Quote from: Omega;1126069A bad string of movies or product can end up poisoning the well as it were. Sometimes inducing a rot that seeps into later product somehow. Sometimes not. I suspect any Star Trek or Star Wars or Marvel or DC to come out after all this all crashes will have a long struggle ahead of them. Moreso if any "fans" of the dark age productions attack the new for not meeting their demands. Like the new Ghostbusters movie seems to be getting.

That's the conventional wisdom, but I think we've seen many times before (though I freely admit that I can't think of an example on the spur of the moment) where a rotten franchise turned around with a single outstanding entry. Actually I think I can drop an example... Batman.  Batman was a joke character, dead in the water, until Frank Miller's Dark Knight.  Sure, that wasn't a movie.

Honestly, as tepid as I am regarding the Mandalorian, I think that if it wasn't being released concurrently with Shit Wars it very well could have been that sort of pendulum reversing example.  

I keep thinking of a sort of What If senario. The Rise of Skywalker, to me, exemplifies the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action.  By the time they began producing it they had to have some clue that the latest trilogy was utter ass, that they should have blue-printed out the trilogy rather than Mystery Boxing, and, from the perspective of Disney's Shareholders, that Kathleen Kennedy was a Toxic Boss less interested in making money than stroking her own ego on a four billion dollar franchise.  I mean: Even the actors were in all but open rebellion by the time they filmed Rise (Not limited to Mark Hamill either. Daisy Ridley, Ma-Rey Sue herself, along with John Boyega and a few others, has been making the rounds spilling tea now that the checks have cleared...).  When in a hole, the first thing to do is... stop digging.

Impossible as it is to imagine, it was entirely possible for Disney to simply make, at a minimum, a new second movie, declare The Last Jedi to be non-canon (not like they'd have to give back any of the money it made), and plow on from there.   It in no way could have cost them any more than releasing the incoherent mess of Rise (and the collateral damage to Solo, which by all accounts was a reasonably enjoyable film, but was also teh first commercial flop of the franchise as I recall...).

I can't stress this enough: They paid four billion dollars for this property.  The moment The Farce Awakens bifurcated the fanbase someone should have called a full stop on all current projects (if only for a few days) to figure out something better than handing a blank canvas to a guy with a track record of small personal films and a penchant for shit-stirring writing.

Quote from: Spike;1126081That's the conventional wisdom, but I think we've seen many times before (though I freely admit that I can't think of an example on the spur of the moment) where a rotten franchise turned around with a single outstanding entry. Actually I think I can drop an example... Batman.  Batman was a joke character, dead in the water, until Frank Miller's Dark Knight.  Sure, that wasn't a movie.

I disagree. That's very much an insult to all of what came before to the character. And also a different franchise type. Id says allot had to happen with Batman all at once in order to make him the icon he is today. And the Dark Knight rises was only one of those things.

Corporate culture is also very different in not only does it have the same usual problems of management always wanting to belay any responsibility for bad decisions, but admitting that any action taken in the past was bad is a way to spook shareholders. It's like your ship is controlled by rats, and even if it gets a leak they jump it even if by doing so they doom it more.
That's why corporate apologies always have this trend of: 'We did nothing wrong, and everything was great but here is what we are doing differently now that has nothing to do with decisions in the past (that where all great) but just happen to be radically different from them'.
For a corporation projecting an image of success is almost as important as actually being successful.

Even assuming all of the above isn't true, you can't walk back a story. A big part of selling it in the first place is making people think that what they are getting is important (when it isn't). If they walk it back and sell it again that will be an admitted black stain on Disney's reputation. And for Disney reputation is everything.

The Sonic Movie re-did sonic almost as a publicity stunt because they didn't have to pay for any of it. The way the system works they could just demand the animation team do it again without paying them even if the animation team just obeyed them in the first place. And yes the animation studio went bankrupt as a result of the demanded edits.

Its true Disney could market itself as 'A Corporation that obeys its fans' but it markets itself currently as 'The infallible corporation that makes everything you love'. It can't afford marketing itself as fallible.

[video=youtube_share;zsmqcLv8Q-4]https://youtu.be/zsmqcLv8Q-4[/youtube]

Quote from: Spike;1126081That's the conventional wisdom, but I think we've seen many times before (though I freely admit that I can't think of an example on the spur of the moment) where a rotten franchise turned around with a single outstanding entry. Actually I think I can drop an example... Batman.  Batman was a joke character, dead in the water, until Frank Miller's Dark Knight.  Sure, that wasn't a movie.

