Disney CEO Bob Iger says company's movies have been too focused on messaging | Hacker News Reader

Disney CEO Bob Iger says company's movies have been too focused on messaging

cnbc.com

76 pointsalescontrela1100 comments

Messaging isn't Disney's problem. Putting out content that's an absolute mess is the problem. Too much content is also part of the problem. The Star Wars sequels were just a freaking mess from start to finish. Their TV series around Star Wars have been hit and miss.

The pacing for Ahsoka, for example, is just awful. Feels like they literally asked the actors to drag out the content. They were all over the place with the Boba Fett series.

It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. Some of the movies since Endgame have been good, some OK, and some of the movies and TV shows have just been terrible. They managed, somehow, to make a series based around shape-shifting aliens starring Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle boring. It's astonishing, really.

None of this has anything to do with the "messaging" Iger is hinting at to try to throw off the scent and appease the GOP. I'll grant that sometimes Disney is a bit hamfisted in checking off the boxes around diversity and so forth -- but none of that accounts for the fact that Disney just went for quantity of content over quality, with the assumption that the Star Wars and MCU franchises would sell no matter how bad the final product was.

In the past, they'd have been right. Fans used to tolerate just about anything to get a taste of their favorite heroes or franchise on screen. Those days are in the past. Fans have gotten a glut of content and have seen just how good comic book and sci-fi live action could be, and a spritz of CGI isn't cutting it anymore.

> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now.

It's the same with my kids. They usually jump at the chance to go to the theatre (popcorn!), but they have no interest in recent MCU movies or any of the TV shows.

> The pacing for Ahsoka, for example, is just awful. Feels like they literally asked the actors to drag out the content. They were all over the place with the Boba Fett series.

It’s so incredibly drawn out that the best version of Ahsoka is likely to be a fan edit currently in the works (by an editor with a good track record) who’s aiming to come in under 3 hours. It’ll assuredly be strictly an improvement. There have already been a couple attempts because the show’s so obviously and painfully bloated. The shortest is around two hours and reviews were positive.

Obi Wan’s at least as bad. It could be half its length and nothing of (even under generous accounting) value would be lost.

Most of the Disney Marvel shows also burn screen time like it’s free. Not that Netlix’s were any better about that, aside from one or two total seasons out of the entire effort.

IDK if this is somehow cheaper for them, writing 3-5 episodes of content and streeeetching it to 8-10 episodes, or what. They still have to have stuff on screen, so I wouldn’t think it’d save them much.

It's worth mentioning the quality for fan-made edits can be, and often are, remarkably high. The only version of Obi-Wan I've seen is a fan edit by Kai Patterson (Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Patterson Cut [1]), which condensed the whole series into one 2.5h long episode/film.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi:_The_Patterson_...

On this topic, is there a definitive fan edit for The Hobbit? That’s also too dragged out over 3 movies.

There are several very good ones. The older ones like The Tolkein Edit were good early attempts, but the quality is bad (720p IIRC). My current favorite is the "M4 Book Edit" version. It's 1080p I think, and does some interesting things, such as editing the scene where the archer guy shoots Smaug with the killing arrow. In the original movies, he uses his son's shoulder to aim, which is cheesy and kills the suspension of disbelief; in the M4 Book Edit version, they actually edited the video to replace his son with a stone wall.

> It's been bad enough that my daughter, who was a devout MCU fan, has zero interest in any new MCU content now. Some of the movies since Endgame have been good, some OK, and some of the movies and TV shows have just been terrible. They managed, somehow, to make a series based around shape-shifting aliens starring Samuel L. Jackson and Don Cheadle boring. It's astonishing, really.

So much this. I was a comic book kid and a big fan of marvel's various properties.

I am so very sick of superhero movies now.

Iger wants to blame political sentiments he objects to, rather than looking at the basic reality that you can't just keep pumping out the same genre indefinitely while making money. Making movies isn't stamping widgets. Just look at how historically dominant genres have risen and fallen (westerns anyone?).

Also A24 is over there showing that ambitious and original concepts can be financially successful.

Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences.

I recall watching X-men on Saturday mornings as a kid and the only thing more overt was Star Trek having an episode where the half-white-half-black people hate the half-black-half-white people.

It’s not messaging. It’s release pace. If their goal is quality movies then they need to make that the goal. But the goal is “make money”, so their incentives are misaligned.

> Iger's problem isn't woke politics its his own lack of imagination and lack of understanding of audiences.

He's an exec. He doesn't really need those things.

He just needs to be smart enough to attract creative artists and gamble a little. He needs to know how to invest capital.

Consider Zappa's take on out-of-touch music execs in the 60s who somehow presided over and profited from (and probably nurtured, really) a creative counterculture movement.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/frank-zappa-music-industry-comm...

PR usually demands a mea culpa that obfuscates. Wokeness is the most obvious PR misdirection to avoid admission of diminished quality.

