That you think they’re going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
Lets look at Disney and Hollywood (universities are their own weird thing). The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision. The leadership at big media companies didn’t change much over the last decade or two, nor likely did their opinions (whatever those actually are). But after gay marriage gained significantly above 50% approval rate in the US and the Obergefell decision happened it became clear to them that it was safe to be at least somewhat socially progressive on issues like that, and would be profitable.
But equally, almost every single “woke” Disney movie has the “woke” components carefully contained such that they can easily be excised for markets where they are a problem. You see a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars, it gets cut for the Chinese and Middle East markets. Disney has many very progressive employees who are responsible for making the actual art they produce; artists lean pretty strongly progressive in my experience, so of course the employees’ values come out in the art they make. But the management puts very strict limits on what they can do precisely because anything less milquetoast is believed to be less profitable.
That you think they’re going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
…and then you go on to describe how Disney is in fact selling movies with woke components to the West, which is exactly what I was talking about.
Just… don’t do this. I’m not available for this kind of psychoanalysis. I find it extremely difficult to engage in good faith when people make moves like this one. My biases are my business. If you think I’m missing something, just point it out. Don’t try to diagnose my failures of rationality.
Karma downvote for lack of introspection into failures of rationality in a rationality forum. Agreement upvote for “don’t do this” because “that is telling of your own biases” without naming any is just not engaging. It was sadly a throwaway starting line to an otherwise excellent comment.
I’m cool with your assessment. Just to be clear, I’m not refusing to introspect. I’m not available for the kind of social move issued. That’s a separate question from willingness to introspect. My introspection is based on my judgment, not directly from social pressure. In fact I try to make whether I introspect and make adjustments immune to direct social pressure. To do otherwise strikes me as opening a port that’s really epistemically hazardous to open.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney’s localizing movies for China means that Disney isn’t a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.
More telling than Disney’s localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers, and in fact ought to be easier for Disney to cater to as an American company.
More telling than Disney’s localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers [...]
What’s profitable for an independent filmmaker isn’t necessarily a market opportunity worth pursuing for Disney. Disney, Paramount, and the other major studios operate on an entirely different scale than independent filmmakers. Given the amount of corporate overhead that they have, a film that returns less than several hundred million dollars in profit, mostly due to merchandising and theme park tie-ins, in some ways, just isn’t worth it.
It’s not just the Christian right who are being neglected by this reality. Pretty much every film genre other than action/adventure and superhero has suffered. When was the last time we saw a major studio fund a small-to-medium budget comedy? Or romance? Drama still gets funding because those films win awards, but it’s unclear even how long that will last.
Okay, fine, maybe not Disney specifically, but Hollywood is perfectly capable of making explicitly political movies like Knives Out iff they are explicitly politically leftist. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are not getting paid to act in analogous movies for other political factions in American politics, and right wing themes, undertones, or acknowledgements are not getting inserted into mainstream high budget action/adventure movies even to a token degree like left-wing ones do.
That you think they’re going super hard woke (especially Disney) is perhaps telling of your own biases.
Lets look at Disney and Hollywood (universities are their own weird thing). The reality is that in the Anglosphere there are lots of progressive people with money to spend on media. You can sell “woke” media to those people, and lots of it. Even more so when there’s controversy and you can get naive lefties to believe paying money to the megacorp to watch a mainstream show is a way to somehow strike back against the mean right-wingers. And to progressive people it doesn’t feel like “being lectured to about politics”, because that’s not what media with a political/values message you agree with feels like. So going woke is 100% a profit-motivated decision. The leadership at big media companies didn’t change much over the last decade or two, nor likely did their opinions (whatever those actually are). But after gay marriage gained significantly above 50% approval rate in the US and the Obergefell decision happened it became clear to them that it was safe to be at least somewhat socially progressive on issues like that, and would be profitable.
But equally, almost every single “woke” Disney movie has the “woke” components carefully contained such that they can easily be excised for markets where they are a problem. You see a gay kiss in the background of a scene in Star Wars, it gets cut for the Chinese and Middle East markets. Disney has many very progressive employees who are responsible for making the actual art they produce; artists lean pretty strongly progressive in my experience, so of course the employees’ values come out in the art they make. But the management puts very strict limits on what they can do precisely because anything less milquetoast is believed to be less profitable.
…and then you go on to describe how Disney is in fact selling movies with woke components to the West, which is exactly what I was talking about.
Just… don’t do this. I’m not available for this kind of psychoanalysis. I find it extremely difficult to engage in good faith when people make moves like this one. My biases are my business. If you think I’m missing something, just point it out. Don’t try to diagnose my failures of rationality.
Karma downvote for lack of introspection into failures of rationality in a rationality forum.
Agreement upvote for “don’t do this” because “that is telling of your own biases” without naming any is just not engaging. It was sadly a throwaway starting line to an otherwise excellent comment.
I’m cool with your assessment. Just to be clear, I’m not refusing to introspect. I’m not available for the kind of social move issued. That’s a separate question from willingness to introspect. My introspection is based on my judgment, not directly from social pressure. In fact I try to make whether I introspect and make adjustments immune to direct social pressure. To do otherwise strikes me as opening a port that’s really epistemically hazardous to open.
they were in fact just pointing it out.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney’s localizing movies for China means that Disney isn’t a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.
More telling than Disney’s localizing for China at all is the fact that they refuse to make high budget, well marketed movies catering to (for example) the Christian right, even though such a niche has proven to be very profitable for independent filmmakers, and in fact ought to be easier for Disney to cater to as an American company.
What’s profitable for an independent filmmaker isn’t necessarily a market opportunity worth pursuing for Disney. Disney, Paramount, and the other major studios operate on an entirely different scale than independent filmmakers. Given the amount of corporate overhead that they have, a film that returns less than several hundred million dollars in profit, mostly due to merchandising and theme park tie-ins, in some ways, just isn’t worth it.
It’s not just the Christian right who are being neglected by this reality. Pretty much every film genre other than action/adventure and superhero has suffered. When was the last time we saw a major studio fund a small-to-medium budget comedy? Or romance? Drama still gets funding because those films win awards, but it’s unclear even how long that will last.
Okay, fine, maybe not Disney specifically, but Hollywood is perfectly capable of making explicitly political movies like Knives Out iff they are explicitly politically leftist. Chris Evans and Ana de Armas are not getting paid to act in analogous movies for other political factions in American politics, and right wing themes, undertones, or acknowledgements are not getting inserted into mainstream high budget action/adventure movies even to a token degree like left-wing ones do.