THAT shows that it is really racism at hand, and specifically racism against blacks. John Wayne can play Gengis Khan just fine, but a black girl can't play a mermaid? The double standard couldn't be more obvious.

Almost the same thing with the Cleopatra case. Numerous cases of color-blind casting (literally dozens) and only "Queen Cleopatra" gets petitions online to outright cancel and/or not air the series.

Also, they literally told the story of a black queen first. Cleopatra was Season 2. Season 1 got great reviews and was on Netflix's front page for a month. But no one cared about the show until Cleopatra.

Which tells you everything about everyone in this controversy...

[Seeker]

It doesn't always have negative connotations as you appear to think.

But most of the time, it does, especially in the case of anti-black racism.

[rogue06]

From this past February...

Disney: a billion-dollar casualty of woke

The Walt Disney Company is in deep trouble. Its last four high-profile releases bombed at the box office, losing over $1 billion between them. Once Hollywood’s most successful film studio, Disney was dethroned last year by Universal Pictures.

The reason for Disney’s decline? It has gone woke, to an almost comical degree. Last year, the company admitted to investors that there was a growing ‘misalignment’ between Disney’s output and ‘public and consumer tastes and preferences for entertainment’. ‘Consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest’, it said, are risking the company’s reputation and profits.

Viewing figures and box-office sales spell this out clearly. Audiences are growing sick of the woke slop that Disney has been serving them. They are tired with scripts that are weighed down by clunky political messaging. They are fed up with storylines being mangled to fit ‘progressive’ narratives. They are irked by Disney’s desire to lecture them instead of entertain them.

Even Disney franchises that were once guaranteed money-makers have struggled to excite audiences of late. Marvel Studios, which is owned by Disney, used to regularly break box-office records with its billion-dollar superhero films. As recently as 2019, Avengers: Endgame became the second-highest grossing movie of all time. But last year, Marvel registered its worst-ever year at the box office.

Its biggest flop last year was The Marvels, which failed to break even. One reason it probably did so badly was that it features none of the characters that audiences are most familiar with. Instead of beloved, well-established heroes like Captain America or Iron Man, The Marvels focusses on an ensemble cast of mainly diverse newcomers. So we follow the adventures of Ms Marvel, a Muslim teen superhero from the Ms Marvel TV miniseries, and Monica Rambeau, a black female side character from the WandaVision miniseries.

Practically all new Disney films place a huge emphasis on this kind of diversity casting. Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content division, said in a leaked video in 2022 that she wants 50 per cent of all Disney characters to be either LGBT or from an ethnic-minority background. Disney Television Animation executive producer Latoya Raveneau has similarly said she is ‘adding queerness’ wherever she can to the shows she oversees.

No one is against diverse characters. Like any other character, they just need to be compelling and have depth. But all too often, their inclusion in Disney productions feels more like a tick-box exercise to meet Karey Burke’s quota. Meanwhile, they often come at the cost of other more familiar faces. It’s as if these ‘diverse’ characters are only on screen to send a message – to remind the public that ‘diversity is our strength’ – rather than drive the plot forward or engage the audience.

Often, these characters are also actively grating. Captain Marvel, played by Brie Larson, is supposed to be the main draw of The Marvels. She even starred in her own film, Captain Marvel, back in 2019. But like so many female protagonists these days, she is the stereotypical ‘girlboss’. She comes across as smug and condescending. She beats enemies with ease and brags about her powers.

Perhaps Disney’s most egregious use of the girlboss trope was in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. This Disney+ series follows a Hulk-type character, except, as the title suggests, she’s a woman and a lawyer. She is a Strong Female Character who delivers lectures about why catcalling is bad. To the surprise of precisely no one, She-Hulk went down like a cup of cold sick with many Marvel diehards.

It seems the public aren’t particularly interested in watching these unfamiliar characters talking down to them for 100+ minutes. Nor are they going to invest hours of their precious time in the endless TV spin-offs on Disney+ if they suspect that these series are just lectures in disguise.

Disney’s Pixar, the studio behind some of the biggest animated hits of the modern era, is now awash with identity politics, too. Even when its output isn’t excessively preachy, it still seems to trumpet ‘diversity’ at the expense of good storytelling. Take its 2023 movie, Elemental – the worst-performing release in Pixar’s history. It tells the story of a fire character and a water character falling in love. The film is inoffensive enough, even if its subtext about overcoming racism is not all that subtle. What executives were most proud of, however, was the fact that Elemental contained Disney’s first nonbinary character – a lake who wears earrings, goes by they / them pronouns and is voiced by a nonbinary actor.

