Writer and actors on STRIKE. Most main stream TV and Movies come to a stand still

[93gilmour93]

What does "woke nonsense" mean, can you give specific examples?


Didn't Barbie make a gazillion dollars despite being man hating or whatever?

Doesn't that directly contradict your theory?

That’s why I say most. Barbie did very well but it doesn’t change the fact of all the examples of movies bombing out cause of bad script/writing. It helped that Barbie looks like what everyone remembered unlike for example the upcoming Snow White movie that’s flipped everything on its head and will no doubt crap out

 

[Finlandia WOAT]

That’s why I say most. Barbie did very well but it doesn’t change the fact of all the examples of movies bombing out cause of bad script/writing

Here's a list of flops from 2019, which ones are woke?

X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Cats
Terminator: Dark Fate
The Goldfinch
Gemini Man
Richard Jewell
Charlie's Angels
UglyDolls
Midway
Playmobil

The Biggest Box Office Hits and Flops of 2019

From "Avengers: Endgame" to "Cats," here are the biggest box office hits and misses of 2019.

variety.com

Meanwhile Avengers: Endgame had that one scene where all the women fought together at the end. Does that make it "woke"? That's the highest grossing movie of all time!

EDIT: I like this list of hits because it puts the unambiguously "woke" film Us (using the classic definition as African-Americans being aware of racism around them) as a hit next to Joker, a film that may or may not be "woke", depending on how we're defining it.

 

[93gilmour93]

Here's a list of flops from 2019, which ones are woke?

X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Cats
Terminator: Dark Fate
The Goldfinch
Gemini Man
Richard Jewell
Charlie's Angels
UglyDolls
Midway
Playmobil

I haven’t seen any of those movies. I’ve only heard of four of them

 

[Finlandia WOAT]

I haven’t seen any of those movies. I’ve only heard of four of them

Have you considered that what is happening is, you are listening to people who are cherry picking data (Hollywood flops) in order to push a specific political agenda?

 

[93gilmour93]

Have you considered that what is happening is, you are listening to people who are cherry picking data (Hollywood flops) in order to push a specific political agenda?

No I try to watch them for myself when it comes to tv/movies. I hardly ever listen to people review movies outside of the industry. I just know personally I try lots of shows/movies and end up turning them off. I watch 90% horror so those movies are pretty cut and dry. I have however seen the woke mob attack characters like Michael Myers in Halloween Kills because he killed two gay characters so clearly the conclusion was Myers is a homophobe

 

[John Price]

I'm so tired of people using woke as a broad label for films. In Terminator: Dark Fate people flipped out over the whole premise of the film because Spoiler

Spoiler

John Connor gets killed like 3 seconds into the film and they push a new female John Connor while phasing out the old guard, and then people took this as literal umbrage. Now, if you want to say doing that makes T1 and T2 irrelevant, fine, but the whole narrative from angry nerds was that this made Terminator Dark Fate woke because John Connor was now a Hispanic Woman

If you can cope with that narrative then you will enjoy the film because it's actually not that bad. But that point hit a lot of people hard.

 

[JustNapalmIt]

Have you considered that what is happening is, you are listening to people who are cherry picking data (Hollywood flops) in order to push a specific political agenda?

Nah. Say it aint so.

 

[93gilmour93]

I'm so tired of people using woke as a broad label for films. In Terminator: Dark Fate people flipped out over the whole premise of the film because Spoiler

Spoiler

John Connor gets killed like 3 seconds into the film and they push a new female John Connor while phasing out the old guard, and then people took this as literal umbrage. Now, if you want to say doing that makes T1 and T2 irrelevant, fine, but the whole narrative from angry nerds was that this made Terminator Dark Fate woke because John Connor was now a Hispanic Woman

If you can cope with that narrative then you will enjoy the film because it's actually not that bad. But that point hit a lot of people hard.

