It’s not even about “offensive” or “cancelled.” It’s about the pure economics of in-theater movies.
The whole business model of comedy movies released to theaters was that they had mediocre theater box office numbers but the theater release would drive a crazy home rental business for years after the movie came out.
That entire business model doesn’t work anymore. After a comedy movie leaves the theater it’s basically worthless and does nothing to drive streaming subscriptions.
Examples like Rogan, South Park, Chappelle, do not apply here.
Rogan’s podcast is not a comedy. And he’s a terrible standup comic.
Chappelle’s comedy specials only require a stage and a microphone to produce. There is no budget besides paying Chappelle.
Eminem is a musician. And, he’s not actually offensive to the general public, especially not anymore.
South Park is a TV show. Trey Parker and Matt Stone haven’t made any movies since the DVD rental era that I talked about. It’s also very inexpensive to produce compared to a comedy movie.
Finally, the elephant in the room. You should really get out of your conservative reality distortion field. This whole idea that Disney’s their wokeness is ruining everything is utter bullshit. My man, they own 20th Century Studios, 20th Century TV, and ABC Studios. They are the majority owner of Hulu. Disney isn’t just “woke politically correct family movies” or whatever conservative weirdos think they are. They are a giant media conglomerate. They finance shows like The Great, full of swearing, violence, and nudity. [1]
Let’s also not forget that Disney is still a box office machine and knows exactly what they are doing.
The top grossing movies in the United States in 2024, 2021, and 2015-2019 were all Disney.
In 2022 Avatar 2 beats out Top Gun Maverick in the worldwide box office.
This idea that Disney has lost its way and doesn’t understand the movie business is baloney. Disney’s stock didn’t tank because of “cancel culture” or “wokeness,” it tanked because half of the company’s revenue is theme parks and Covid-19 wrecked their business. Its movie business is also heavily skewed to in-theater big blockbusters. Seriously, look up the stock, all the downturn happened in 2020-2022. Disney stock is up 5% this year.
Disney struggles with streaming for the same reason the other networks struggle with it: streaming replaced cable but nothing replaced DVD sales and rentals.
[1] I have also noticed that conservative weirdos always bring up South Park, Rogan, Chappelle, and Eminem specifically as great examples of anti-cancel crusaders. The funniest part about that to me is that conservatives are so behind the times that they don’t realize that Eminem isn’t “slim shady” anymore and isn’t offensive to the general public. Somehow Rogan is supposed to be proof that a show that elevates conservative voices can break through an anti-conservative system, when really all he proves is that conservative talk radio is as good a business as it ever was. He is effectively now no different than Rush Limbaugh, except with a format where he has guests on the show. And then there’s South Park which is basically coasting on a fan base just like The Simpsons.
Finally, Chappelle. Let’s be real be real here: a good portion of Chappelle’s white male audience enjoyed the original show because they took his show to be jokes about Black people, at the expense of Black people. Just like the people who didn’t realize that Colbert on The Colbert Report was satire, they didn’t really see any of the satire or social commentary. So it’s not surprising to me that those same mostly conservative white men enjoy watching an hour of trans hate jokes.