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

[EricHiggin]

Mummelmann said:

Darc Requiem said:

Reading through this thread has been everything I expected, unfortunately. Variety, like most legacy media, is just coming around to fact has been exspoused by others for years. As has been the case, especially in the last 5 years or so. Content creators, on Youtube in particular, will point out a failing in entertainment media, get labelled as every pejorative in the book for it, then that very same legacy media will post the same views years later like it's a great epiphany.

Disney has gone out of it's way to tear down the aspects and/or characters that appealed to male audience in its IP. The audience expressed their issues, got ignored, and So they left. Anything that appeals to the male audience is viewed bad and/or archiac in Hollywood, so they refuse to make products that will sell to that audience. Ironically a lot of the elements that appeal to a male audience, appeals to the female audience as well. So when they alter things to appeal to female audience, not only to they turn off the male audience, they produce something that unappealing to the female viewers as well.

This is a big reason why Eastern entertainment IP has found great success. They have no issues making content targeted at a specific audience. Not everything is sanitized to "appeal to everyone". You get things like Solo Leveling and My Happy Marriage. The real way to "appeal to everyone" is not alter one property in a one size fits all fashion, but to produce a wide spectrum of properties with different target audiences. That's how you often get surprise hits with crossover appeal.

Side note: It amazes me how properties I grew up with wrote women better than content today. You wouldn't the Sara Connor of T2 in today's media. Instead of using expert tactics to take down men twice her size, she'd fight them straight up and win. Hell Ripley came into reality the year I was born.

Bold, italic, and underlined; this is the simple answer, right here. I agree 100% with this - if all things carry the same message, themes, structure, and overall feel, nothing is unique, and nothing has flavor. Another post I quoted had a similar take, where they used the top-ten grossing films in a certain period to point out just how different the productions were from one-another. Where we used to have a spectrum of colors, today's entertainment is often written and produced into a beige sludge. 

This is the precise issue I take with modern entertainment; everyone injects the same ingredients, baking time is the only difference, and perhaps some sprinkles. In a twist of irony as hilarious as it is tragic, the chase for diversity has led us into the least diverse period of entertainment in a very long time (in idea, opinion, endeavor, vision, and messaging, not sexuality or ethnicity). One can only hope that the creative industries manage to tie together the latter part within the parentheses with more dynamic and organic versions of the points before it. If we get to a place where hyper-capitalizing on messaging and any form of grandstanding is no longer seen as the main objective, there's still hope, and all involved parties will be better off for it.

You could almost say it lacks "diversity".

Problem is, this is much harder to accomplish. Creating new IP and having it end up popular and a big deal is much easier said than done at any time. Far worse, if your group, that you usually hire from, isn't as creative as they used to be, or is practically 'bankrupt' creatively, especially if they're all in line with "a new message" needed to be spread, to accomplish "a new goal".

It's much easier to take what's already popular, and try to inject new theme's and idea's, etc, into them instead. Best case scenario, it works. Worst case scenario, the industry burns to the ground, which isn't a problem, because it was supposedly a "problem" to begin with and needed to be "changed" in some manner anyway. Usually you should assume stupidity instead of wrongdoing, but sometimes it's not always stupidity.