Go woke, go broke has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:always been a fickle beast. It's being used right now, as we speak, to explain why The Marvels is 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's worst MCU-era gross, but the first movie in the series, the equally woke Captain Marvel, made over a billion. It was used as a cudgel against Mario for making Princess Peach into a fearless warrior then, when that also cleared a billion, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:people decided it wasn't actually woke at all and was proof that movies don't need to be so woke. Even Wish, a movie that says nothing about anything, is being tarred with this slogan, and Frozen 2 (which, you guessed it, made over a billion), has palatable environmentalism while being as overt as possible with its covert queer themes, including Elsa running off to live in the woods with her girlfriend. Now Disney CEO Bob Iger has weighed in.

Speaking at New York Times’ DealBook Summit, with key fragments of his speech posted , Iger said movies should “entertain first, not [push] messages”, adding that while “positive messages for the world” are part of Disney's image, they shouldn't be the central focus. It's 'go woke, go broke' by any other name, but it does strike a little closer to the issue than that online war cry. Your movies have to be good, that's movies 101. The issue is some too-online professional whiners think anything that could possibly qualify a movie as woke automatically rules it out from being good, and in the case of Captain Marvel, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Frozen 2 (and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Black Panther, and Barbie, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars: The Force Awakens...), it seems audiences don't agree.

Don't get me wrong, there is definitely an issue with modern progressive politics seeing good as the enemy of perfect, and dismissing earnest attempts to show realistic messiness as problematic, causing some creators to go more heavy-handed in their messaging - my colleague Jade King recently spoke to ND Stevenso🍌n and Molly Ostertag at length on this very is🎀sue. It's all well and good to say that art without belief behind it is pointless, but so is belief without art. Sometimes a cool robot is just a cool robot.

That's not to say I agree with Iger, per se. I just don't think he's wrong in the way most people think he's wrong. The 'go woke, go broke' crowd see this as a victory, and the rest do what I just did and point out how many quote-unquote woke movies make a killing at the box office. But more to the point, does 'messaging' have any correlation to Disney's successes and failures?

2023 is the first non-pandemic year since 2014 where Disney didn't have a billion-dollar movie

Make no mistake, The Marvels is a flop. With three female leads, two of which are women of colour, and an insight into Muslim life in America, it is a woke movie. But Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which has no woke messaging whatsoever and is led by a white man, 168𒅌澳洲幸运5开奖网:also flopped, failing to clear $500 million. The Little Mermaid barely cleared $500 million itself, a far cry from The Lion King's live-action remake making a billion, and again, has no messaging to speak of. There's no feminist twist on the original, it's just the original. She trades her voice for a man she just met, then marries him. She's Black, but if that's the level of messaging we're talking about then we might as well all quit and go home.

Likewise, that's the only possible charge of wokeness you could bring against Wish, which is flopping with poor reviews - that's in major contrast to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the extremely woke Turning Red, which was a streaming smash hit after Disney, running scared of pandemic audiences, pulled it from theatres. Lightyear had a lot of controversy around an extremely small scene, but this was two women kissing in the background for one second - and the movie otherwise reviewed very poorly. Again, it's not messaging to have Black people, women, or gay people in your movies (see Black Panther, Barbie, and Bohemian Rhapsody for further examples of major hits).

Mario and🐠 Barbie are the only movies to clear $1 billion in 2023. Oppenheimer is third, with $950 million.

Messaging can be heavy-handed. Disney's Baymax showed a trans man buying pads, and we knew he was trans because hℱe wore a trans flag on his s🦄hirt. Well, the entire shirt was a trans flag. At the time I thought it was sweet, heart's in the right place kinda stuff, but I 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:also see that it's very clunky. But one scene in the Baymax show does not define modern Disney. The reasons for Disney's string of failures are far simpler.

Firstly, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it's a quality issue. The live-action sequels have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:burned audiences too often, and The Little Mermaids' marketing looking like grey sludge (plus the overall 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:misuse of Halle Bailey's R&B pipes) meant people didn't show up. Wish's marketing has also gone awry, with critics panning the ending (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:it's even worse than you've heard) and the movie's total lack of substance causing it to rely on the thin motivations of the antagonist, which were advertised so badly people ended up agreeing with him.

With The Marvels, you needed to watch three different TV shows as well as the original movie, not to mention the general exhaustion of keeping up with the MCU at large. I wrote when it was revealed that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:wokeness wouldn't be the reason it failed, and I stand by it. In 2024, Marvel is putting all its eggs in Deadpool 3's basket, and while it's not woke, it's an R-rated comedy threequel banking on two different generation's worth of nostalgia - it's a big risk.

The other issue is Disney has trained its audiences to wait. In order to bolster Disney Plus as it raced to catch up with Amazon Prime and Netflix, several movies (like Encanto and Turning Red, both huge crowd pleasers) had their theatrical runs cut short or cancelled to beef up the streaming platform. While movies like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: The Way of Water can offer a must-see theatrical experience that will get cinemas packed, for so-so offerings, audiences have been trained to wait a 🐓few weeks to see it at home where the snacks are free and the bathroom breaks are plentiful.

Bob Iger might think entertainment needs to outweigh messages, but the biggest message Disney has been sending audiences is 'wait until it's on Disney Plus'. It's that message, not anything connected to wokeness, that Disney needs to address if it wants to see a billion dollar gross on the board again.