The writing is impacted by ideology, though. When the writers consistently present victim-as-hero narrative you get bad writing. When the only morality shown is oppressor-oppressed dichotomies the story doesn't hold up.

The other part is how these ideologies led the writers and showrunners to "deconstruct" characters the audience loved: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Nick Fury, Luke Skywalker... All of them were retconned to be "stupid old man" who had to be gotten out of the way. Not because it served the story, but because it served the ideology.

The bad writing didn't come from no where.

> Also A24 is over there showing that ambitious and original concepts can be financially successful.

I'm not sure that is true. A24 is starting to pivot from that model so it's not clear they were making that much money.

[1] https://www.thewrap.com/a24-shifts-strategy-commercial-film/

At a guess, there is probably a regress-to-the-mean problem where the people responsible for the scripts are pulling back to an ordinary level of understanding of nuance, motivation and whatnot. There are a couple of symptoms and people struggle to pick up when content lacks nuance - as far as I can tell it kinda feels wrong to them but they can't put a finger on why.

I've been interpreting the "they're politicised!" chatter around Disney & friends to mean that they lack nuance. Political messages in art isn't new - but using art for ham-fisted messaging makes for a boring story. Great storytelling often looks like, say, Portal I by Valve. Noticing the thickly layered feminism in that game is pretty hard, but I suspect there are literally no male characters and it is likely most people playing the game don't notice. It was jarring vs Portal 2 where a more ordinary game plot was used. But that sailed completely under the radar of most criticism of both games because it was a rather subtle change.

Ironically the most "message"-y Star Wars production is also widely considered the best thing Disney has done with the franchise. Andor is fantastic and it's not subtle about its politics.

Have you considered that it's a choice between the two?

The script that goes full ESG is not the same script that is actually good.

Is ESG why Marvel had 58 movies and shows in 15 years?

No, that's because of greed, ESG simply enabled it. Black Panther, for an obvious example, was mediocre, but it had a degree of guaranteed success because of black pride.

It seems that this is just an admission that Disney overplayed its hand in this regard.

The first key point in the article says

> Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged his company has focused too much on movie messaging and not enough on quality storytelling.

So Disney does actually agree with that its content is a mess. (insofar that you mean that its storytelling sucks, which seems to be your point)

My point is that blaming "messaging" is pandering to a certain audience, and has nothing to do with the actual problems. Messaging, for example, didn't have anything to do with the pacing for Ahsoka. It didn't turn the Star Wars sequels into a train wreck.

Iger is trying to score cheap points while deflecting responsibility for the actual problems.

It had everything to do with Ahsoka's pacing problem.

The ideological pandering problem - which literally everyone from Iger to South Park knows Disney have - is just a symptom of the relentless ideological capture of Disney's own executive staff. You think they just promote diversity hiring in their film's messages? Iger has spelled it out clearly here: when they faced a binary choice between "messaging" and making quality movies, they always picked messaging.

What he's saying here is obvious to people who have observed the woke in action. People who would relentlessly pander to left wing ideology were hired and promoted over people who wanted to make good movies that appealed to everyone. You can't have both - the people with talent usually don't want to put forced propaganda before the story they want to tell. The problem is doubled up because when woke people find conservatives they immediately fire them, sideline them or make false accusations against them. Pick the propaganda people and you rapidly end up with anyone who cares about quality first being emptied out of the organization.

Kathleen Kennedy is the most famous example of this, a woman who presided over a decade+ of box office disaster and divisive, hateful anti-men messaging (e.g. her famous "The Force Is Female" t-shirts), but who Disney cannot remove because she and her allies would immediately accuse the CEO of being sexist, and they'd rather crash the company than be accused of being mean by allies. She in turn ensures Star Wars scripts are all messaging-first, and if they suck as films then whatever, she doesn't actually intend them to entertain anyway because she has a higher purpose in mind.

Messaging is Disney's problem. Their writing quality has gone to hell because they systematically promote and protect executives/writers who see films as a mere vehicle for spreading their message, not for telling a good story.

To me it feels Disney is just running algorithms to generate content. Some VP up in the ivory tower keeps telling the writers "add that joke that worked on the X movie", "make an action scene like that one in Y movie".

Even the stories in Star Wars are rehashes of previous stories with different characters, the whole new trilogy of movies was just episodes IV, V, VI with a different cast and hollow characters.

On MCU it seems that each movie is just the same formula, I haven't even watched "Endgame" because I got sick of the formula after the 4th repetition.

Disney is just pumping content out, quality be damned, I have no idea who thought that completely oversaturating a cash cow market would be good... They killed it, and in its wake tarnished the reputation of Disney. I used to consider anything coming out of Disney to be at least of decent quality, entertaining enough to check out. Now I simply ignore what they do, it's trash.

It's definitely formulaic, and I often feel like there's obvious plot beats, jokes, etc. that were inserted by committee or to match somebody's checklist.