So a Terminator movie which has always revolved around the John Connor/Sarah Connor character which has made it successful decides to kill off John right away, replace him with a new character that Terminator fans don’t know and people wonder why it failed. This is exactly why these movies fail to be honest. Why not create a new movie with new characters instead of changing up an huge existing franchise to the point that people don’t like it moving away from what’s made it successful in the first place

It’s like making a new Black Panther movie only this time Black Panther is killed 5 minutes into the movie and a new hero takes over played by Roseanne Barr

 

[BostonBob]

Got another update from the ACTRA President today:

Hello ACTRA members, What a summer this has been. SAG-AFTRA went on strike, taking on the studios just as we were invited back to the NCA bargaining table by the ICA. The good news is that the media interest over the SAG-AFTRA strike has allowed us to shine an even greater spotlight on our lockout. We have done many interviews on all forms of news media outlets (radio, broadcast news, etc.). With each opportunity, we highlighted that ACTRA members have been in a 16-month illegal lockout by the ICA. We will keep doing our due diligence in taking advantage of every platform to get the message out. On that note, ACTRA Toronto, UBCP/ACTRA, and ACTRA Montreal are holding an ACTRA Day of Action to protest locked out engagers. ACTRA Toronto and ACTRA Montreal dates are scheduled for Tuesday, August 22 with the UBCP/ACTRA date TBD. Please look out for further details on the time and location. As well, we encourage you to share our social media posts to help rally people to these important events for our commercial sector. Friends and family are welcome to attend in support of ACTRA performers and to end the lockout. We continue to stand in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA during their strike and are watching negotiations closely. In case you missed it here is the latest update from the Writers Guild of America negotiating committee after returning to the table with AMPTP Friday. As a sign of our support, we are planning a cross-Canada rally that we hope will take place on Friday, August 25 to show solidarity with the SAG-AFTRA & WGA strikes. Once again, when the details are confirmed, it would be great if you could share them widely on social media. We will provide an update on the NCA once we are out of the current blackout. Please visit www.actra.ca/nca/ for the latest updates and FAQs. Until then, thank you for your continued support and solidarity. These are interesting times, and we are doing everything necessary, at this critical point of change in the evolution of our industry, to protect ACTRA and its jurisdictions in all ways possible. #unionstrong

 

[MadDevil]

I pretty much immediately doubt anybody who brings up "woke agenda" these days because most of the time people are just using it to describe things that they don't agree with and then when challenged struggle to define what it actually is.

Movies/series/games flop all the time, and with even more options available for all of them these days, I'm not surprised they do. I think the majority of them fail simply because they're mediocre or do a terrible job of marketing.

 

[Tawnos]

So a Terminator movie which has always revolved around the John Connor/Sarah Connor character which has made it successful decides to kill off John right away, replace him with a new character that Terminator fans don’t know and people wonder why it failed. This is exactly why these movies fail to be honest. Why not create a new movie with new characters instead of changing up an huge existing franchise to the point that people don’t like it moving away from what’s made it successful in the first place

It’s like making a new Black Panther movie only this time Black Panther is killed 5 minutes into the movie and a new hero takes over played by Roseanne Barr

I mean... it's really not anything like that, since the stories in Black Panther are specifically bound up in questions of race and inequality while the ones in Terminator are not. Also, you've conflated two separate concepts. Killing of John Connor and replacing him in the first 5 minutes might give a good explanation why it failed. Replacing him with a person of different race and gender shouldn't be a reason for it to fail. You can embody the same values as John Connor and have a different backstory informing a different character. Once you make that decision, you then have to deliver. The need to deliver would be the same if you replaced John Connor with another white guy.

I will say that the one thing I agree with you on is that Hollywood needs to get away from franchises and put out more unique material. The idea of replacing characters in this manner isn't uncommon in the comic book realm, but really the big comic book franchises represent the shallowest form of SFF. Not something I like Hollywood replicating, personally.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

So a Terminator movie which has always revolved around the John Connor/Sarah Connor character which has made it successful decides to kill off John right away, replace him with a new character that Terminator fans don’t know and people wonder why it failed. This is exactly why these movies fail to be honest. Why not create a new movie with new characters instead of changing up an huge existing franchise to the point that people don’t like it moving away from what’s made it successful in the first place

It’s like making a new Black Panther movie only this time Black Panther is killed 5 minutes into the movie and a new hero takes over played by Roseanne Barr

That's bad writing and bad execution. Period.

