Failures at massive scale can only teach if people are willing to learn.
It was reported recently that Disney lost $170 million on its "live-action" remake of Snow White. For most of Hollywood's history, such a sum was never spent on a film and its promotion. But today, a $150 million film might require a similar sum for advertising, with the studio and the theaters splitting the gate. Today, one has to have a winner that makes a lot of money worldwide to break even or turn a profit.
The failure of a remake of a Disney classic should be a "teachable moment" in the language of a former president who learned nothing. Something can be teachable if those involved are willing to learn. But they are not, and for reasons that will not soon change. The ideological Left cannot learn from this failure or the reelection of Donald Trump, because the lessons would undermine their most basic beliefs. Disney and the Left would tell us that their Snow White was outstanding and that the potential audience that did not show up either does not know quality, and/or was distracted by irrelevant political issues, or stayed home because of COVID, three years after the pandemic ended. They would never admit that their product was defective and that there is no audience because nobody wants what they have to offer.
It was said that when Al Gore ran for president, his handlers made him do something very uncomfortable. Saturday Night Live ran a skit in which candidate Gore came off as an automaton, to the point that the fictional George W. Bush called him a "Harvard Yard Brainiac." Gore's handlers made him watch the sketch, in the hope that maybe he might learn how people see him: a stiff, unapproachable smarty-pants. He apparently learned nothing from the exercise, and walking in his footsteps, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly reintroduced to the people because every version voters saw was insipid and wooden. Her loss was, on the one hand, a shock, but on the other, there was no there there—she doesn't have 1 percent of the likability or people skills of her more personable husband.
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Disney would rather not hear that its star for Snow White was an insufferable lefty nincompoop. She claimed that the beloved original had the prince giving the sleeping princess a kiss without her express, written permission, and was thus defective. Well, that's how she woke up, and people like the idea of the princess and prince getting together. She went on to side with the Palestinians, making the situation of her co-star, Israeli Gal Gadot, somewhat uncomfortable. The latter had to reaffirm her religion and support for Israel. Elvis and Johnny Carson understood that nobody out there wants to know about your politics. For the Left, which includes most of Hollywood and the music industry, politics come first. We need to know what you believe before we can enjoy your product. Billie Eilish made lots of new enemies by suggesting that the entire U.S. was "stolen land." Did she ever hear about the Louisiana Purchase? She has still not vacated her home or returned it to the tribe that now claims it as being on their land.
The Left can't learn anything because it would undermine their entire ideologically driven belief system. Americans like having a closed border, support the removal of illegal aliens, and overwhelmingly support solid voter ID. The first two issues directly undermine their claims of borders being racist and that everyone has some "right" to come to the U.S. and get free stuff from the government. The last issue directly affects their ability to massage elections for their benefit. The ability to let illegal aliens vote or take huge numbers of absentee ballots to overwhelm in-person voting is key to winning when you have no winning ideas. Higher taxes! Open borders! Free stuff for illegal aliens! Taxes on unrealized gains! I don't know of one position that could be described as 80:20 in their favor. In the old days, both the Republican and Democratic parties had positions that could be popular. The Democrats have selected rigid ideology over electability. They need those illegal aliens to vote, and they need weak ID requirements to get as many votes as possible. The idea of actually embracing economic and other issues popular with voters is as foreign as many of their supporters.
The rigid ideology of the Left is on near-constant display. They are still mumbling about "genocide" even as Hamas pays 50,000 widows of its fighters—out of a total of 70,000 Gazans killed. They still scream "famine" even as Palestinians show the massive amounts of food available at various restaurants in the Strip. Don't these guys ever get the memo? They are like Orson Welles' character in "The Stranger," when he is exposed as a high-ranking Nazi hiding in a little Connecticut town: he starts to say that he was just following orders, there was no choice….The Left cannot learn anything because the implications of what they might learn would rip their entire program to shreds. Chuck Schumer and other Democrats, when presented with polls showing that over 70 percent of Democrats also support picture ID to vote, lose their minds and start talking about how hard it is for a married woman to vote when she has a new last name—they had to drop the "blacks can't figure out how to get an ID from the DMV" because it apparently rubbed part of their voting base the wrong way. Every normal country—and a lot of third-world dumps—have required picture IDs to vote. The Democrats should accept the reality of the popularity of having kosher elections, but their desire to grab and keep power makes it impossible to support something that their voters like.
Disney destroyed Star Wars, and Paramount is destroying Star Trek, again, starting with its ideology and then thinking about plot, actors, and action. The first episode of a new Star Trek series had virtually no viewers, even as it was offered for free by the studio. The characters look like they came out of a trans boot camp and not Starfleet Academy. Star Wars lost all of the luster of the original movies, for which I stood in line nearly five decades ago. Amazon apparently does not know what type of James Bond they want. The old, handsome, smart, tough womanizer will probably be replaced by a thoroughly repulsive, politically correct person of multicolor. They never follow the program that led to enormous box office and cultural success. Star Trek is no longer "to boldly go where no man has gone before"; instead, it is now "to quickly run away from somewhere nobody wants to be."
It was revealed that "ethnic" psychology organizations declared that Jews are "white" and thus undeserving of consideration as a minority worthy of protection. That there are more blacks in the U.S. than Jews in the world did not fit into their calculation. If they had agreed that Jews are a protected minority, then there goes all of the pro-Palestinian stuff. No more marches, no more screaming, "Intifada revolution." So, instead of being honest, they too stuck tightly to their ideology so as to never change. Losers remain losers.
The upcoming election will be about the economy. If you have to tell the people that the economy is doing well, you are losing. The people will show you that the economy is doing well when they buy a lot and praise lower prices. The Democrats can be beaten, but the people must believe that, beyond a secure border and illegals' ejections, their own lives are looking up. There is no substitute for people feeling good about their condition.
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