Looking back, the original Star Wars movies were clunky and had plot problems galore -- but they were fun and they had heart and something novel to offer visually and narratively. Lucas couldn't write dialog for shit, but the pacing, casting, story, and eye candy made up for it by a long shot.

(BTW, I thought Endgame was pretty good. There's at least one bit that made me cheer out loud. Maybe I'm just easy, but Cap's big moment was worth the price of admission for me alone.)

I'd argue "messaging" (more aptly referred to as "propaganda" in this context) has a lot to do with it. When you shoehorn ideology into entertainment you get a product that's less entertaining, doubly so when the ideology is mostly devoutly held by humorless people.

Disney's trend of tossing in a BIPOC LGBT equivalent of "Poochie" in everything they've made in the last few years is the worst kind of pandering. It took audiences speaking with their wallets for Disney to acknowledge this, but i's going to take more than a few words from Iger to instil confidence. There will have to be a shake up at Disney and with their partners, and I would expect Kathleen Kennedy to be pretty high up on the hit list.

See ‘Didacticism’:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didacticism

vs ‘Art for art’s sake’:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_for_art%27s_sake

The Barbie movie is highly didactic. It’s like a series of college essays strung together on a thin string of story. You come out of the the theater ready to debate the issues in the movie.

Oppenheimer on the other hand is ‘art for art’s sake’. It’s not trying to ‘splain anything to you. You come out of the theater speechless, just carrying the weight of it all.

Edit: Barbenheimer.

Barbie started off pretty strong, but I lost interest when they repeatedly changed course. I got the feeling there were too many cooks in the kitchen.

Barbie was a shallow representation of the multiple generations of various feminist ideals and discussion points. Only 2nd wave feminism gets any actual discussion, though there's a mild discussion to point out that today's kids are on the 4th wave and have different ideas.

The thing is that most people just agree with 2nd wave Feminism, as its the type that was well regarded and well pushed from the 1950s onwards. So Barbie plays it safe, pushes the older, well-agreed messaging and doesn't stray too far from the guard-rails.

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Like, after watching Barbie, is anyone actually ready to discuss if sex-work / prostitution is pro-Feminisim or anti-Feminism? Erm... no. It avoided any sketchy issue or anything remotely controversial.

Is sex-work pro-Feminism because women can decide how to act for themselves and use their innate femininity to gain power over males?

Or is sex-work anti-Feminism because males who enjoy sexual material can turn into malicious actors who play into bad stereotypes and harmful myths? (And thus the females who partake in it are subject to male-gaze or something, its been a while since I've read feminist writing)

Nothing wrong with that mind you. Barbie was designed to just be enjoyable, but it is a watered down discussion. But the minute real-world issues show up, you're hopelessly unprepared if you've only reached the surface-level that Barbie-movie brought you to.

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Hell, even just the 4th wave feminist child vs 2nd wave feminist mother dynamic in Barbie is so... short and shallow. The movie just leaves off without much debate, or exploration of the contradictory viewpoints. The only conclusion at the end is the younger generation might find Barbie fun if we play with them together, which is... absolutely avoiding the deeper issues and debates brought up in the movie.

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Oppenheimer on the other hand... gives you far more capability to discuss the pros-and-cons of the 1940s / 1950s politics of nuclear weapons. Its very deep on the subject.

I broadly agree, but Barbie was both entertaining and very successful. It's also not a Disney movie. It would be a better example of how you can make a good, successful, didactic movie if you have very sharp filmmakers with enough pull to get it done their way.

Funny, my take on Oppenheimer is the opposite -- and I loved both movies.

Nolan is making the explicit argument that Oppenheimer is the most important person of the 20th century, it's literally a biopic that adheres (shockingly) faithfully to history, is explaining everything to you from the history of Los Alamos to justifications to drop the bomb to arguments for and against the H-bomb, and you come out of the theater absolutely ready to debate the issues.

Oppenheimer is the literal opposite of art for art's sake. It's a straight-up history lesson that presents different sides of one of the biggest moral questions of the 20th century.

Now other films of his, whether Tenet or Inception or Interstellar -- those are much more art-for-art's-sake. You can discuss them aesthetically all you want, but aside from questions of taste and clarity and plot, there isn't much of substance to debate.

(On the other hand -- while Barbie was hyped as providing a lot to discuss, it was actually mostly just a very clever super funny comedy. It didn't really lead to all that much debate, aside from whether the idea of playing guitar "at" someone was merely a really funny joke, or one of top five funniest jokes in the movie...)

The whole Barbie thing wasn’t important until the vocal political right made it their new public enemy #1.

IMO the movie is making the point that Oppenheimer's security clearance review was politically motivated and essentially baseless. There's also a scene where Oppenheimer demands that workers without a clear need to know be told what they are building for morale/efficiency reasons.

