Piers Morgan Uncensored - Is Disney Falling Apart?

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

The House of Mouse is falling down. Disney’s last four big releases have bombed at the Box Office. The company is currently no longer Hollywood’s number one film studio. Recent box office takings show even Marvel has lost its - well - marvel. Critics say the reason is simple. Disney has prioritised identity politics over entertainment; pushing messages audiences don’t want or need to hear. So do they have a point? YouTubers Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic join Uncensored contributor Esther Krakue and the author for 'The case for cancel culture', Ernest Owens.  YouTube: @PiersMorganUncensored X: @PiersUncensored TikTok: @piersmorganuncensored Insta: @piersmorganuncensored Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's start with Disney. There's a huge civil war raging with Disney. We're trying to work out what is going wrong. Disney are the DEI department. People want to go see diverse films. No, they don't. We used to joke about they're just checking boxes when they're literally checking boxes.

And they've stopped thinking about storytelling because they actually look down on the audience. The Wolf Brigade that's within their building. They've got nowhere to go at this point. They're just there for identity politics. The House of Mouse, is falling down. Disney's last four big releases are bombed at the box office. The company is currently no longer Hollywood's number one film studio. Recent box office takings show even Marvel has lost

its well, Marvel. And critics say the reason is simple. Disney prioritized identity politics over entertainment, pushing messages audiences don't want or need to hear. So have they got a point? We'll discuss all that and more to titans of YouTube returning on censored by popular demand, Critical Drinker and Ned Drottic. I mean, otherwise known as Will and Gary, but I prefer your stage names, guys. We're going to sink to those. Also, here to debate is Unsensual Contributor, Esther Cracko,

and the author for the case for cancelled culture, Ernest Owens, which is one of the worst named titles of a book, Ernest. I can ever, ever envisage. But we'll let that pass. All right, let's start with Disney, because there's a huge civil war raging with Disney. We're bored members, investors, all trying to work out what is going wrong

with the recent series of flops because Disney is not used to having flops. Nelson Peltz, who's a serious investor in Disney's, criticized Disney's woke strategy in an interview with the Financial Times. He said, why do I have to have a Marvel movie that's all women? Not that I have anything against women,

but why do I have to do that? Why do I need an all-black cast? What do you think of this? I mean, critical drinker. There's no doubt Disney. he's in a pretty poor run at the moment. How much of that is down to woking up the movies? I mean, I think it's definitely a factor,

but it's part of a much bigger picture that incorporates other issues like a general decline in storytelling quality, a prioritization of quantity over quality, and yeah, like delving too much into identity politics, which by their nature are divisive. Of course they are. And so all of those different factors,

actors working together have slowly undermined their creative output to the point where all of their major franchises are failing. Star Wars is kind of a disaster at the moment. The Marvel cinematic universe that used to be this money printing BMOth is churned out flop after flop in recent years. And even their own, you know, their own unique animation movies like Wish. On the Mansion, flop. Pixar flops all over the place. Yes, exactly. All of those different aspects of their creative output have flopped.

And they've got nowhere to go at this point. Clearly something has to change. What they're doing is not working anymore. Yeah, I mean, Dodson, Shee Hulk, attorney at law, a comic book tale featuring a strong female lead. The Marvel's, a comic book movie featuring a diverse cast of strong female leads, Elemental, Disney's first animation featuring their first strong non-bindance

lead, all flops. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. People who are intent on attacking Disney saying, well, this is because they're pursuing a strategy that's not based on just producing great movies. They're pursuing a strategy trying to appease the woke brigade who will come hunting for them if they deviate from the woke worldview. Your thoughts? The woke brigade that's within their building, right? So, you know, we see all these third-party companies and gaming that's going off, right? right now, but like Disney is that third party company. They are the DEI department.

Lucasfilm is the DEI department. And now Marvel is too. And it was really easy for comic book fans to figure this out because we read the comic books. She Hulk, for example, was a great comic book. It was reverent. It had it broke the fourth wall. You know, the famous one, the famous run is by John Byrne.

And I love the comic book. She Hulk was a member of the Fantastic Four. This is one of my favorite female Marvel characters. And they destroyed her because they don't know what they're doing. I did a clip in one of my videos of all of the writers for most of the D plus shows. I'm sorry, Disney Plus, stating that they didn't know anything about the comics and they didn't read the comics. And that's part of the reason because they're just there for identity politics. We used to joke about they're just checking boxes when they're literally checking boxes now.