You call it woke because it's a woman, but they could do the exact same thing with a flag waving badass white dude and it would be just as bad.

 

[x Tame Impala]

People just want to see well written, good, and fun movies. It feels like since 2014 or so there was a change in the quality of scripts, narrative, and story execution. Bad writing sucks under any circumstances. It takes the immersion away from the viewer and turns their focus towards negatives inherent in most movies.

Some of you are being a little disingenuous here or are forgetting all these remakes/rehashes/sequels/whatever of old IP's but "This time we swapped out the characters for women or POC's! Come see it!" So on top of a particular movie being poorly written, they add that dynamic of swapping out white characters for something more progressive and to me it came off as somewhat pandering.

I think it's great there's more diversity in film now. Watching movies/shows from the 90's and even early 2000's you can see the relationship Hollywood had with minorities. It needed to change and I'm happy it did.

Quality of writing is the biggest issue here. I agree with the poster mentioning it above.

 

[HFsNumber1Heel]

Here's a list of flops from 2019, which ones are woke?

X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Cats
Terminator: Dark Fate
The Goldfinch
Gemini Man
Richard Jewell
Charlie's Angels
UglyDolls
Midway
Playmobil

The Biggest Box Office Hits and Flops of 2019

From "Avengers: Endgame" to "Cats," here are the biggest box office hits and misses of 2019.

variety.com

Meanwhile Avengers: Endgame had that one scene where all the women fought together at the end. Does that make it "woke"? That's the highest grossing movie of all time!

EDIT: I like this list of hits because it puts the unambiguously "woke" film Us (using the classic definition as African-Americans being aware of racism around them) as a hit next to Joker, a film that may or may not be "woke", depending on how we're defining it.

It wasn't a "woke" thing: The issue for X-Men: Dark Phoenix and Charlie's Angels were they were literally both remakes of the movies that came out less than 20 years ago, with inferior/lesser star quality casts, that no one wanted.

Dark Phoenix especially is not something you can do without a lot of money/intergalactic implications which they tried to. And it was the wrong X-Men team to use on top of that. Also IMHO, Jean Grey is the most overrated X-character of all-time. Her two biggest arcs involve being killed off (at least 4x) or cheated on. Her clone (Madeline Pryor) had and actually has in present a much cooler arc. The best Jean was ever written in comics was from 1989-1991 when the the official X-Men were Banshee and Forge and she was helping them find out what happened to the Outback Team.

As for Terminator a few years back: it was just dumb. T2 is probably pound for pound the greatest scifi action movie ever made. You try to undo it and you're just a dumb dumb even if you stamp Cameron's name on it.

 

[StreetHawk]

If you are basing a show or movie off IP, that did really well in the past, you tick off a huge portion of your expected fanbase when you basically overwrite the past like the last terminator did. Dark Phoenix, also came out after the Disney acquisition of 20th century Fox, thus similar to what is going on at WB with the Shazam 2, Flash, and to be released Blue Beetle, very few will care about something that doesn't tie into the new guard's vision.

You have to respect the IP that you are working off of. There is a built-in audience for it. Personally, I have not issue with basing IP characters on their intended character. So, I'm fine with superhero characters being primarily Caucasian to match their comic IP. It was bad when Ghost in the Shell cast the Asian lead as Scarlett Johansen.

If we are talking an original movie, I have no issues with the cast being more inclusive if it fits the genre or arc of the story.

 

[HFsNumber1Heel]

If you are basing a show or movie off IP, that did really well in the past, you tick off a huge portion of your expected fanbase when you basically overwrite the past like the last terminator did. Dark Phoenix, also came out after the Disney acquisition of 20th century Fox, thus similar to what is going on at WB with the Shazam 2, Flash, and to be released Blue Beetle, very few will care about something that doesn't tie into the new guard's vision.