The fact is though that the Manhattan Project had multiple Soviet spies, and Oppenheimer's policies enabled them. It's even come out more recently that Oppenheimer is mentioned as a Soviet intelligence source in a decrypted cable from the San Francisco consulate.

Allegories are great, preaching to people not so much. In order to get people to take in a message you can’t shove it down their throats or they will just throw it up.

I haven’t watched a new Disney movie in the last 10 years. What have they been preaching?

Lots of internet commentary on this already, but in my personal experience there are many BIPOC or LGBT or female characters that are undeveloped and lacking any tragic flaws.

Not to mention the tortuously shit dialogue: "Black girl magic!"

> female characters that are undeveloped and lacking any tragic flaws

You mean like Hunger Games or Twilight?

Or the male equivalent of Capt. America? (Or Harry Potter?) Steve Rogers is just your ordinary everyman who's underdeveloped and lacking in any tragic flaws.

I mean... at this point, even Hulk is missing out on his classic flaw of rage. *All* the Marvel characters have braindead writing these days, female or male. But plenty of the "good" ones (ie: Capt. America) were always like this from the start, its a trope in comic books for a reason because it keeps working. (Superman, Shazam, Capt. Marvel, Capt. America). For some stories, you don't need a flawed lead character, they could just "be good" and you can focus on other elements of storytelling.

But that's the kind of main character tons of people love and gobble up. Both male, and female, versions of it.

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But hey, I like my "Superman" stories. (My Adventures with Superman cartoon this year was excellent). Or perhaps for a more well-regarded character: Ang from "Avatar the Last Airbender" is pretty much your typical every-man / heroic type without any tragic flaw. (Etc. etc. Lots of good examples around all of writing. Indeed, Oedipus Rex is arguably one of the earliest "Lack of Flaws" character to maximize the chance that the audience take's Oedipus's side in his struggles).

Mary Sue / boring good guys / Superman types / Lawful-Good Paladins who just try to make everyone feel better can be done well. It just takes good writing to make them captivating. I personally think they're the hardest character to make work, but when its done well I enjoy the trope (especially because I recognize how hard it is to write).

I feel like some of the examples you list are a poor choice to illustrate your point.

Both Harry Potter (books so more than films, but in the films too) and Aang have plenty of flaws, and there's arcs and events that help them grow/develop.

It's been a while, but Katniss does have plenty of flaws and growth (and even some things she never overcomes about her self). Although, it's been a few years since I've read Hunger Games, I feel like she doesn't belong in the same category as Bella (which feels like a placeholder character intentionally). Tris from Divergent might be a good example though, but even there there's some growth.

Regarding some of the super heroes: they're all kinda "super" and very mary-sue-ish, I agree. But they still face challenges and difficulties they need to overcome, or the stories they're part of (rather than the character themselves) are otherwise interesting.

Most of the modern "strong female leads" are just boring (and this comes from a gay boy who LOVES strong women, my favourite characters are women: Sydney Bristol, almost every one from ATLA & Korra, Willow & Buffy, Halliwell sisters, Xena, Lara Croft, Jade from BG&E, women from Harry Potter, Aya from Parasite Eve games, an uncountable plethora of amazing female characters in Anime and manga, and I could go on and on and on, it's not like it can't be done, or hasn't been done, it has been done MANY times). The only challenge these modern Disney SFLs face is not believing in themselves (and as someone who struggles on and off with self esteem issues, I realise how difficult those can be, but also it's not "enough" to base a whole character around just that), usually with a sprinkle of "blame the patriarchy" in there too.

All this misandry and trying to portray any masculinity as toxic is just lame. It's very similar to Disney's queer coding of villains. I remember in my teens, while being a sexually confused and closed queer how sensitive I was to that bullshit and how awful and ashamed it made me feel. It's ludicrous how it's being done again, just the aggressor and targeted demographics are different now. I can't tell if that's just Disney's Modus Operandi, or of this is some type of bitter revenge writing. It sucked then and it sucks now, and it will continue to suck. We need to do better.

People mentioned elsewhere in threads that people complain about too many POCs. I've not seen much of this (maybe a few low quality posts online, but that's just racist drivel of a few small minced idiots, and rarely anyone cares about it). What people dislike is their liked characters' identities getting twisted to fit "modern audiences" (often it's MORE than just race). And the irony is, not even this mythological modern audience likes it because it usually ends up being a shallow self insert, so then down the line the audience gets blamed and called names). There's plenty of original PoC characters that are loved (of Disney: Mulan, Pocahontas, Aladdin/Jasmine, Moana, Lilo, Encanto cast). The whole "well why does it matter" argument is also a bit of a bad faith bait. If it didn't matter, why so bullishly insist on changing it?