Right. So, Ernest, you'd be sitting there grimacing. I mean, it's clearly demonstrably not working this strategy. And I've, just looking from the outside, look at it and think, yeah, they have been too concerned about identity politics, too concerned about appeasing their very woke workforce. And they should have stuck to doing what Disney does best, make great family films and make a ton of cash. So there's a lot of misinformation. And I think the issue is, is that no one here is actually really. really reading the real strategy.

The problem is several things. There's a missing implication. There has been, arguably, films that were super successful. Black Panther had a predominant black cast, not all black cast, and made $1.3 billion at the box office and had a really successful sequel. The reality is that when you start saying woke or DEI, you know, there's another implication there

where you're implying in many ways that what is the opposite of lack of diversity in those films? It's feeding to an all-white cast, or majority white cast, and the lack of diversity. I don't think that that's what Disney's trying to do, and I don't think that's what Hollywood should do, because it doesn't reflect the society we live in. However, what's missing in this conversation

is that the reason why a lot of these films are not doing as well is because many of them are spin-offs, sequels, or there's just overall fatigue in the market where people want original stories. So I do think that rather than try to make this a culture war, which really it isn't, it's more of a change and taste from the audiences to what they want.

Let's keep it 100. Pixar has not really made too many original films that have really been able to be fully marketed and there's a bit over saturation of them. There's an oversaturation of Marvel. But if you look at other films elsewhere, there has seen to be a trend of liking diversity, TV shows, streaming platforms.

And so it seems to be a little bit intellectually dishonest to frame it in this way. I think there's another way to look at this point. I'll come to us to it once. I mean, I would just say, you know, my favorite movie the last few years was Top Gun Maverick, because it just did what it said on the tin, right? The guys behave like guys,

and women behaved like women, bad guys got slotted, and the good guys were heroes. I mean, that used to be how movies got made in Hollywood. They celebrated the basics in life. Now they're too busy worrying about what the basics in life actually are. Esther, what I play a clip from South Park. Take a look at this. Is there a problem, people?

We were just discussing ideas of what to do with the new Prince Eric movie. Put a chick in it, Maker Gay. Maybe we should go a different route than we did with Indiana Jones. Fuck Indiana Jones. Put a chicken in and make her name a gay. Sure, yeah. Well, let's try that again. Kathleen Kennedy is down on set right now,

ruining the new Bambi movie. Bambi's a baby deer. Fuck, baby, dear, put a chicken in, make her gay. Now, the thing about South Park is Megan and Harry can tell you, is that through their comedy, they often absolutely nail the truth. Esther, your thoughts. Well, I think that the argument that they've not

been making enough independent films, and that's why they've been flopping. But the independent films that they have made have also flop because they've not been focusing on storytelling. They're always thinking, how can I have a transgender, Muslim, black woman in there? And they've stopped thinking about storytelling because they actually look down on the audience that they're targeting. I also think there's another dynamic here, which is actually the media. So the media works against them.

So if you actually just wanted to tell a story and the whole, the entire cast of that, that film was white, even before you watch the movie, all the promo will just be saturated by these sort of pink news articles saying, oh, it's sexist, it's homophobic, it's transgender. So even before the film comes out, you have media working against you. So in that, and the media will be easily disseminated. So that will kind of kill the buzz before anyone bothers to watch the film.

And I think that's the issue. They've stopped respecting the audience, and they feel the need to preach to them. I just think that's so right. I just think Disney should go back to what they're good at. It's a fantastic company that used to make fantastic movies and hardly ever had a flop. Because they knew their audience so well,

and they didn't attack their audience. examples. A lot of those movies were not. A lot of those movies Yeah, but going back to Black Panther, do you know, did Black Panther succeed because there were black people in it? No, it was a great story. It was a recognizable character that comic fans that I had

been reading since I was six and seven years old. And the thing is they tried to replicate the same exact formula for Black Panther with the second one. And it made half as much. Clearly half as much. Yeah. I mean, that's a second. And no one talks about it more. I want to be clear that Peltz did say in that interview that basically argued that the Marvels and Black Panther, he didn't even want to get Black Panther made. And in Iger's book that he came out in 2019, he referenced that they had to fight to get Black Panther to come out.

That was Ike Pearl Mutter, not Nelson Peltz. You're right. Why? Who's backing Nelson Peltz. Why? They didn't think it would sell action figures and he was obviously wrong on that one. And he didn't want Captain Marvel made either. but there's a lot of fissioniness around Captain Marvel.

And then when the sequel came out, which was the most predictable flop of all time, it flopped. It was their biggest flop. They didn't put any effort in it because they didn't put any, if you watch Captain Marvel and read the books that she was based on, she was Carol Danvers, she was Miss Marvel,

she was a likable character. They turned her into a dude. And Kevin Feigey is the one who put out the edict. He said, we're going to make half of our characters women. That's where the MCU comes from. I didn't create it. Nobody created it.