You have to respect the IP that you are working off of. There is a built-in audience for it. Personally, I have not issue with basing IP characters on their intended character. So, I'm fine with superhero characters being primarily Caucasian to match their comic IP. It was bad when Ghost in the Shell cast the Asian lead as Scarlett Johansen.

If we are talking an original movie, I have no issues with the cast being more inclusive if it fits the genre or arc of the story.

Rebooting or doing multiple versions of everything less than 15-20 years after a popular film came out is grounds for trouble and barely works.

Part of the reason The Flash was such a disaster was the movie premiered like three weeks after the CW series ended.

DCU is a weird though because they're basically trying to tank their own movies for another reboot.

So a Terminator movie which has always revolved around the John Connor/Sarah Connor character which has made it successful decides to kill off John right away, replace him with a new character that Terminator fans don’t know and people wonder why it failed. This is exactly why these movies fail to be honest. Why not create a new movie with new characters instead of changing up an huge existing franchise to the point that people don’t like it moving away from what’s made it successful in the first place

It’s like making a new Black Panther movie only this time Black Panther is killed 5 minutes into the movie and a new hero takes over played by Roseanne Barr

Surprisingly it might do well in an ironic kind of way.

 

[StreetHawk]

Rebooting or doing multiple versions of everything less than 15-20 years after a popular film came out is grounds for trouble and barely works.

Part of the reason The Flash was such a disaster was the movie premiered like three weeks after the CW series ended.

DCU is a weird though because they're basically trying to tank their own movies for another reboot.


Surprisingly it might do well in an ironic kind of way.

Well, WB is doing that with Pattinson's Batman which is a decade after Bale's final installment as the lead character. That managed to be fine, but not amazing.

Flash, also Miller's personal life chaos impacted the film. Lead actor not doing any press. Plus, they aired a movie that had a long running TV series so fans got to know the character and to many, he's the Flash. WB would be wise to end the Superman & Lois tv series a good year before Gunn's Superman reboot debuts.

 

[Osprey]

That's bad writing and bad execution. Period.

You call it woke because it's a woman, but they could do the exact same thing with a flag waving badass white dude and it would be just as bad.

It can be both, IMO. Replacing or sidelining existing characters can be poorly written and executed, but also done for social reasons. Substituting John Connor with another white dude would've been bad, too, but they wouldn't have done that because it would've been a pointless, lateral change for the worse. Replacing him as future commander with Dani Ramos, however, allowed them to add a female empowerment theme, Hispanic representation and a little commentary on immigration, among other things. None of those are bad, but it looks like the desire to incorporate those played a factor in the change being made, and if we agree that any substitute would've been bad, then we're really criticizing that the change was made in the first place, which calls into question the reasons behind it.

What people call "woke" is when things are seemingly done more for social reasons than improvement. Terminator: Dark Fate seems to qualify. Now, did it fail for that reason, like the other poster said? Probably not, but it probably was a contributing reason. It goes without saying that a lot of people being turned off is going to hurt a film at the box office. I disagree with suggesting that it's the main factor behind movies and shows failing and I disagree with suggesting it plays no factor. Dark Fate likely would've lost money even if there were nothing "woke" about it. After all, it's considered one of the biggest flops of all time. The same is likely true of Dial of Destiny. Did they likely lose more money because many people stayed away for that reason, though? That's very likely, too. This seems to be such a heated topic partly because people tend to argue one extreme or the other, that "going woke" is either the reason why something failed or not a reason at all. I think that the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.

 

[flyersnorth]

A person's reaction to art says more about that person than the art itself.

Art reveals biases.

 

[Tawnos]

People just want to see well written, good, and fun movies. It feels like since 2014 or so there was a change in the quality of scripts, narrative, and story execution. Bad writing sucks under any circumstances. It takes the immersion away from the viewer and turns their focus towards negatives inherent in most movies.