> All this misandry and trying to portray any masculinity as toxic is just lame. It's very similar to Disney's queer coding of villains. I remember in my teens, while being a sexually confused and closed queer how sensitive I was to that bullshit and how awful and ashamed it made me feel. It's ludicrous how it's being done again, just the aggressor and targeted demographics are different now. I can't tell if that's just Disney's Modus Operandi, or of this is some type of bitter revenge writing. It sucked then and it sucks now, and it will continue to suck. We need to do better.

I disagree with a lot that you say, but I think I can agree with this paragraph.

The story of "Wish" needlessly shat on King Magnifico and I felt pretty uncomfortable about that writing. So I can agree that there's definitely an element of coding the Disney villain in a certain way.

Scar is the effeminate uncle. Ursula is coded as a drag-queen. Moving to the more recent movies: I can also agree that King Magnifico was coded as toxic masculinity (handsome, successful king), but they did a poor job in the movie saying why he actually deserved the punishment he got (or the betrayal of his wife).

That being said, its also just... how Disney movies always seem to have been written? Both the good and bad ones. Not really an excuse mind you, but for a happy-go-lucky musical for children, a lot of Disney Villains get rather harshly punished, and not all of them seem like they deserve said punishment.

> The only challenge these modern Disney SFLs face is not believing in themselves (and as someone who struggles on and off with self esteem issues, I realise how difficult those can be, but also it's not "enough" to base a whole character around just that), usually with a sprinkle of "blame the patriarchy" in there too.

Well lets talk about Live Action Mulan for example.

There's no "blame the Emperor" scene. In fact, the emperor is a badass who takes to single-combat on the frontlines. Maybe you could argue that the Bori Khan (the new name of the main bad guy) and his relationship with Xianniang / Witch / Hawk is a bit of a blame the patriarchy (female witch subservient to a warlord). But on the other hand, villains are often seen needlessly abusing their underlings (Darth Vader needlessly kills his officers. Megatron abuses Starscream, etc. etc.). So I'm not entirely sure if this is beyond the norm in these kind of settings.

People blame Mulan for a lot of faults and say its clear of Disney's issues today. But... has anyone aside me actually watched it? Its a crappy Chinese Kung Fu movie yes that has issues deciding if Wuxia is cool or not... and that's the main problem with it.

But if there's some level of "Woke messaging" going on here, I'm not seeing it.

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Edit: after further thought, Toxicly Masculine male villains were at least a thing since The Sword in the Stone, and Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. I argue it's not really a recent trope either.

Not Disney but I had the same feeling watching "And Just Like That" with my wife when it came out during COVID. The original series was in its own way pushing boundaries, but always fairly entertaining & lighthearted. The new series feels like sitting through an annual mandatory corporate DEI/respectful workplace training, with all the cringe and more.

I used to go to church pretty regularly and the priests were less preachy.

There are ways of conveying messages that even those in the audience who agree find tiring.

Some of it comes across to me as GenZ being overly earnest and expecting their media to be the same (or people thinking thats what they want and producing content to fit). Sarcasm in the service of more subtle social commentary in the style of a 30 Rock type show seems to no longer be fashionable.

Reminds me of New Amsterdam. First season was quite heart wrenching in all the right ways, really nice storyline (lone hospital admin fights bureaucracy to provide treatment to everyone, in spite of personal issues). But they put out all the good gripping content in the first season itself, that there was barely anything to put in the subsequent ones. Instead, they resorted to preaching SJW stuff through the protagonist's different idealistic initiatives, some of which are so unreal that it's laughable in a sad way.

My ex got me into that series, but even she gave up by season 3, and she's one of the most liberal left-leaning persons I've met.

You see this all the time with new series that have one season to prove their worth, get picked up and then the creators/writers go "how are we going fill the next 3 seasons with 5 episodes worth of medicore content?"

The sellers’ goal is achieving a reliable income stream at the lowest cost, which dampens risk taking.

The buyers’ goal is to receive something which surprising and new, which means risk taking.

Trying to make balance both is the trick, and few media companies have the executives and management skills to pull it off.

> GenZ being overly earnest

Why do you say this?

Can you provide some specific examples of Disney movies shoving something down your throat? I see this language used frequently but have yet to see any examples of it actually occurring.

Did you watch the new Star Wars trilogy? How about the new Mulan? If you did and did not think they were hamfisted, then I think you have a much higher threshold than most.

> How about the new Mulan?

Mulan sucked, but mostly because "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" did the plot better 20 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzkhVVFRIIg

Mulan fell into the same wishy-washy problem so many of these other recent movies fell into. Was Mulan supposed to be a wuxia / Chi-based kung fu movie where one exceptional warrior makes huge differences on the battlefield? Erm, maybe.

Or was it supposed to be a somewhat gritty war movie akin to the original cartoon? Erm... also yes, sometimes.

As such, we never got the spectacular fight scenes you'd normally get from Wuxia, nor did we get the grittier, tactical kind of Mulan that the cartoon was. The directors were faced with a choice and they chose "both", which in practice means "neither".