Kevin Feige created it. He's the one who said, I'm going to put down this edict, and I'm going to start checking boxes, and that's exactly when they started failing right after Captain Marvel. It's been all downhill from there. None of their,

very few of their movies have made money because the budgets have blown up beyond a record. We don't even know. We just learned that Dr. Strange cost around $300 million without marketing. By the way, that's the same thing that they did to Bobby. Can I just point that out?

I mean, I know comic books are not. as popular as Barbie. But I'm a huge Barbie fan and the people who made Barbie didn't bother to watch one of the 47 47 animated Barbie films. If you actually are a fan of Barbie,

the Barbie film that was produced last year and made all that money it was a complete abomination because they didn't even bother to actually do any research. It was a lot. They have activists instead of filmmakers. That's the problem.

And no one wants to watch something that's preachy and boring. Candice Overs Jr., listen, it's not a fly. It's a flaw. Barbie did the thing. Barbie was an abomination. And so all this was talking about woke

at the end of the day, it was a fresh original concept. People want to go see diverse films But they also want to see things. No, they don't. There's nothing diverse about it. Oh, it's a ludicrous. They don't care about it.

And Bobby had nothing to do with it. To be clear, Barbie was not a film about diversity. It was a film bashing men, attacking the patriarchy, and saying that all the good things in the world of female. And the only funny thing about it

was at the Oscars. It was all about Ryan Gosling. Ken had the last laugh. As Margot Robbie sat in the seats. Unwanted and unattended. And I love Margotty Robbie. Let's not pretend what Barbie was. It was a box office smash.

And as Esther said, an abomination. A man bashing abomination. Talking of abominations, let's come to Joker 2, a musical. It's been announced that the sequel to Joker is going to be a jukebox musical co-starring Lady Gaga with the 15 lip-synced cover songs.

My heart sank when I heard this. Critical Drinker, what did your heart do? Yeah, pretty much the same thing. I mean, ultimately, it's all going to come down to the implementation. Potentially, there's a way you could make this work. When I first heard that this is the route they were going, they were going to turn it into a musical, wasn't a fan.

But I loved the first Joker movie, told a great story. it wasn't mired in the comic book, superhero movie genre. It was a story about a man gradually losing his way in society and a world that just didn't care about him. Fine, that sort of thing works perfectly. And it was great. Not sure I love this idea of turning it into a musical. I got a little bit of confidence in Todd Phillips as a director.

He clearly knows what he's doing with this, but whether or not they can make this work, it is debatable. I think we're going to have to wait a scene. I despise musicals. I mean, to be fair, Baz Luhrman has a hand in why I really hate musicals. But I also think... I don't really like his cinematic style and what he did with Mulan Rouge just, I can't stand it. And it's not a genre I can take seriously.

I think it works in theatre, but... La La La Land was great. It was awful. La La Land was horrible. It was unacceptable. It was horrible. But I just, I don't understand... Singing in the rain?

The Joker character and a musical. All musicals are terrible? I think they're all terrible. They're all awful. I don't, I can't stand. No, Drosick. No, Droson. Come in here.

I'll come to you, Ernottic. All musicals are awful. Just go. Most of them are. There's a couple. There's a couple I like. But most of them are pretty horrible. Just not my taste.

But with Joker, I didn't think the first movie should exist. And then it became kind of a cultural event. I'm sure you remember the press around that. That was supposed to be some movie for instance. cells and I had to walk through a metal detector in New York to go watch the movie in America because of all the press that was around it, that that was going to incite violence and all that

crap. And the violence happened at Frozen 2 and not Joker. Thought the movie was great. I didn't think it needed to exist because ultimately the Joker doesn't need an origin. But I really don't think this sequel should exist. I love Todd Phillips as a filmmaker. Not a big fan of Lady Gaga. So, yeah, I'm skeptical. Okay, Ernest. musicals are touch and go, but I think people like something that is original and fresh,

and we haven't seen it, but I wouldn't count Gaga out and I wouldn't count Todd Phillips out. I think that the cast is going to really drive it. It already has a great interest in the public. I'm open. And again, I'm not crazy about a lot of musicals. Do you know my theory about musicals, Ernest,

is that it's a bit like music. It's like an album, right? When you listen to an album for the first time, it's very rare that I listened to an album once and think, oh, that was fantastic. They grow on me, right? You listen to the same song a few times

and suddenly you're into it. And I felt the same about La La La Land. First time I watched it. I didn't like you. I didn't get it. Second time I liked it a bit more. And the other night I watched it with my daughter absolutely loved it because I knew all the songs. You know, it's a bit like when you go to a concert.

