Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Boris Johnson Is Your PM And Solo Lost Money

Now that we've got that whole 'election' thing out of the way, it's time to move on to the really important issue, namely the release of Star Wars 9: The Rise of Skywalker.

Hey, I'm only half joking. Politics really is down-stream of culture, and - as extensively documented by Itchybacca here - Disney Lucasfilm have never made any secret of their desire to use these latest movies to push a social justice agenda (hence the two alternative names suggested: Ruse of Soywalker and Star Wars Nein).

Consider the history of Disney Star Wars since they bought out George Lucas. The first film, The Force Awakens, was a mostly inoffensive remake of A New Hope, albeit the decision to portray Han Solo as a deadbeat dad should have tipped us off. Ditto, stand alone movie Rogue One was a good entry to the series.... but then came The Last Jedi...

This is the movie where one of the characters says 'let the past die, kill it if you have to' - as fine a statement of SJW philosophy as you'll find. The trouble was, as it always is with these guys, that the film established that Disney Lucasfilm  really, really hated Star Wars, but also that they had no idea what to replace it with. They made Luke Skywalker a bitter loser and a coward (really) but couldn't create a single memorable character to replace him with - or at least memorable for the right reasons. Absurd super women rubbed shoulders with borderline moronic male characters while spewing out sub-Titania McGrath talking points, but none of them came within a country mile of an actual plot. The movie opened big but then set the record for the biggest drop off from week one to week two once word got around. Ditto, merchandising - always a big factor for Star Wars - was a disaster zone.

And that's how Solo lost money! $70 million lost on a Star Wars movie - who'd have believed that even five years ago? True, Solo was relatively woke-free, if you ignore the coolest character in the Star Wars universe getting continuously chumped by women, but The Last Jedi had already killed the golden goose, plucked it, then set fire to it and thrown the ashes in the river by the time Solo came around.

Now it all comes down to Rise of Skywalker to make or break a franchise Disney paid $4.05 billion for. Hence why the people who wanted to kill the past have suddenly decided to make the Big Bad Emperor Palpatine - aka the guy who got killed in 1983s Return of the Jedi.

And then there's the desperate attempts to cram in footage of the late, great, Carrie Fisher, left over from The Force Awakens (leading some to call the movie Star Wars Plan 9 From Outer Space). Consider what it says about these people that, even dead, Carrie Fisher still has more charisma than the dullsville wokeling drones they've inserted in the new movies.

The irony is that Disney Lucasfilm have succeeded in pushing a political message, just the opposite of the one they were hoping to push. They tried to ditch actual Star Wars in favour of woke nonsense that only vaguely resembled the world George Lucas created, smearing anyone who objected as a racist, misogynist, homophobic Nazi. All they succeeded in doing was ditching existing fans in pursuit of a new, woke fanbase that may or may not exist.

Of course, this new movie might still make a shedload of cash - it is the biggest franchise in the world after all - but the desperate attempts to row back on the uber woke Last Jedi, even to the point of virtual necromancy, already speak to the failure of Lucasfilm's New Girl Order. The more they trashed Star Wars, the more it emphasised how much better the original films were than their PC garbage.

All of which brings us back to the wider political point. Disney Lucasfilm justified trashing their own franchise with the claim that it was [current year] yo! They didn't need old white guys like Luke Skywalker when they could replace them with cool new, sexually ambiguous, characters of various ethnicties like.... you know, that one, the one who did that thing...

SJWs always dismiss their critics as squaresville losers but it's them who always seem to struggle with getting normal people through the door. Consider the latest entries to the ledger entitled Get Woke, Go Broke:

Ghostbusters 2016
Terminator: Dark Fate
Dark Phoenix
Charlies Angels 2019
Black Christmas 2019

All of them were attempts to 'reimagine' (i.e. rip off) older, more successful movies/franchises, but with more wokeness, and all of them imploded.

In so far as we can judge from what real people spend their money on, it's not conservatives that are out of touch with the public.

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