The most upfront "message" I can think of from the Star Wars sequels is TLJ's assertion that you don't need to be born important to do important things. Is that what we're talking about?

Luke is washed up and pathetic, Han is washed up and pathetic, "Let the past die", "I've dealt with plenty of trigger happy flyboys like you", the ham-fisted lecture about capitalism on the casino planet, and the whole "The force is female" marketing. It was pretty egregious.

I asked for specific examples. If it’s so obvious, it should be easy to provide a couple. If you’re so confident this is occurring, provide examples and be able to defend them. Gesturing broadly at movie titles tells me that you may be aware your position isn’t very strong.

Disney movies aren’t doing great because they’re boring, plain and simple. “Messaging” has nothing to do with it.

You have plenty of examples in this thread, you have the CEO literally stating it as a problem.

At this point, if you don't see it is because you don't want to see it.

There are precisely zero examples of anything being shoved down someone’s throat. Unless you’re so incredibly sensitive that the mere presentation of a gay person living their life constitutes shoving homosexuality down your throat. As I said, Disney movies are boring. Everyone knows that, but it’s much easier for the CEO to vaguely hint at “messaging” than admit that they don’t know how to create entertaining movies any longer.

Was there even a "message" in "Wish" ?? I enjoyed the movie, but it was terrible from a plot perspective and almost entirely vapid.

I don't think there were many messages in other recent Disney movies I enjoyed (ex: Little Mermaid live action, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) either.

Its more like, Disney's Phase4 / Phase5 of Marvel was just poorly written. They ran out of creative juice for the movies after they spent it all on the TV Series. Disney oversaturated us with Marvel and needs to cut back down to stories we can actually follow.

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Star Wars didn't seem to have much "messaging" either in my view. It was just two directors arguing over the plot with the audience getting confused in the middle. Is Ray a nobody? Or is she the grand-daughter of someone important? Well, both, because the directors / creative team behind Episodes 7/8/9 couldn't decide and didn't have the heart to make a decision.

That's just crappy storytelling. "Messaging" isn't the issue as much as the writers just suddenly started to suck recently.

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As far as I'm aware, the best recent Disney movie, critically, was the one with "obvious messaging". Elemental, which was about how to think about immigrants and how their culture/strength/weaknesses play a role in cities.

Retrospectively, although I kinda disliked it the first time I watched it, Star Wars 8 was the best Disney movie of recent years. If he had just killed Leila in space and spent a bit of time exposing 'interdictors' (prevent ships from going into hyperspace in Legends), making the 'hyperspace suicide' feel less ex machina, it would have been their best since Ironman.

Any hopes of anything coming interesting out of Episode 8 were dashed when Episode 9 basically erased all of the buildup though.

Someone needed to unify the story and not just have different directors/writing teams changing the story from movie-to-movie.

The messaging argument (within the comment section, that is) is tough since it's a game of innuendo. Folks who hate the modern messaging are trying to find any criticism except to point out their distaste for DEI casting, plotlines, and messaging. Folks who are more supportive of those things tend to try to "out" the first group, and ask specifically what it is about the messaging that people don't like. eg: "Old movies had contemporary moral messages. Why don't you like _these_ messages?" Both sides of course have some validity in their argument. A lot of the modern movies are simply bad in addition to having DEI messaging. And if we're being honest, some folks' primary concerns are the DEI issues alone.

I just don't think there's much point in having the conversation unless people can elucidate what exactly they're complaining about. All films have "messaging".

I think there's some merit to that point of view, but at least in the narrow context of HN, I don't want to contribute to culture war internet arguments.

Which is precisely why it's impossible to point at exactly what the problem is.

Yes, all films have messaging, so why did messaging change? Was it not pro-women enough? The Little Mermaid came out in 89 with great success. Not diverse enough? If there is one thing that Disney deserves flak for is for plundering tales from all around the world. Pocahontas and Mulan were also massively successful, long ago.

The most recent "incidents" I recall are the new Little Mermaid being black, the seven little dwarves being of various ethnicities (With a Hispanic Snow White) and the whole deal regarding Star Wars. It gives the feeling that the messaging was deemed not enough. It's not enough to have films like Mulan or El Dorado, or Lilo & Stitch or Aladin, with a plethora of cultures and races, that which is white and male has to changed on top of that. I can't even imagine the reactions if Disney dared turn Mulan black, but The Little Mermaid is Danish, and since that country is predominantly white, it's fair game since that's what US left-wing politics dictate. Not to even mention what China's reaction would have been.

I think it's important to emphasize, we already had diversity, the current state of things is a different matter that, if I might add, looks ridiculous as hell from Europe.

What moral message? Really, what's the moral message now? 15 years ago the moral message was maybe "gay people have a right to love each other too." In the late 60s it was "black people are just people like everyone else, treating them like second class citizens is wrong." What's the moral message now? I can't find one, all I can see is "here's more, if you're tired of it you're a bad person."

