Push And Pull

We're about a dozen days into the release of Disney's live-action remake of Snow White. In case you missed it, this production has been a giant cluster[redacted], with delays, re-shoots, an initial batch of "magical creatures" replacing the original dwarfs but who were later CGI'd out of existence and replaced with CGI dwarfs, a rewriting of the tale to turn Snow White into a girl-boss, and the show's star setting social media on fire by deriding the original film and calling the original prince "a stalker." Apparently, waking a poisoned and comatose Snow by kissing her without her permission is kinjiru, verboten, this-shall-not-pass in 2025.

All this stürm und drang ballooned production costs to $240-270M, which in Hollywood terms (marketing, distribution, and movie-house shares) means the film needs to make $500M in sales to break even. As of March 30, after its second weekend, it was only about a quarter of the way there. With a drop of 66% from its first weekend, it’s firmly in “bomb” territory.

Another flop for the Mouse House, the place that just a few years ago was printing money via the massive Marvel Cinematic Universe cultural phenomenon. The MCU lost its way after 2019's Avengers Endgame and Spiderman: Far From Home. While some the dozen movies released since made real bank, MCU went from "must-see" to "who cares" in the blink of an eye.

This is in no small part due to a fundamental shift in storytelling - an infection of wokeness and a "preach rather than entertain" mindset.

The always brilliant Thomas Sowell summed it up thus:

There was a time when movies were made for audiences. Today they're made to lecture them.

Thing is, people don't like to be lectured, especially when they don't believe they've done anything to deserve the condescension and "we are better than you" messaging. And they certainly don't like to be called "-ists" or have things they cherish blithely and arrogantly derided.

Since market forces are inexorable, things that are unpopular eventually end up costing. Snow White 2025 is apparently not a terrible movie, and "The Message" isn't by some accounts as blatant as some might expect, but the girl-boss re-telling isn't something that audiences clamored for, as the lackluster box office shows us.

Thing is, Disney should have seen this coming. It pushed several such "men, who needs them?" offering at us in the MCU, ignoring the reality that superhero comics are primarily the province of boys. I touched on this disconnect here and here.

Meanwhile, Disney's stock price has halved in just the past four years. Consumers have heard "The Message" and found it wanting. This was obvious a couple years ago, and while Snow White began production in 2020 so it can be excused as "already committed to," I figure the overall feedback still hasn't sunk into the brainpan of Disney's C-suiters and creatives.

This is in no small part due to the mindset that prompted the "lecturing" fixation in the first place. A "we are better than the masses to whom we sell" arrogance. Like conspiracy theorists, actual evidence doesn't deter these... "elites," to borrow Thomas Sowell's label.

Thus, it's no coincidence that wokism and socialism are bosom buddies. Both eschew the realities of human behavior known a "market forces" in favor of top-down instructions - instructions that are not to be questioned or challenged or resisted. It's why they scold us and tell us how wrong we are when we don't obey and comply, and why all their post hoc analyses of failures, whether they be movie flops or election debacles, inevitably rely on deriding the consumers/voters rather than on asking "what did we get wrong?"

This also goes hand-in-hand with David Mamet's pithy description of socialism as "abdication of responsibility." Of course it's not Disney's fault that Snow White and The Marvels and She-Hulk and The Acolyte and other Mary Sue offerings flopped, it's the fault of the bigoted and Neanderthal audience for not understanding and accepting that they need to get more woke.

And, of course Kamala Harris's electoral debacle was due to poor message delivery rather than the message itself. This is made clear by the Left's demands that the Democratic Party go even more socialist rather than saying “the voters don’t want this, let’s adjust.”

This is also made clear by the escalations in political violence (see: burning Teslas) and calls for more of the same by the people who claim to be the protectors of Democracy and the only ones who care about their fellow humans.

Back in business school, a marketing professor told us that companies cannot force anyone to something they don't want. This seemed a bit "academic" to me, since clever marketers can sucker people into making purchases of things that they neither want nor need, but it is true that even in those situations people are making conscious choices. Time and experience make consumers wiser, and every past occurrence makes it less likely that a person can be as easily suckered into the next one.

So it seems be with woke entertainment. Audiences are tuning out, and it really does appear to be only the stubbornness of Hollywood execs (along with residual fear of the largely defanged cancel mob) that is the last obstacle to movies and TV again being made for audiences.

With one caveat: that which I call the "fresh fool" problem. Every child that grows into a young adult is fresh prey for the marketers... and for the socialists. There will always be a steady stream of such, and one of the Left's greatest achievements is its capture of the halls of academia.

That capture, straight out of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov's playbook, will take decades to unravel - if it can ever be unraveled. But, as with entertainment and elections, the consumers are wising up. College enrollment is down, and the most storied institutions are finding they need to change in order to keep up with the times.

The Best-and-Brightest believe they can push society in the direction they believe to be best. What they continue to fail to realize is that market forces, which as I already noted are a manifestation of human nature, are all about pulling. Force can override or deflect market forces for a while, but only a while. A blockage in a stream will slow or stop water flowing, but eventually the water finds a way. If the Best-and-Brightest want to teach, they need to craft lessons that resonate, that make sense, and that align with the better part of our natures. This is how real human progress happens, and the Enlightenment is one of the greatest examples of that.

Pushing, on the other hand?

You can easily pull a string. Try pushing one sometime.