  Well, DC had been doing a lot of work with the character throughout the 70s and 80s to bring him back from where he'd been in the 60s, so it's not the single turnaround you might think.

  Now, Star Wars provides an example of a franchise that, while not a joke, was largely forgotten outside of a small community until a singular event--the release of Heir to the Empire in 1991.

  I really don't think you could get away with retconning away TLJ, though. You can do that with smaller productions in franchises with smaller and more dedicated audiences, but a major tentpole of a mass-market franchise? Not without severely confusing the typical moviegoer, and Disney's approach to SW has been all about making it mass-market accessible and selling it to the vast untapped market of potential girl fans.

Quote from: Spike;1126081That's the conventional wisdom, but I think we've seen many times before (though I freely admit that I can't think of an example on the spur of the moment) where a rotten franchise turned around with a single outstanding entry. Actually I think I can drop an example... Batman.  Batman was a joke character, dead in the water, until Frank Miller's Dark Knight.  Sure, that wasn't a movie.

Actually Miller later regretted the damaging impact his Dark Knight work had on the character and industry. It ushered in the dark age and thats persisted a long long time. Batman had seen a revival in the 70s and was actually in pretty good form well before Miller came along in the 80s to wreck things. From there it went down hill. Not up hill.

As for the character during the code era up to the 60s. That was in part outside problems plaguing every comic publisher for a while and also in part at the time comics were seen as "kids stuff" and not serious. Magnified by the codes sanitizing of everything they could.

As gfor the Mandalorian. Problem is it is not easily accessed and so is just at the edge of perception while in full view we have the ongoing train wreck in progress. And unfortunately it too could be ruined without notice. No clue how the books and comics are faring.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1126085Its true Disney could market itself as 'A Corporation that obeys its fans' but it markets itself currently as 'The infallible corporation that makes everything you love'. It can't afford marketing itself as fallible.

I should introduce you to a long forgotten business concept called 'Customer Service'.  

Why in the fuck would anyone expect a massive multinational business conglomerate to provide infallible anything?  Where does this attitude that we have to take what they give us, and like it, come from?

Bullshit.

Disney exists to entertain ME. Well me and everyone else. If we are not being entertained by what they are putting out, its on THEM, not US, to change.   Hollywood, and Disney in particular, seem to have not merely forgotten that, but actually inverted it.  In a healthy business environment, the statements by Alex Kurtzman, re: the fans of Star Trek, would have been grounds for a very sudden and sharp dismissal.

There is a reason a whole bunch of people, myself included, are no longer buying entertainment. I don't watch movies*, I don't watch TV or streaming services, and I'm hardly alone in this.  When I feel compelled to, I've got hundreds of DVDs from back when Entertainment was, you know, entertaining.







*Ok, like a fat guy on a diet I have had one or two cheat days in the last few years. Mostly MCU movies, like Infinity War. I'm not a saint.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1126109I really don't think you could get away with retconning away TLJ, though. You can do that with smaller productions in franchises with smaller and more dedicated audiences, but a major tentpole of a mass-market franchise? Not without severely confusing the typical moviegoer, and Disney's approach to SW has been all about making it mass-market accessible and selling it to the vast untapped market of potential girl fans.

I said it was unthinkable, but I don't think it would be as hard a sell as you imagine, especially with guys like Mark Hamill carrying water.   Sure, ideally the massive structural problems with The Last Jedi, vis a vis a trilogy, would have been identified before release (ideally during scripting), but I imagine had they come out with a press release announcing the intent to 'reboot' the second film around instead of doing Rise of Skywalker, with the support of the cast, along with some appropriate apologetic boilerplate and a new name so it isn't confusing... followed a few years later by a Rise that wasn't a bodge job mess (though still: Removing JJ Abrams from any and all scripting duties until the End of Days would be a good start.  Fucking mystery box... That should have been a career ending speech right there...).

But, and this is entirely my fault, this is a Star Trek thread, not a Star Wars thread...

Star Trek actually makes it easy. Simply put together a show that is in the Original Timeline, and quietly let this Kelvin Timeline die-off.  Solving Canon issues is easy. STD and Picard are Kelvin Timeline, thus we don't have to wonder how they fit in the Main Canon, end of debate.   As with the other properties, the solution is as always... find an actual writer and pay him to actually write. It worked with the Nolan Batman (salvaging the Schumacher Batman debacle...), it can work for Star Trek.

