The never-ending battle against woke Hollywood and SJW infused entertainment media [trigger warning]

The only saturn that had a minimal impact on my life was sailor saturn.

 

i certainly agree on the first part.
on the second one i'm doubtful, but it's certainly a possibility

 

Were you aware that Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer 40K strategy game, but GW said no, so they took their game engine and made up their own ersatz version of 40K?

I believe a Starcraft movie or TV series would be difficult to pull off well. That said, I'm not opposing such an endeavor. I am just concerned that the movie would not be very good, even without wokeness involved.

The 1993 Super Mario Bros movie was very very bad even though it was not woke (or whatever the 1990s equivalent of woke was), FernGully? Saving the Rainforest was the big thing then. My least favorite Gargoyle's episode had this theme.

There was a lot of talk that if the rainforest went away we'd run out of oxygen. Though it turns out most oxygen comes from algae. It's almost like alarmist environmental Chicken Littles were either lying or wrong in the 1990s. I'm sure they know what they are talking about now.

 

Proof that when Hollywood wokesters preach diversity they are lying.

To them, diversity means, black people, non-straight people, and masculine women.

It would be a huge win for diversity to have an Egyptian actress play a high profile role in a major production, but that's the wrong kind of diversity I guess.

 

In the 1990s a movie producer bought an option for the movie rights to The Fantastic Four, but the rights expired if a movie wasn't made in a certain time frame.

They made a super low budget Fantastic Four movie which played in one movie theater to meet the requirement, then they supposedly destroyed the film reel. Note, they didn't tell the actors that the movie was a farce, they thought this would launch their careers.

Why am I bringing this up? Amazon is contractually obligated to make three or five seasons of Rings of Power but there is no way they won't lose large piles of money given the low and declining viewership. Only 37% of Amazon's American viewers who watched the first episode watched through to the finale and only 45% of international customers made it start to finish. It's at least two years till season 2 hits. I think they will be lucky if 25% of the people who saw episode one bother to watch season two. Normally Amazon has a rule that if at least 51% of their viewers don't watch the whole series, they pull the plug.

What if hypothetically, they cut 99% of the budget and deliberately made it crappy, but they technically finished two more seasons. If anything, people might watch these things ironically, Mystery Science Theater 3000 style and Amazon could recoup some of their losses from season 1 and buying the rights.

Crazy hypothetical I know.

 

In this case, Amazon loses a lot more. If they don't make the requisite number of seasons (I don't know if it's three or five), it's not that they simply lose the rights to the IP, but they owe the Tolkien estate more money.

So stuck between Charybdis and Scylla, Amazon either loses money spending money on a failing show or they have to just write Simon Tolkien a check.

I am not Jeff Bezos. I do not know what is going through his head. Bezos, for all his faults, is in the top 1% of men in terms of raw ambition. I, Scalenex, do not have anything close to this ambition. I cannot put myself in his head. But let's pretend he called me.

"Hey Scalenex, what should I do about the Rings of Power? I know you are an old school Tolkien fan, but I personally don't care about his legacy, I am just concerned with mine."

"Okay Mr. Bezos, yes I would prefer derivatives of Tolkien work stick close to the source material and the spirit of JRR Tolkien the GOAT of fantasy authors. I think doing so will actually make more money than the source material will do 'reimagined for modern audiences'....normally. But not for you. At this point, the Rings of Power lots so much credibility for Amazon Prime that even if you made a perfect Tolkien derivative show, the hardcore and casual fans would not give your a fair shake."

"So, Scalenex, you are saying I cannot turn this ship around to success?"

"Yep, Mr. Bezos, the best you can do is to turn this from a large failure into a small failure but the odds of even that are low.

My thoughts are that season 1 of Rings of Power was a sunk cost. If you throw good money after bad, Season 2 and 3 of Rings of Power will be bigger financial disasters. If you get to season 4 and 5, these seasons won't be derided by fans, they will just be ignored entirely, and that's even worse. You won't even get hate watchers for it.

You can lose money by making more seasons or you can lose money by writing the Tolkien estate a check. I say you should write the Tolkien estate a check. If you throw money away on some failed seasons, you will lose more than money, you will lose prestige. With all due respect sir, I know you value prestige more than money. You can get money back from your core business easily enough.

Let's say you cancel the series and write the Tolkien's ungrateful grandchildren a big check. You can then issue a sort of carefully worded statement that you regret some of the radical changes to the source material and make a non-binding promise to be better in the future. This will give Amazon Studios more credibility and good will for future projects.

The Boys had better viewership than Rings of Power and a much smaller budget. Jack Reacher too. Well written stuff like this is where Amazon Prime can truly compete against Disney, Warner, and the others. For the budget of Rings of Power, you can make several mid budget shows like The Boys. If some of these projects don't land, you aren't really out much, you only really need one in four shows like this to become fan favorites to come out ahead.

Also, distance yourself from Chinese suppliers, slowly. Not because of moral reasons, those things of course don't matter at Amazon. But the CCP will stab you in the back, it's only a matter of time. All you can do is make sure you are expose as little back to them as possible."

 

Wokeness isn't helping, but I don't believe that is the core problem. It just happens to be the case that live action versions of Flounder and Sebastian are nightmare fuel.

 

pretty much that