The character, called Lake Ripple, is such a small part of the film that it – sorry, ‘they’ – doesn’t even appear in the end credits. But ‘they’ were still everywhere in the film’s marketing and media campaign. Studio executives seem to imagine that the public is constantly clamouring for yet more diversity ‘firsts’. Or perhaps they are shamelessly using them to generate more publicity. Either way, it clearly isn’t a winning strategy.

Disney’s preoccupation with diversity can often feel like an attempt to distract from its otherwise pedestrian output. Its 2023 live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, in which black actress Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel, is another case in point. Although some might have seen this blockbuster remake as a sad day for redhead representation, most members of the public were distinctly unbothered by the prospect of a black Ariel. Once again, few people are opposed to ‘diverse’ casting in and of itself.

Predictably, there were some tedious woke additions to the remake – including new lyrics in ‘Kiss the Girl’, emphasising the importance of consent. But the film’s main problem was that it was boring and uninspired. Although Disney was hailed in the media for its ‘inspirational’ choice of casting, The Little Mermaid performed worse than expected when it hit screens in 2023, barely breaking even. No amount of diversity hype can make up for a dull film.

Snow White is next up for a woke reboot. It’s slated for release next year. And already, its prospects aren’t looking good. Ever since her casting was announced in 2023, star Rachel Zegler has used every opportunity to trash the source material as sexist and outdated. She has called the film’s love story ‘weird’ and accused Prince Charming of having ‘literally stalked’ Snow White. Zegler claims that this new, updated version will focus less on romance and ‘true love’, and more on ‘women being in roles of power’.

This might sound thrilling to a women’s studies graduate, but what about the young girls the film is supposed to appeal to? And what about the adults who feel nostalgic for the original? Zegler has essentially branded their tastes as bigoted and backward. Listening to her interviews, you get the distinct impression that Disney now loathes its canon and its audience.

Time and again, Disney has gone out of its way to alienate and insult the core fanbases of its franchises. After Disney acquired Lucasfilm studios in 2012, Star Wars fans feared the franchise was about to be given a feminist, progressive makeover. Disney executive Kathleen Kennedy was even pictured wearing a t-shirt saying ‘The Force is Female’. Whatever that means.

The Force Awakens, Disney’s first Star Wars film, performed well when it came out in 2015. But as the rest of the new Disney trilogy dragged on, the box office numbers trailed off. Meanwhile, some of the spin-off movies and series also fared poorly with audiences. The only thing many of the new movies had to shout about is their ‘diverse’ casting.

When fans made their displeasure known, they were dismissed as bigots and trolls. The Star Wars cast and crew got into a bizarre war of words with sections of the fanbase in 2018, after Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in The Last Jedi (2017), left social media following alleged trolling by fans – something Rian Johnson, director of The Last Jedi, blamed on the ‘manbabies’ among Star Wars’s audience, upset with its new direction.

When Disney isn’t infuriating its own audience, it is cancelling its own actors. In 2021, Gina Carano – who starred in the Star Wars spin-off series, The Mandalorian – shared an Instagram story comparing being a Republican in 21st-century America to being Jewish during the Holocaust. Carano was almost immediately fired by Disney for ‘denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities’.

The comparison was in poor taste, for sure. But to smear Carano as an anti-Semite – not least when Hollywood A-Listers had spent most of the previous few years comparing Trump’s America to Nazi Germany – was both wrong and outrageously hypocritical. Carano maintains that the real reason she was fired was because she is an outspoken conservative, who has mocked woke practices like stating preferred pronouns. She is now suing Disney for wrongful termination – and is being backed in her fight by Elon Musk.

Disney has even taken to making political interventions out in the real world. Since 2022, in the US state of Florida, home to Disney’s biggest theme park and resort, the Walt Disney Company has been locked in a fierce battle with governor Ron DeSantis over something entirely unrelated to Disney’s business interests – namely, the place of transgender ideology in schools.

DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Act bans ‘classroom instruction’ on issues of ‘sexual orientation or gender identity’ for schoolkids under the age of 10. Disney, apparently outraged by the prospect of preteens being denied an indoctrination into gender-identity ideology, pledged to donate $5million to organisations opposing the law. In retaliation, DeSantis revoked the special tax status that the Walt Disney World Resort has enjoyed since the 1960s.

Not only did this spat cost Disney its tax breaks – it also damaged its image as a family friendly company. Most parents agreed with DeSantis that gender ideology is an inappropriate subject for under-10s and were baffled that Disney would say otherwise. After the skirmish with DeSantis, Disney’s approval rating among Americans tumbled by more than 25 percentage points.

The woes facing Disney illustrate the powerful hold wokeness now has on big corporations. It’s as if Disney’s leaders felt compelled to toe the line on the identitarian agenda. They were prepared to trash the company’s reputation and alienate its fans, seemingly just to signal their allegiance to this new elite ideology.

