They have a great, Spinal-Tap-Manager-Level euphemism for poor park attendance: a "moderation of consumer demand" for its services and "experiences."
In Disney's seemingly never-ending game of corporate Whac-a-Mole, a new trouble spot has arisen: Americans -- battered by years of high inflation -- have less money to spend on amusement, imperiling growth at Disney theme parks.
Why is this inflationary problem affecting Disney in particular?
Maybe because it's not all about inflation. Maybe it has to do with hiring men sporting thick black beards to play female Disney Princesses at their shops.
On Wednesday, Disney reported weaker-than-expected theme park results for the three months that ended on June 29. Revenue increased 2 percent from a year earlier, to $8.4 billion, while operating profit declined 3 percent, to $2.2 billion.
Disney blamed a "moderation of consumer demand" that "exceeded our previous expectations," along with higher costs. Disney said softening demand "could impact the next few quarters."
Disney added that it was "aggressively managing our cost base."
In other words: we're laying people off, and also not greenlighting any new movies, except for sequels to money-making movies.
...
Mr. Iger has been trying to move Disney beyond a tumultuous period when activist investors sought to alter the company's direction. One activist, Nelson Peltz, mounted a proxy contest for board seats this year and harshly criticized Disney's streaming strategy, succession planning and lagging stock price. Disney fended off the attacks, but its share price has fallen 27 percent since early April.
"If Disney doesn't manage to reverse this negative trend, the specter of an activist rebellion will rear its head again," Paul Verna, a media analyst at Emarketer, a research firm, said in an email last week.
...
Disney also benefited from improved streaming results. Together, Disney's three services (Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+) generated $47 million in operating income, compared with a loss of $512 million a year earlier. It was the first time that Disney's direct-to-consumer division as a whole turned a profit. Disney previously said it would not achieve that goal until later this year.
The "profit" is largely due to Disney cancelling most of its awful, awful shows and movies, and mostly just coasting on already-paid-for "content."
And Hulu has always been profitable. Disney now owns Hulu outright -- they have yet to pay for it, of course -- so the increases might also reflect Disney's sole ownership of the somewhat-successful streaming service.
Speaking of Disney cancelling its awful Disney Minus shows: They had hired the maker of the insanely-racist Dear White People show -- which is nothing but minorities shaming white people for being born to an inferior race -- to make a new show about Lando Calrissian.
They've now cancelled that piece of shit.
Director Justin Simien (Dear White People) has confirmed that Lando, a series from the Star Wars franchise, has been cancelled while in development.
Lando was set to focus on a young Lando Calrissian, a gambler and semi-retired smuggler from the Star Wars universe.
In an interview to Collider, the director of the now-cancelled series Simien stated, "It [the series] was pretty developed. There was a bible. There was concept art. There were scripts. But it just wasn't meant to be."
Regarding the cancellation of the project, he said, "There's so much that I experience that I get to keep forever and take into the next project. I can't obviously take the storyline or the IP or the characters, but there's so much more that I got, as a maker, and that's mine. Sorry, it's too late, you can't take that part back."
Yeah I'm sure that stuff is really great. They always cancel shows with really great concepts and storylines.
If they really liked the storyline, they could just pay you for that. But they didn't.
Chris Gore, who I usually trust but not on this, claims that he's spoken to Disney people and they claim that Marvel Studios has purged most of its "activist producers."
Film Threat founder and acclaimed writer Chris Gore made the claims about Marvel during an appearance on The Critical Drinker's podcast on Friday.
'I do know people who work at Marvel -- they have cleaned house. They quietly, months ago, fired all the producers that could be labeled 'activist,'' said Gore.
Gore explained that president of Marvel studios, Kevin Feige recognized that going woke didn't work for them, revealing that '[Feige] said he tried it, it didn't work.'
'He's talking about Phase 4,' continued the noted film critic. 'That's it. Tried it, didn't work. No Kang, none of these side characters that don't have the legacy of classic characters.
'And if Deadpool & Wolverine proves anything...you've heard that phrase 'male and pale is stale'? That was spoken aloud across studios. But if you look at box office this year, I would say 'male and pale is money'. And that's the phrase that I think people should more adopt.'
In contrast, Gore said the rival studio, also owned by Disney, Lucasfilm, 'is lost.'
'They are doubling down on all the nonsense. You will never get anything good out of Lucasfilm and Star Wars. That's it,' said Gore.
Gore predicted a return to success for the Marvel franchise as they release the remaining 'woke' movies in the can, before focusing solely on entertaining viewers, rather than preaching to them.
'I think we're gonna get a year of bad Marvel stuff,' said Gore, referring to the upcoming television series Agatha All Along and Ironheart as well as the soon-to-be-released Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and Fantastic Four.
