[Variety] Disney's Boy Trouble: Corp seeking ways to win back young men

[coolbeans]

the-pi-guy said:

coolbeans said:

I mean... I guess part of our disagreement stems from reading the room differently.  This kind of overinflated proportionality to these complaints just doesn't ring as genuine - aside from the most radical of responses.  Most people rebuking Disney Wars aren't mentally framing this as a mini-9/11 or whatever, but rather directly responding the elephant in the room.  To see why Disney's lost their influence with this particular market just look at the slop they've recently made.

I do think the reaction is wildly disproportional. 
Your first post was in response to a T-shirt that someone happened to have worn 7 years ago. Yet it's the kind of response that I would give to something if they had some wide marketing campaign - spend 6 or 12 months saying that Star Wars is only for women, and the next Jedi is going to be wearing a pink dress.  

I think the reality of these struggles is not driven by Disney's motivations, I think it's just fundamentally challenging to make something really good in the first place, and it's challenging to continue something.  

As you mentioned yourself, some Star Wars fans don't even like George Lucas's changes in the prequel trilogy. I would guess the reason isn't that George Lucas decided he didn't like his fans.

How much harder do you think it is when you try to pass off a franchise to a completely different group of people - who might not have the talent or they might have found something appealing with the original that is very different from most fans.

Or how hard it is in general to build on something? How many stories have poor sequels? It seems like it is very hard to come up with a great idea for a story and characters in the first place, and it seems like it is even harder for creators to expand on those ideas in a meaningful way that is as well loved. It is pretty rare for a sequel to be as critically acclaimed as the original. The Godfather 2 seems like a rare exception, only for Godfather 3 to be talked about very poorly.  

None of this requires any kind of indifference or malice towards a fanbase.  

Wait a minute.  You're highlighting my initial comment as an example of wildly disproportional?  I guess I underestimated how we were reading the room differently, or even other people's motivations.  For starters, to leverage so much on my short & snide jab at Disney's huge fumble (that they themselves are admitting) is tough for me to comprehend  And why does it matter how old an image is when the one overseeing Star Wars still seemingly holds to the same sentiment today?  These extra thresholds about 'wide marketing campaigns' and whatnot you're introducing are arbitrary, and seem to disregard what I was reflexively getting across and have since expounded on in my previous reply.  It still seems like you're trying to frame this discussion like I'm saying "men are under attack" in this context instead of something less inflammatory.

Oh, I certainly agree about the difficulty of making quality sequels, especially so for new trilogies.  I recall a random roundtable interview with then-CEO Bob Iger talking about the time spent producing The Sequel Trilogy and George Lucas quickly butts in to say "it takes 10 years if you're doing it right" (or something like that).  Even if no one can diagnose Disney's fumbles as indifference nor malice towards its fanbase, I'd still argue there is such a thing as "creative negligence".  Overrelying on candy without any proper nourishment will lead any franchise into feeling stale.  A couple of examples during Disney Wars tenure:

-Throwing away GL's Episode 7-9 story treatments which would've ventured into new creative territory.

-Limiting what'll likely be its crown jewel, the Andor series, from a potential 5-season series down to 2 seasons.  Out of all creatives within Disney's hemisphere, Tony Gilroy is the only one they can't corral (so to speak).  He's one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hollywood today.

These moves are rather predictable for a mega-corporation.