I'd argue that one of the current moral messages is a meta-message, and it does follow some specific rules:

- Representation of the "correct" racial and gender groups is of primary importance.

- We need to make up for historical sins by casting the "correct" racial and gender roles appropriately. For example, the man should be the supporting character, and the woman must be the leading action hero.

- Because the show (or movie) itself is an act of representation, supporting the show demonstrates your support for the cause of representation. And therefore if you don't like the show, it's primarily because you do not support this "representation" goal. (and this point is also why plot and writing can take a back seat. "Representation" is the primary goal, writing and plot are often secondary.)

But its less of a moral message and more of a direct attempt at social engineering. Instead of appealing to the populace with a concept, they're attempting to present reality as they'd like it to be (for a while at least; it isn't progress if it doesn't keep changing) hoping that the fans will emulate it and enforce a contrived norm onto their peers. To me that isn't moral messaging at all, there's no moral high ground to aspire to here, there's no lesson to be learned.

Yes and no. It is true that Disney movies were not good, and it is not part of them being woke. They were just boring not interested.

On the other hand if you create a checklist movie (Strong female character - check, good gay character - check, showing white privileged character who is wrong - check) it is exceptionally difficult to create a good movie.

Therefore yes, wokeism is destroying movie industry. Political agenda makes characters unbelievable, because they are just vehicles for political agenda.

Therefore movies and not because they are include woke, but woke makes a worse movie overall. It is the effect of including it, not the act of including it.

This morning The New York Times published an article about the recent stumbles of the MCU genre and "superhero fatigue" (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/movies/superhero-fatigue-...). Criticisms included poor quality control on recent releases as well as audiences having to understand a complicated backstory to follow the plots and character motivations.

The comments lit into the messaging issue, including the current top comment:

Marvel has embraced Disney’s obsession with identity, and fans hate it. Every recent movie is a transparent checklist of gender, race, and religion, and the topics covered obviously have to run the gauntlet of problematic themes, leaving stories with “acceptable”, non-offensive tropes that repeat over and over. DEI isn’t the only problem with superhero movies (and their close cousin, the Star Wars drivel), but it’s a big one.

Someone else said that Disney is basically paying lip service to these ideals, noting "Disney will include a gay character that can easily be cut out at the behest of China."

My biggest gripe is the villains. I want stories that challenge my expectations, not a litany of ham fisted cold war allegories.

I hope the whole industry listens to this.

While I definitely definitely DEFINITELY appreciate seeing movies from Disney that use non-cis white men as protagonists or avoid the traditional love story, I agree that the stories could be tighter.

I might be glossing over a lot of subtleties, but if you ask me South park single-handedly rerouted Disneys trajectory through nothing but targeted satire.

I'd be nice to hear him mention some specifics of messages that got he feels too much focus in their movies.

Cartman: put a chick in it and maker her gay!

I would too.

that said, the article conflates "messaging" with "storytelling". What's the difference? Genuinely curious, not trying to start a politically-inclined flame war.

I would think that some would find that Disney is trying to push a specific message via a story versus telling a story and letting the viewer come to a conclusion on their own, but that to me means there's a grey area, because Disney has been doing the former for a long time, but maybe some feel it's too overt? I don't know. Would love to get other perspectives here.

One thing frequently complained about by Nerdrotic and company, is that the main female characters have no character-arc and no love interest. They start out awesome and they continue to be awesome.

The Problematic 'Strong Female Character' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G3VSkZ4H7o

Hollywood can't write male characters anymore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL6H8CuCdjk

I don’t know if that’s Disney’s problem, overall—Turning Red, Elemental, Encanto, and Raya and the last Dragon are all recent Disney movies with female leads who had interesting character arcs. Not all had love interests, but most the main character was too young. Raya could have, but she lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and anyway I don’t think the movie had room for another subplot.

Storytelling is the plot. Messaging is the moral.

Plot v. Content, as Johnstone put it in Impro. The plot’s a sequence of things happening that connect back to earlier events and elements (without the latter, it’s not a plot, it’s just… stuff happening) that has a plain beginning, middle, and end, the flow of which most people can sense—he relates that children can usually tell when a story being made up on the fly is “over” and doesn’t demand to continue.

“Content” is theme and message. You don’t necessarily need narrative to have it, but it tends to exist in narrative also.

Johnstone advises, when writing or improvising, to worry about the plot, and that the content can take care of itself—it’ll just be there, like magic, when you look back on what you’ve created. Putting “content” first can weaken the narrative, and make one less creative, and anyway the content doesn’t need help to appear.

Of course, his advice is also explicitly for beginners, and he repeatedly mentions as an aside that of course one may take a more active hand in guiding these sorts of things as one gets good enough at the basic techniques that they become effortless.

I think it's extremely smart of Mr. Iger to keep CEO intervention at "less messaging, more storytelling", and leave it to his organization to interpret and implement. Nobody likes a micromanager.