All of the YouTube pop culture critics emphasize that even if it's true that the Woke Baboon Kevin Feige fired the wokies -- and I doubt that it is true; I think some Disney people are putting out a false, optimistic spin -- they still have their content pipeline stuffed fill with all the woke losers they've been greenlighting for the past five years.
Note that Marvel would never publicly say they're cancelling the woke. And if you don't have the guts to say it, I don't think you could have the guts to do it.
Marvel's doomed either way. The mistake Feige made was deciding to kill all of the actual known, popular characters when their actors wanted to move on, or wanted too many tens of millions of dollars to keep playing these characters.
Instead of simply recasting Iron Man, Captain America, etc. and carrying on James Bond Style (or Batman style), Feige took the opportunity to just kill them and replace them with woke analogues, just like they'd done in the comic books -- where the initiative also failed, disastrously.
But this low-talent idiot (many of the movies that were actually good were good because of Ike Perlmutter's involvement and common-sense judgment that fundamentally, superhero fare is a boys entertainment thing) believed his own hype and really thought that he could turn unpopular failed characters like Captain Marvel into superstars.
Marvel has something like 10,000 characters. Now they're not nearly all superheroes -- every superhero has a rogues gallery of dozens of mostly-forgettable villains. And the list of characters include all of the normie civilians a superhero counts as his supporting cast. No one will be doing a standalone movie about Peter Parker's news delivery boy, for example.
Although now that I say it aloud, Sony might just try to make Timmy the Newsboy into its own IP....
I mention the large number of Marvel characters to make this point: Of those 10,000 characters, how many characters can you name? If you're a comic book fan, you might be able to name 2-300, tops.
If you're a normie, you can maybe name 30. The various characters you've seen in movies, even though you might not know their names. You could say "Oh the Jeff Bridges one" or "the Gwyneth Paltro one."
Stan Lee was asked a long time ago how he managed to create about 100 highly lucrative, popular characters. He answered something like, "Simple, create 10,000 characters and wait for 1% of them to catch on with the public."
My point is that even Stan Lee created a lot of nothing "characters." Characters barely worth the bother of naming. Characters with no real market value.
But Kevin Feige decided that he's such a super-genius and Master Storyteller on par with Homer that he could just pick whatever zero-value character from the comics and make them into major players.
I remember five years ago: Feige and Marvel began hinting that, to replace Captain American and Iron Man, they were thinking of making a movie about (wait for it...) Nova. Nova! Can you believe it? NOVA!
If you're wondering "who the f*** is Nova?," well, it's a zero-value character that Marvel has been pushing since the seventies, with very little positive public response. He's basically a human who was granted Discount Generic Superman powers by the Nova Corps, who in turn were in Guardians of the Galaxy in a fairly minor way.
So that was Feige's idea -- sure, I'm getting rid of Captain America and Iron Man, but I'll just do what no other content creator has ever done before and turn Nova into a big thing.
Same with all the woke characters he's crapped out-- Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel, Ant-Man's annoying woke daughter.
Feige promised, proudly, that he would deliver a Marvel Universe that was more than 50% female super-heroes, as if that's a great thing. He's finding out it's not.
Crusty "old think" billionaire Ike Perlmutter was right when he told Feige that boys just didn't care about female superheroes. And Perlmutter knew this, based on experience, because he had owned the Marvel toy-making rights for decades, and knew that female characters were peg-warmers that sat on the shelves forever.
(Ethan Van Sciver talks about "the Fantastic ratio," referring to the one woman among the four characters of the Fantastic Four, figuring that about one woman for every three male characters is about the right ratio for a universe that appeals mostly to boys.)
But even if Feige had kept to the "Fantastic Ratio," he'd still have a problem: Having decided to kill off most of the 1% of characters with actual public recognition appeal, he was left with male characters who'd never caught on.
Like Nova.
Like "Starfox," introduced in the end credits of The Eternals.
It wasn't just wokeness that killed Marvel, though that was 50%.
The other 50% of it was Feige's insane delusion that he could mint one popular new character after another. Stan Lee said that he'd created 100 popular characters by creating 10,000 characters, with a 1% hit rate; Feige believed that he could up that 1% success rate to... 100%. 100%. Every single dreg character he put in a movie or TV show would become the next Captain America, just because he's that damn good.
There is no way out of this. And the stunt casting of Robert Downey Jr. as some multiverse version of Doctor Doom will not get them out of this hole.
Marvel has about, at absolute maximum, 15 characters and teams (like the Fantastic Four or X-Men) that can sustain movies. And that's it. That's all. Just those 15.
It took Marvel Comics 70 years to produce 15 characters big enough for the big screen. Feige cannot add another 15 to that list in just a couple of years.
It's insane that he ever thought he could.