If they play their greatest hits at a concert, I'm a happy boy. And it's also an original musical, which is my point. Like, you didn't see it on Broadway. It was made for the film. And so when you have, again, something that's different, people will watch it. Because if you're like, you know, the color purple didn't do well, right? Because a lot of people was comparing it to Broadway, to the other movie.

And so you have to have to compare it with. Not everything can be Chicago, which I think is one of the best adapted musicals of films ever, in my opinion. Okay, let's turn to Sydney, this cultural phenomenon, being called a double D antidote to woke. Canada's National Post, Canada's National National. Post posed a question, are Sydney Sweeney's breasts double D harbingers of the death of woke? And they summarise the argument by saying, we spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty

because beauty is rare and exclusionary and to exclude us to hate. Also, we've been scolded to accept by today's diversity, equity and inclusion fanatics. We aren't supposed to admire Sweeney's beauty, but we've done it anyways. The times they are changing. Critical drinker, are they changing?

Has Sidney's Sweeney's cleavage basically spelled the big. beginning of the end of woke. I just love the idea that Sidney Sweeney's breasts have somehow become a political movement. I mean, that's the one aspect of politics I can definitely get into. But no, I mean, from this point of view, I don't know, there's been so many attempts to redefine beauty standards and voice different ideas upon us, but ultimately the heart wants what the heart wants, I suppose.

And when you see a young attractive woman who's well endowed, shall we say, guys are going to like it. We're relatively simple creatures, you know, and we're not. not all that difficult to please. And people are appreciating it. Sydney Sweeney herself seems to be very much aware of the attention that she's getting because of this and she's happy to play into it. And as she should, I don't think it's only, by the way, it's not only guys. I mean, I'm, I'm a tidiologist. I love I love nice boobs. I'm a bit jealous though because I feel like Sydney Sweeney and I are

boob twins, but she gets all the double D attention, but I don't. Maybe because I'm not, I'm not dressing like I'm auditioning to be a witness. Anyway, If you haven't seen Esther's pole dancing on her Instagram, by the way, you haven't lived. Yeah, no, but I think, look, she's unapologelics and sexy. He's a breakout pole dancing sensation waiting to happen. I don't know, for my parents' sake. But look, I love that Sinisunis leaning into her femininity, her beauty, maybe a bit too much because I see a lot of boobs, but anyway.

And men like boobs. It's not groundbreaking. All right, no, Drozzi. I mean, I always think that the movie game in particular should have a premium on beauty. I don't want to see too many ugly people on screen. Sorry. No, that's the problem we've been having is we have a lot of ugly people on screen.

I don't want to identify. Current screen, except it, obviously. We're not active. Silver screen. Yeah, no, I don't need to see myself reflected. I don't see some middle age, you know, recovering alcoholic on the screen all the time. I don't.

I want to see heroism. I want to see beauty. I want to see something to aspire to, something we normally don't see. Look what they did to Kelly Marie Tran and The Last Jedi. They completely uglified her, you know, and she's a pretty girl. And they've been doing, I mean, they put a piece of metal over Scarlett Johansson's boobs in endgame. That should be a crime. Yes.

You know, these are things. Actually be a crime. I agree. I agree. So, honest, it should be a crime. I agree. So misogyny inside, I think that trying to vocalize. To admire the female form, Ernest.

You have some kind of. Which would you fancy hot women be misogyny? I'm moving on. Try to make it like this thing against the woke. I think, again, it's forcing a culture war that's just nonsense. But I will argue this, that if they think that Sidney Sweeney is the antidote to wokeism, then I would say that Taylor Swift is the person that's countering all of that.

She has no boobs. Well, she got a boob job, but what are you talking about? That's the point. That's the point. It doesn't matter. She is the antidote, that type of narrative. She's successful. The Wright used to love her.

And so she basically became to them woke, which is nonsense. It's not her boobs. And now, I mean, she's in good, it's her attitude, too. It's not a subject to like boobs, by the way. I like boobs. And by the way, I think as the John Huss pointed out, with Cindy Sweeney, it's not just about her cleavage. It's about the fact she's worked out what to say

that is going to resonate with people in a way that is now leading this debate. And good honor. Not her acting. Not her acting. And her acting. And her beautiful. Oh, okay. Important to put her talent out there.

Acting, talent, beauty, and an attitude that is resonating. And she's a breath of fresh air. Thank God for Sydney, Sweeney. And thank God for critical drinker, nodrotic, Esther, and even you, Ernest. Even you. Thank you all very much for a spirited debate. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Cheers. Change his title of your book, Ernest, for God's sake, man. It's working.