Perhaps those billion-dollar losses will finally break the spell.

When you place having a good, compelling story at, as best, a distant second in importance, well behind requiring a diverse cast and a woke storyline, quality will naturally suffer. But that seems to be the sacrifice Disney execs are determined to make.

[Seeker]

Afrocentrism is a worldview that is centered on the history of people of African descent or a biased view that favors it over non-African civilizations. It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history.[2] Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.

So...according to the bit in bold, it came after Eurocentrism and thus has less time of existence, which was my point to Cerebrum.

[Mountain Man]

Marvel has laid off staff and will be throttling back the number of movies and TV shows they produce "after the challenges of the 2023 releases". In other words, 2023 saw one woke stinker after another that alienated their fanbase and lost them hundreds of millions of dollars

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainm...reduce-output/

[Cerebrum123]

Wrong. "Woke" was a term originally used by the black community to address real problems they had re racism and so forth, but now is used pejoratively (snarl word, as I said) by the far-right, a political group/spectrum which you seem to belong to.

To elaborate:

It's a term that arose out of suffering and the pain of segregation and was exclusively used by black people to describe how they must stay vigilant against threats to their lives and livelihoods.

There's a good article here:

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879...on-controversy

and another one here:

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/202...opted-politics

Both of them describe nicely how the word woke has been co-opted in order to attack those people who once exclusively used it. There's a good quote from a law professor in there which summarises it perfectly.

“Slang amongst Black people is a love language and I am frustrated when that slang becomes appropriated and used by others and the meaning morphs. There’s something really sinister about this term not only being taken from us but also deployed against us. It’s a double violation.”


[/QUOTE]

The usage your source is using was first recorded in 1962. By this time, Critical Theory, and the offshoots of it had already started to infect various groups. So, that doesn't really refute what I said. I'm not on the far-right, not even close. The fact that you even think that just shows how skewed your perspective is.

You missed the point, Cerebrum. The issue here has always been hipocrisy, since the debate started. There have been tons of whitewashing through Hollywood's history, yet none/rare/seldom complaints. When the raceswapping happens and it's blacks on the roles, the world falls apart. THAT shows that it is really racism at hand, and specifically racism against blacks. John Wayne can play Gengis Khan just fine, but a black girl can't play a mermaid? The double standard couldn't be more obvious.

Almost the same thing with the Cleopatra case. Numerous cases of color-blind casting (literally dozens) and only "Queen Cleopatra" gets petitions online to outright cancel and/or not air the series.

Also, they literally told the story of a black queen first. Cleopatra was Season 2. Season 1 got great reviews and was on Netflix's front page for a month. But no one cared about the show until Cleopatra.

Which tells you everything about everyone in this controversy...

Who here has said there is no issue with whitewashing? Most people arguing against blackwashing also argue against whitewashing. Like when they made The Ancient One a white woman for Doctor Strange or they had Scarlet Johansen in Ghost in the Shell instead of a Japanese woman. As for Cleopatra, that was a documentary doing the blackwashing, which makes it infinitely worse than a simple fictional story doing either. That is why Egypt has actively sued Netflix, they do not appreciate another group trying to twist history to suit their ideological agenda. The fact you have to dishonesty downplay what has happened as well as dishonestly exaggerate the general reaction is rather sickening.

The reason people didn't like a black Ariel is because it is inaccurate, not because a black girl is playing a mermaid. The fact that you are actively arguing for blackwashing shows you have no principles and are infinitely more racist than anyone making the argument that all racebending is bad.

[Cerebrum123]

So...according to the bit in bold, it came after Eurocentrism and thus has less time of existence, which was my point to Cerebrum.

The duration of an ideology's existence is immaterial. An evil ideology is an evil ideology. Eurocentrism was bad, and so is Afrocentrism because they are two sides of the same coin. They just promote different cultures as the center of everything.

[Terraceth]

Honestly, that seems to be the problem most of the time anyways. These movies tend to flop, not because of the message, but because they were bad movies. People like movies that entertain. If an entertaining movie also has a message, it'll likely still be a hit.

What tends to flop is when people sacrifice the story for the message. In other words, the story becomes "preachy" about its message, and it fails to entertain.

I would say this is more the reason for the flops than them being "woke" (however someone wants to define the term). There are various "woke" movies that were successes. The big problem is that so frequently it seems like they try to go for being "woke" and, perhaps due to that being a motivation rather than making a good movie, the movie doesn't do so well.

And when they decide that they need to do a movie about a [fill in the blank] superhero rather than doing a movie about a superhero who happens to be [fill in the blank]. When their racial/ethnic/religious/sexual identity is a driving force rather than an incidental part, you can pretty much count on the movie sucking.