Quote from: Spike;1126135Why in the fuck would anyone expect a massive multinational business conglomerate to provide infallible anything?  Where does this attitude that we have to take what they give us, and like it, come from?

The fact that 95% of people take whatever they give and they like it?

Your assumptions on how buisness works and how corporations remain profitable are...optimistic.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1126160The fact that 95% of people take whatever they give and they like it?

Your assumptions on how buisness works and how corporations remain profitable are...optimistic.

Not at all.  I am well aware of how endemic government corruption protects and encourages these massive monopolies (Disney's long run of warping and distorting IP laws is exhibit A...) I am also well aware that despite that Disney almost died out in the late 80's, and that it was the extraordinary efforts of Menken and Ashman as craftsmen that turned things around for Disney in the 90's. True, mostly for writing music but here writing that music into the story, as extensions of character, theme and plot... you know, all those things a writer should be bringing rather than 'where can we stick the lens flare in this scene'.

Corrupt, protected monopolistic entertainment companies still can't force people to buy crap, and increasingly people aren't.  I expect the market would have collapsed a few years ago but for the Chinese market... but signs are increasingly pointing to the fact that the Chinese aren't putting up with this shit either.

When the Transformers franchise pulled ahead as one of the biggest box office successes, I gave up on people's taste in films.
I mean, I myself kind of liked the first one, despite the Bayisms. But the sequels tossed all the potential for them to be any kind of fun Transformers films, and they became the filmgoing equivalent of a 6 year old banging pots and pans for 2 hours.
I don't mind bad movies, I do mind it when terrible films become huge sucesses and set the standard for other films to follow them down the hole of suckitude.

Quote from: Spike;1126214Corrupt, protected monopolistic entertainment companies still can't force people to buy crap, and increasingly people aren't.  I expect the market would have collapsed a few years ago but for the Chinese market... but signs are increasingly pointing to the fact that the Chinese aren't putting up with this shit either.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1126246When the Transformers franchise pulled ahead as one of the biggest box office successes, I gave up on people's taste in films.

I'm more with Ratman here. For me, there's a lot of what I think of as crap movies that do extremely well in the market -- and many good films that do poorly.

I think too often people confuse their personal taste with what sells best.

I think it's pretty clear from the market data that Disney is really good at creating stuff that sells well. I think that's not a coincidence -- there's a lot of skill and talent that goes into their products, even if I often don't like the results.

Quote from: jhkim;1126283I'm more with Ratman here. For me, there's a lot of what I think of as crap movies that do extremely well in the market -- and many good films that do poorly.

I think too often people confuse their personal taste with what sells best.

I think it's pretty clear from the market data that Disney is really good at creating stuff that sells well. I think that's not a coincidence -- there's a lot of skill and talent that goes into their products, even if I often don't like the results.

My hope is that the "wokeness" of the creators provides sufficient motivation for the studios to "reorganize" their structures and get right of idiots like Kurtzman and Chabon. I don't directly fault their personal politics, but I do think their lack of skill and talent is part of the reason why their politics is so transparent and anvil-icious in their creations.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1126289My hope is that the "wokeness" of the creators provides sufficient motivation for the studios to "reorganize" their structures and get right of idiots like Kurtzman and Chabon. I don't directly fault their personal politics, but I do think their lack of skill and talent is part of the reason why their politics is so transparent and anvil-icious in their creations.

I don't think the penny has dropped yet. Once it becomes acceptable to say in public (and in movies) that the woke can be publicly satirized in at least mildly cutting ways (like with hippies) then people like him will be purged and not instantly replaced by the same tier of an idiot.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee;1126294I don't think the penny has dropped yet. Once it becomes acceptable to say in public (and in movies) that the woke can be publicly satirized in at least mildly cutting ways (like with hippies) then people like him will be purged and not instantly replaced by the same tier of an idiot.

So you haven't heard the rather pithy comment that gets leveled constantly at almost everything produced by hollywood these days: "Get Woke, Go Broke".  Its not exactly satire, I know, but Disney especially has practically created a cottage industry of youtube film critics utterly savaging their films and shows.

Quote from: Spike;1126327So you haven't heard the rather pithy comment that gets leveled constantly at almost everything produced by hollywood these days: "Get Woke, Go Broke".  Its not exactly satire, I know, but Disney especially has practically created a cottage industry of youtube film critics utterly savaging their films and shows.

Niche. Very niche, and generally shares the same audience, on a platform moving to get rid of them. Once it's being made fun of on TV (IE bottom of the barrel) then it's sticking.