It'd be an awful idea for a business to admit they have signaled too much support for collectives after seeing it as a mistake.

There seems to be a thing in recent decade of entertainment media where there is no subtext and the message needs to hit you over the head repeatedly. Right wingers allege it's because its all "gone woke" and then make their own flavor that's even worse.

Personally it all reminds me why I'd rather just read a book.

Good luck with finding new books that aren’t practicing the same techniques. Unless it is directly or metaphorically confronting a hot button social issue new books do not get much recognition.

Fortunately there are enough good old books that you could read them nonstop for the rest if your life and not get through them.

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Haruki Murakami.

You think everyone else is reading books?

I'm not sure I agree.

I love how recent movies feature a broader range of characters. I was watching the Super Mario Bros Movie yesterday (not Disney) and it was so refreshing to see a strong, leading princess. Likewise I absolutely love seeing different kinds of people featured in Disney movies. It feels like they finally started putting a bit of everyone into their movies. It does not feel forced at all.

And why is messaging a problem? Wasn't Wall-E great? And what about The Wind Rises (not Disney)? Did Soul suffer from its messaging?

In my opinion, Disney's problem is not messaging, but phoning it on with tried-and-true recipes, and playing it safe instead of exploring what the medium can offer.

Wall-E was made in the pre-messaging-first age.

There is a message, but the main focus is between Wall-E and EVE. They didn't add any LGBTQIA+ themes or racial issues in there, because it didn't make sense for the message - which was "take care of the environment"

Strong leading women aren't the problem either. We've had those ages ago. I think the first major one for Pixar was Brave (2012). For Disney we had Ariel, Pocahontas and Mulan in the late 1900s.

Disney's problem is that they forgot that story and characters come first, a movie doesn't have to have an overt agenda. I'd prefer the 80's tv cartoon style where they always had The Lesson in the end of the episode after He-Man spent 20 minutes beating up bad guys in the toy ad disguised as entertainment.

> Strong leading women aren't the problem either. We've had those ages ago.

Hell, Leia’s depicted as more savvy, braver, tougher, and cleverer than the other two main characters in 1977 Star Wars, and it’s not even close. Or subtle.

There's a difference, she's savvy, brave, tough and clever. As she should.

But she doesn't solo the whole Imperial Army while the rest are just sidekicks. She has her strengths, Hand and Luke have theirs.

You're right, Leia was a much better character than Rey.

Could it be that messaging aside, the newer movies are just lazily written? I place them in the same bucket as the last seasons of Game or Thrones. What makes them bad is not the wokeness, but simply the bad writing.

I think that we can have both: trope subversions and good writing. I don't think that the problem is too many subversions; it's not enough good writing.

His dialog and such seem fine (or at least he doesn’t screw up what others put there) but JJ Abrams’ plotting, in particular, is chiefly defined by its… well, generously, childlike qualities. You can certainly tell when he’s been involved in a script. “Lazy” would certainly be a term one might apply to it.

> You're right, Leia was a much better character than Rey.

Rey's issue is what's plaguing too many female movie characters today. She had no flaws she had to overcome. She was perfect from the start and didn't have to grow. She had a few training montages in the movie, but that's about it.

In Brave for example, Merida's pride (a flaw) causes her mother to be cursed. She has to learn to accept help from others to grow.

She's all those things, but she's still a princess. Even better is Ellen Ripley in 1979's "Alien": she's just a space trucker basically, doing a shitty, dirty job hauling ore from distant star systems, and suddenly has to deal with a human-hunting xenomorph. She returns in 1986's "Aliens" and takes on a giant alien queen single-handedly after rescuing some space marines.

> For Disney we had Ariel, Pocahontas and Mulan in the late 1900s.

That's debatable. For example Ariel trades her ability to talk so she can use her body to impress a man. Academics usually consider the strong female character to be Ursula, and she's depicted as unattractive and then brutally murdered with a ship.

> the strong female character to be Ursula, and she's depicted as unattractive and then brutally murdered with a ship.

She’s literally the villain character in a fairytale cartoon who is based on a witch character that was written almost 200 years ago. Seems like the depiction is appropriate to the character trope. How many fairytale witches get the pretty face and happy ending?

> Wall-E was made in the pre-messaging-first age.

Which part of the fat consumers destroying their planet was pre-messaging?

Messaging _FIRST_ Disney and Pixar stuff has had _a_ message for a long time. Before they didn't feel the need to tackle every single issue from LGBTQIA+ representation to racism in a single movie. They just focused on the environment.

If Wall-E was made today, it'd have a gay/queer/nonbinary character in it, every major race and culture would be represented possibly as other bots with distinct accents etc. The full DEI checklist.

> So refreshing to see a strong, leading princess

Is there a movie made in the last five years that wasn't this? At this point it would be radical if the damsel was actually in distress.

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