Hollywood's Destruction of Movie and TV Franchises Rolls On

So there has been a lot of YouTube and Rumble video about Hollywood's destruction of properties that should either have been left alone, or at least respected.

Under the heading of "Disrespect the lore," the current example in the zeitgeist is Rings of Prime. There are plenty of people explaining that, if you need elaboration, I recommend the Nerdrotic video The Rings of Power Finale is Embarrassingly BAD - Just CANCEL The Show. I tried to watch some of that show - it is on Amazon, and so not hard to see. I couldn't make it through much. (The clips and commentary online are more entertaining by far than any of the episodes.) It shows what two not-so-talented hacks from Bad Reboot Bad Robot can do when they put their minds to it.

Let's concentrate on the "should have been left alone" heading. The example making the rounds is Joker: Folie à Deux, from director Todd Phillips. His first Joker movie had a budget of about $65 million (per Odin at OMB Reviews), not including marketing. It made $1 billion at the box office. Under normal circumstances, Warner Brothers should have pocketed roughly half of that sum, but Warner Bros. didn't believe in the film, and so they got partners. As a result, at the end of the day, Warner probably made about $200 million dollars on that first movie. Never having heard the adage, "Quit while you're ahead," they wanted to go for double or nothing.

Todd Phillips did not want to do a sequel. But as Nerdrotic said in one of his videos, Warner Bros. backed up a Brink's truck with enough money that he couldn't say no.

The result is crashing and burning at the box office right now. With a reported budget of $200 million, not including marketing, Folie à Deux probably needs to take in at least $500 million, and probably $600 million, at the box office, depending on what the actual budget was, and what they spent on marketing. Which is not going to happen.

By killing off Arthur Fleck in the movie, at least director Phillips made it impossible to try again.

The Life Lesson for studio executives: Not every success deserves or needs to have a sequel. They won't learn that lesson because anything else would require intelligence and/or creativity. But maybe when the director and the lead actor don't want to do it, you could consider listening.

All of this brought to mind the Critical Drinker video Cowboy Bebop - How To Kill A Show In 5 Easy Steps. It is from a few years back, but Hollywood has not learned these lessons. I don't believe that the people in Hollywood are capable of learning these lessons.

It bears repeating. Politics are downstream from culture, and the Right abandoned pop culture to the Left. They are too serious, and important to worry about stuff like Movies, or TV, or Comic Books and Manga, or Video Games. And now they are shocked to discover that the culture is completely in the hands of the Left. If they notice it at all it is too just denouce entire classes of media, rather than admit they screwed up.