Some of you are being a little disingenuous here or are forgetting all these remakes/rehashes/sequels/whatever of old IP's but "This time we swapped out the characters for women or POC's! Come see it!" So on top of a particular movie being poorly written, they add that dynamic of swapping out white characters for something more progressive and to me it came off as somewhat pandering.

I think it's great there's more diversity in film now. Watching movies/shows from the 90's and even early 2000's you can see the relationship Hollywood had with minorities. It needed to change and I'm happy it did.

Quality of writing is the biggest issue here. I agree with the poster mentioning it above.

Personally, I think it's weird to talk about bad movies, even in this quantity, like it's a recent phenomenon especially when it comes to the action/adventure bucket that we're largely talking about here. 10 years before your 2014 date, you had Catwoman, The Punisher, Van Helsing, King Arthur, Alexander, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and a bunch of others that were pretty bad, including I, Robot which butchered a major aspect of the original IP. You also had decent-to-good movies like Day After Tomorrow, National Treasure, Troy, Chronicles of Riddick, Spider-man 2, Hell Boy, etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list and obviously my opinions of these movies are my own. You can look at any year and find essentially the same thing. We tend to remember the good ones worthy of seeing again and forget how many bad ones there really were.

The only real differences between then and now are how many movies coming out are part of franchises (though many of those listed were that way even in 2004) and the extra effort put in to making sure there's diversity in casting. I think the former leads to some level of dissatisfaction and the latter gives a new element for complaints from some corners.

One other thing I find interesting in this whole conversation is what seems like pandering to some people feels like representation to others. I have watched movies with friends where they were a little offput by something that happened with a Jewish character that I recognized as similar (even if exaggerated) to something I've seen in my own life as a Jew. It made me feel represented. Similar things have happened in the other direction too. Earlier someone mentioned the women's power/model-walk moment in Endgame. I remember feeling it was silly and pandering when I saw it, but I know women who absolutely LOVED it (and of course, not all women are going to share that opinion). Even though I still think the execution of that moment could have been a little better, ultimately it's still worth it to make those women feel represented.

Do I wish it could be done well in both ways all the time (representation and well-written/executed)? Sure, but I don't think that's reality.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

It’s that thing that kills profits more often than not

If it did, they'd know and stop doing it. You think studios don't run the numbers and the reasons why the numbers are the way they are? Seriously?

 

[93gilmour93]

If it did, they'd know and stop doing it. You think studios don't run the numbers and the reasons why the numbers are the way they are? Seriously?

I think that’s going to eventually happen. They’re trying to push narratives and it’s not working anymore so the changing of the guard is fast approaching. If these companies want to make big box office profits on more movies per year instead of hoping one does well here and there it’s time to drop the woke scripts and get back to making and writing solid movies again.

 

[Spring in Fialta]

I think that’s going to eventually happen. They’re trying to push narratives and it’s not working anymore so the changing of the guard is fast approaching

You're basing this on (seemingly) nothing but your hunch that itself seems to be largely based on personal politics and wishful thinking.

The truth is that people with your opinion just aren't that significant a demographic in terms of entertainment consumption and shifting the numbers.

The anti-woke brigade will still by and large buy that Spider-Man ticket no matter what because at the end of the day, their comic-book and their childhood entertainment is more important than their internet politics. Even to them.

 

[93gilmour93]

You're basing this on (seemingly) nothing but your hunch that itself seems to be largely based on personal politics and wishful thinking.

Go check out the Disney profit losses. It’s not politics but just factual numbers. They lost $123 billion in 2022 but I’m sure that’s just a hunch and political

 

[Spring in Fialta]

Go check out the Disney profit losses. It’s not politics but just factual numbers

And what are the reasons for those numbers? Do you have any credible links?

A Ben Shapiro apprentice is still going to pay to go watch his X-Men because he loves his superheroes more than he loves Ben Shapiro. Shapiro isn't his childhood nor is he part of the wider culture people want to participate in.