I mean, the racial identity of Black Panther was a driving force of the movie. And while quality is subjective so I can't say if you'd like it or not (I thought it was about on par with the other Marvel movies at the time), the movie did enormously well ($1.3 billion gross) and received very good reviews. The sequel, admittedly, was a drop in both perceived quality and success, but there was really only so much they could do when they couldn't actually use the main character due to the actor dying.

[seanD]

I would say this is more the reason for the flops than them being "woke" (however someone wants to define the term). There are various "woke" movies that were successes. The big problem is that so frequently it seems like they try to go for being "woke" and, perhaps due to that being a motivation rather than making a good movie, the movie doesn't do so well.


I mean, the racial identity of Black Panther was a driving force of the movie. And while quality is subjective so I can't say if you'd like it or not (I thought it was about on par with the other Marvel movies at the time), the movie did enormously well ($1.3 billion gross) and received very good reviews. The sequel, admittedly, was a drop in both perceived quality and success, but there was really only so much they could do when they couldn't actually use the main character due to the actor dying.

You're confusing the backlash against woke ideology and just racial diversity. Very few people have a problem with racial diversity. Black Panther was always centered around a black character, therefore it made sense to have a predominantly black cast. Very few people have a problem with that, and this is where the misconception comes in that the backlash is against racial diversity when it's not. Though I will say that this might be in contrast to the backlash against LGBTQ being forced down our throats because that's a tiny minority, and most people view it as moral depravity and aberrant behavior than they do someone's color of their skin.

[rogue06]

I would say this is more the reason for the flops than them being "woke" (however someone wants to define the term). There are various "woke" movies that were successes. The big problem is that so frequently it seems like they try to go for being "woke" and, perhaps due to that being a motivation rather than making a good movie, the movie doesn't do so well.


I mean, the racial identity of Black Panther was a driving force of the movie. And while quality is subjective so I can't say if you'd like it or not (I thought it was about on par with the other Marvel movies at the time), the movie did enormously well ($1.3 billion gross) and received very good reviews. The sequel, admittedly, was a drop in both perceived quality and success, but there was really only so much they could do when they couldn't actually use the main character due to the actor dying.

Black Panther is sort of an exception, but the character has always been an African king so it isn't that they changed that for the movie like they've done with so many other characters.

[Seeker]

The reason people didn't like a black Ariel is because it is inaccurate, not because a black girl is playing a mermaid. The fact that you are actively arguing for blackwashing shows you have no principles and are infinitely more racist than anyone making the argument that all racebending is bad.

Oh my! Cerebrum, I respectfully ask this time, despite all our previous problems, what, pray tell, is an "inaccurate" mermaid? You DO realize that "mermaids" don't actually exist, now don't you?

[Cerebrum123]

Oh my! Cerebrum, I respectfully ask this time, despite all our previous problems, what, pray tell, is an "inaccurate" mermaid? You DO realize that "mermaids" don't actually exist, now don't you?

The fact that you even try to ask the latter question shows you aren't asking me this in good faith. We are not talking about a generic mermaid here. We are talking about Ariel. The Little Mermaid with Halley Bailey in it is a live-action remake of the 1987 classic starring Jodi Benson. This is Ariel, she has a very specific look and personality. None of which was captured in the live-action remake and the remake is therefore inaccurate. 

?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Rxmt8glvOs7_PnH241L1ZAAAAA%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=4af0a3036d71f1397024ddd095f65d34c58a3651a532791ba7dc5befae0b1959&ipo=images.jpg

I'm not okay with them taking a character this iconic and changing them regardless of their race or race they are changing them to. I wouldn't be okay with Black Panther, Jon Stewart, Cyborg, Static, The Ancient One, or countless other characters and changing them to white or vice versa. If you want to argue that because they are fictional it doesn't matter, then all of those can and reasonably and justifiably be whitewashed because they aren't real. I know you won't actually follow your own logic, because you aren't being logical about this. You are being ideological about this. Throwing out sound principles for the sake of ideology the way you are doing just continues the cycle of hate. 

[rogue06]

The fact that you even try to ask the latter question shows you aren't asking me this in good faith. We are not talking about a generic mermaid here. We are talking about Ariel?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.Rxmt8glvOs7_PnH241L1ZAAAAA%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=4af0a3036d71f1397024ddd095f65d34c58a3651a532791ba7dc5befae0b1959&ipo=images.jpg

I've heard a similar defense of making Superman black. He's an alien from another planet. He can be any color.

In a sense that logic makes sense.

But it never stops there. We end up with an all-black Hamilton.