The shift is already happening behind the scenes at studios. The market has spoken and its time to shift away from the types of films we’ve endured for five years.
Summer of 2022 is gone and it is taking the corpse of the woke narrative push with it. Hollywood, though unlikely to ever repent or admit defeat, is tucking tail and giving up on pushing the unwashed masses from seeing the secular light. September was the worst month in Hollywood domestic box office history or at least for the last thirty years. I highly recommend this article from Manu Lopez that goes into just how bad it was. It was driven by the wokest of woke films and they’ve left Tinsel Town with nothing but bitter tears.
Even SNL has figured out that it nearly killed itself. They might not know how to be funny anymore, but SNL mocking itself for being unfunny is the sort of meta commentary on how badly postmodern, narcissistic neomarxism has hurt entertainment. Nothing inside that bubble is funny or exciting. It’s all just deflating… for audiences and for economies.
Of course, you’ll almost certainly not hear any of this in the mainstream press, nor in the access media for that matter. Think back over the last twelve months and what you get is a very strong pattern decided by the market. No matter what you’ve heard, the market is the deciding factor when it comes to what gets made and what gets shelved. Double that factor when the economy is heading into a global recession… which it, in fact, is certainly doing. Studios can’t afford to have worst-months-in-thirty-years on a regular basis. They definitely can’t afford it when inflation should make that nearly impossible plus the economy is about to wallop their budgets.
It’s the same story over on streaming. She-Hulk may have increased its viewing minutes from “very, very bad” to just “very bad” in the last week for Nielsen numbers, but that isn’t changing the Marvel situation. Disney+ subscriptions are supposed to be going up, even if modestly on the domestic side. Why, then, are the Marvel live action shows drawing smaller numbers of viewers? That’s the antithesis of what Disney wants to see. And the only way that happens is if you are producing the antithesis of what the market wants you to give them. A quick glance at the other Marvel live action properties shows the same — sputtering out for a franchise that is on the decline. Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, She-Hulk… they’re all series that are less popular than the series that came before them. If a report out of Whip Media is true (and it very well may not be) that Andor pulled a smaller audience than She-Hulk on its debut weekend, it won’t be the patriarchy that will be smashed. It will be Kathleen Kennedy’s Lucasfilm. If you can’t beat She-Hulk’s ratings, you’re doing something very wrong.Devil in Ohio on Netflix is beating She-Hulk and I’ll bet you the average person on the street has no idea what that might be. What does that say for Marvel’s best impression of Princess Fiona?
Nolte: Woke 'Bros' Delivers Another Weekend Box Office Bust https://t.co/6AgFNasiQO
— John Ocasio-Rodham Nolte (@NolteNC) October 1, 2022
Then you take a look at House of the Dragon out of HBO. The show is double dipping with presentations on cable plus streaming. Yet it’s not far behind Rings of Power for Amazon Prime even though Amazon Prime is solely a streaming affair. When you combine the ratings for cable and streaming, House of the Dragon is likely ahead of Rings of Power…and it almost certainly will be after the initial debut impressions take effect. If you’re Jeff Bezos and you’ve spent a billion dollars on the most expensive television production in history, you probably don’t want to be running neck-and-neck (best case scenario) with a Game of Thrones spinoff. You sure don’t want to be in that situation while your cast and crew make your show out to be as woke as possible. Clearly that’s not working.
So the market is already giving its final answer on the trend that will have become a faded fad soon enough. Replacing strong narrative and meritocratic heroes with identity politics and tribalism is a dead endeavor. It’ll take a few years for all the pipeline gunk to be flushed out, similar to what is happening at Warner Bros Discovery right now. But eventually we’re going to move on from this like we moved on from Soap Opera style motion smoothing on televisions. Yeah, it’s still available, but all the cool kids know to leave it alone. That’s the same with this woke junk. The market has spoken and we’re leaving it behind.
You won’t get a big apology out of the studios. Disney and Bob Chapek aren’t going to release some statement letting you know they’ve changed strategies. It’s just going to happen quietly. We’ll see more of these movies fail over the winter and we’ll all move to the next topic. Those who were true believers will shriek and contemplate how the world can be so obtuse, so hateful — but the rest of us will just move on. I would say it was a fun experiment but it wasn’t.
So back we go to a world where Hugh Jackman returning as Wolverine is a cagey Hollywood decision that brings testosterone-loving audiences to theaters. Back we go to a world where real world practical effects dazzle audiences and make them wonder how in the world they pulled it off. It won’t be every movie but it’s the destination now. All the studios know it, all the CEOs know it. The temperature has shifted, the thermostat is different. China is a dead market for Hollywood and everyone’s tired of the postmodern stuff too. Let’s get back to the action.
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