Disney’s Strange World, a cartoon flick featuring a gay teenager, belly-flopped hard at the box office Thanksgiving weekend, doing so very poorly, and costing so very much to make, that it is now expected to lose something like $147 million when it’s all done.
Naturally, the right-wing press is over the moon. “Woke = Broke: America Says ‘No Thanks’ To Disney Cartoon With Gay Teenage Hero,” crowed the Daily Wire. “Disney’s latest attempt to go woke has them going broke,” cried the equally imaginative Louder With Crowder. “Americans Slam Demonic Disney for Trying to Teach Kids About Sexual Preferences in Its First Cartoon With Homosexual Main Character,” read a headline on the Liberty Daily news aggregation site feed.
But no one was quite so excited about the film’s box office failure as Breitbart’s John Nolte, who bashed out a column bashing the “gay groomers” at Disney and their “predatory embrace” of “the sicko trans movement.” (There are no trans characters in the film.)
Over Thanksgiving, the child groomers at Disney again sought to groom your child, which cost them a loss of up to $147 million.
With rhetoric like this prevalent on the right, it’s no wonder someone went and shot up a gay club.
Strange World, Disney’s latest … animated feature, is all about spreading environmental propaganda and exposing your child to adult sexuality. One of Strange World’s lead characters is a gay teenage boy in love with another boy. This plot point has nothing to do with teaching children tolerance for people who might be different and everything to do with shattering your child’s innocence.
I’m pretty sure no one in the family-friendly film is having explicit gay sex, but whatever.
Disney’s predatory embrace of child grooming, drag queens, and advocating the mutilation of children on the altar of the sicko trans movement is no longer a secret. The Disney brand is forever damaged. Decent parents no longer trust Disney, nor should they.
He equated Disney with a creepy child predator luring kids into his van.
Maybe turning your $250 million investment into the equivalent of a guy in a van holding candy and a camera is a poor way to do business?
But, Nolte insists, straight people aren’t being bigots because they reject a cartoon movie with a gay character. It’s just that.
homosexuality makes straight people uncomfortable. We don’t go to the movies to be uncomfortable. Mainstreaming it to children is unconscionable. Suddenly, instead of thinking about love, they are thinking about the complicated world of sexuality long before they are ready. Decent people don’t do that to children.
Meanwhile, the New York Post is celebrating a British dad who took his 9-year-old son to Hooters.
Somehow Nolte didn’t feel moved to write about this example of premature sexualization.
So why did Strange World flop, anyway? It may not be the gay subplot so much as the fact that no one has heard about it; as the Mary Sue points out, Disney fumbled publicity for the film. And those who did hear about it may have decided to wait a couple of months for it to start streaming on Disney+. Of course, by then, the right will have moved onto railing hysterically about something else too woke for their tastes.
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@Surplus to Requirements;@Alan Robertshaw:
I try to avoid likely places to encounter spoilers before seeing the movies!
Good luck with that; I’m specifically remembering July 2009, when the Children of Earth arc of Torchwood aired on BBC One; there was a delay before it would get around to airing on BBC America. At a U.S. science fiction convention I’d had a standing commitment to attend, what should be parading all around me, on stickers, banners, T-shirts, and petitions, but the 500-foot (and famously ill-received) Spoilerzilla!
And, long before that, Charles Schulz had left the 500-foot Spoiler for Citizen Kane lying out where grade-schoolers like me could happen across it:
“Ah, only the journey is written! Not the destination!” — Part of the audio track in a fixed, recorded film, complete with subsequent ending.
Why? It’s not like they had to get it translated for that particular market.
Well, maybe they felt the need to do an s/colour/color/ on the subtitle file. But that wouldn’t even have been a five-minute job!
@ surplus
Broadcasters would prefer if shows went out across the world at the same time. It mitigates against people uploading them and affecting later viewing figures.
However scheduling doesn’t always permit that. Channels may be waiting for another show to end and free up the time slot for example.
I seem to recall one season of Torchwood was actually broadcast in the US before the UK. Causing some minor consternation amongst licence payers; even though BBC Enterprise sales subsidies the licence fee.
The 1996 movie was also released first in the US and Canada; although that had a lot of US money behind it; so fair enough.
@Alan: The last season was largely paid for by Starz, a premium cable channel, so they got the rights to air it first. Plus it was mostly made in America. I don’t know how long it took or even if it came to BBC America; we had a 3-month free Starz deal, so we saw it as it went. Although now it’s on HBO?
Anyway, the Beeb was only a week behind on TW:MD, which is some revenge for the 2 year lag between showings of Doctor Who for years/decades. And even the 2 week lag at the beginning of the new episodes, which led to so much pirating. Finally, we get only an 8 hour delay, except for the specials that go out live everywhere.
