PINOCCHIO Hanks/Zemeckis Reunion "Creepy in the Worst Ways"

[AndyDursin]

Can't vouch for that movie, but the 2nd lowest grossing weekend of 2022 -- which means it's one of the lowest grossing weekends in cinema history -- means they're all going to be closing if they have more performances like that.

[Monterey Jack]

Hey, Barbarian made back its $10 million budget in a single weekend, which is not something you can say for the majority of blockbusters these days.

[AndyDursin]

Lipstick on a pig in the big picture. Against no competition and with a terrible perscreen average I'd imagine considering it was, what, the only wide release of the weekend? Audience score was abysmal also.

Considering what it costs to market and telease its probably not going to make a profit at least not in theaters. Either way cinema owners don't want a repeat of that weekend for sure...that was historically bad.

[Monterey Jack]

Tell 'em, Doomc0ck...

[AndyDursin]

Excellent video as always.

So is this article which states Disney's entire diversity push is money driven. In that they don't need white heroes anymore because they already have the white audience. So what they are doing is "reaching out" to cut their disastrous performance in China by finding new demographic areas and people who don't watch Marvel.

It's less about "representation" than it is $$$$. Which was entirely the point of the women driven Star Wars ideology. They know they have young boys and men locked up as viewers. So where do they go? Push hard with women to make more $$$.

But it backfired with STAR Wars and they're concerned where it's heading with Marvel... For good reason. Most of their recent series and movies have had some total clunkers.

And if you start using and abusing the pre established audience, you are in trouble...

[Monterey Jack]

It's been Disney's M.O. for decades...target a particular trend, then when they reach the maximum amount of profit from said trend, cut them loose and start glomming onto another one. They went hard with Disney Princess musicals...until the box office tailed off in the late 90s. Then it was "boy-centric" action/adventure clunkers like Atlantis and Treasure Planet (which bombed), and it took until the 2010s until the Disney Princess musicals were now officially old enough to be "nostalgic", so they brought them back. Now it's "remake all of our old movies, but with racial/gender swapping". With Little Mermaid and Snow White (er, Snow Brown ), they've now reached the end of the most famous movies in their backlog to remake, so what's left? Bambi with a photorealistic CGI deer (and where it's the father who dies)? Fantasia w/Kidz Bop muzak? And yet they won't remake their "bad" movies with decent premises like The Black Hole, The Watcher In The Woods, Something Wicked This Way Comes or The Black Cauldron, because the originals have no nostalgia around them the studio can crassly latch onto. Of the recent Disney remakes, one of the best was Pete's Dragon, because no Disney fan considers the 1977 movie any sort of sacred cow, and thus it was allowed to actually REMAKE the original in a way that never felt like they were shoving a socio-political agenda down the audience's throats. Naturally, it did mediocre business.

It's a desperate strategy, because when Disney's run out of sh!t to remake or acquire, what's the exit strategy? Are we supposed to squee with pleasure seeing the X-Men and Fantastic Four characters take their place in the MCU...after we've seen them done twice over by Fox over the last two decades? Disney used to advertise their 90s films as being, "...in the great tradition of the DIsney classics!", but now they just give you the SAME Disney classics, only in soulless, visually ugly retreads that suck all of the joy and color and excitement out of the originals and give you nothing in return but different skin tones and chiding lectured about how sexist/racist/"problematic" the originals were. And these are the versions that today's kids are growing up on. It's criminal.

[Monterey Jack]

SOME people get it...

[Monterey Jack]

[Monterey Jack]

Seven Razzie nominations.

[AndyDursin]

Still haven't watched it but I'm not surprised! To be honest...I didn't like the Del Toro version much either. Too arcane for my tastes, especially the ending.