@Alan Robertshaw:
I’m not sure I enjoy movies more if they’re spoiled; it’s better to say that I’m pretty much agnostic to spoilers. (A condition I know many others don’t share, so I still try to avoid providing spoilers to anything recent.) But that’s at least in part because when I read a book or watch a movie I’m at least as interested in the craft of the story as the actual destination.
That’s one of the issues with being a writer myself, I guess, even if I haven’t been professionally published much. My inner editor and literary critic is on pretty much full-time. Which is also sadly why I’ve never succeeded at NaNoWriMo: I can’t seem to get the inner editor to shut up long enough to just write straight out at that speed.
(I ended up discussing a lot of this with friends after seeing the movie of Alita: Battle Angel without having read the manga or seen the anime like some of my friends had. And then seeing it again with a different but overlapping set of friends. One of the things that impressed me about that movie was that it worked pretty well for both fans and newbies; also that there was just so much stuff happening there and yet I never felt that it was rushed anywhere. Given how much story and background they had, the controlled pacing was really impressive, and it’s a shame that the early trailers and the marketing were so badly handled. Sadly there have been any number of good movies that were obviously made with love from the director and even producer level that then got kneecapped at the distribution level.)
I don’t see why there’d be such a scheduling conflict, since the logical thing for BBC America to be is an 8-hour-delayed carbon copy of the London mothership (and that, only to accommodate the time-zone difference, so an 8pm show airs at 8pm in London and at 8pm in New York). Or maybe to be two channels, one 8 hours delayed and one 11 hours delayed, the latter for the west coast.
BBC America has a feed showing the Doctor 5 hours after original, the difference between London and NYC. Possibly another 3 hours later for the west; we only get the East feed. I don’t even know if they have 2 feeds. But we usually record it and watch later anyway.
There might be only one feed of BBCA, I don’t know.
I just have to point this out in reference to the article and GSS ex-noob’s comment because it’s a pet peeve of mine – Strange World isn’t a “cartoon”, it’s an animated movie. People misuse the word often but “cartoon” really just refers to goofy short-form animation meant for comedy, like those shorts that used to air in front of movies in theaters, not anything animated ever. It sort of has a negative connotation since “it’s just a cartOOOOn” is something people use to flippantly brush off any analysis of any story presented in animation.
Regardless, I don’t know why being animated vs. live-action would affect how fitting the title is since the medium has nothing to do with the content, and IIRC it’s an all-ages movie rather than being strictly for kids or adults.
I don’t mean to come off as rude or anything but the history of animation fascinates me, and the medium gets very little respect even now (i.e. the Annies still aren’t televised despite being a legitimate awards show for animation, but the Oscars half-ass their handling of animation and their awards get held up as legitimate just because they’re the Oscars).
In other news of “not promoting cartoon movies”, I only learned yesterday that there is a new Puss in Boots movie this month, and only because it was mentioned in an entirely different commercial! I was FFWD through the ads and caught a glance of Pooos swashbuckling and went “wait wut?” and watched it. Apparently it comes to theaters in less than 2 weeks?
Although I saw trailers for it a while ago (they pushed it back) but not again now, so I thought it had come and gone already.
I suspect part of the marketing problem is now that we have so many streaming services that are also owned by the same companies that are making the shows (and thus aren’t likely to be advertising for anybody else’s shows) it’s become nearly impossible to do really broad-reach advertising anymore. You’re not going to see an ad for a Dreamworks production on Disney+.
Add to that things like the near-collapse of print newspapers aside from a few large markets, the pandemic meaning people are less likely to be outside and seeing billboards, and the fact that a lot of people online are using ad blockers because frankly a huge number of online ads are dangerous or at least annoying in ways that any reputable company doing outdoor advertising would block… and honestly I think general marketing of films is a lot more difficult these days.
Though, again, a lot of it is self-inflicted damage by so many of the film studios trying to set up their own vertical silo streaming services to keep people locked in, with nobody really paying attention to the fact that multiple lock-in services result in also effectively locking new users out because they won’t know what you have if they subscribe to other services. It’s becoming a circular firing squad of media companies.
Strange World, Disney’s latest … animated feature, is all about spreading environmental propaganda and exposing your child to adult sexuality. One ofStrange World’slead characters is a gay teenage boy in love with another boy. This plot point has nothing to do with teaching children tolerance for people who might be different and everything to do with shattering your child’s innocence.This shit right here where diversity will automatically hurt your child and scar them forever is such a mask off moment lol. Like they only care that minorities suffer