Disney's Cost Cutting Ax Hits 538

The Other McCain asks Why Has the ‘Valuable Resource’ Known as 538 Been Summarily Discarded?

538, once known as FiveThirtyEight, specializes in a stastical approach to politics, which is mostly conducting and studying polling around policy and elections. It was moved around a bit, but eventually landed as part of ABC News. ABC is a division of Disney.

538 gave Hillary a 71.4% chance of winning in 2016, and in the 2024 election had Harris ahead by 6 points among likely voters.

Well, there’s a lot to work through here and I suppose the best place to begin is with ABC News claiming to offer “best-in-class polling,” to which my reply can be summarized briefly: LOL, are you kidding me?

After a bit of history of 538, and the people that started it, we get the meat of the matter. Neither 538, nor the founders of 538, though they are both still doing projections in their own ways, predicted a Trump win in 2024, even though he won the popular vote.

The fact that Trump not only won the Electoral College (as he had done in 2016) but also won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of 2.3 million votes — which he had not done in 2016 — means that predicting a Trump win in 2024 should have been easier than eight years earlier. Yet somehow these two statistical wizards managed to miss this one.

Click thru for the rest. There is quite a bit.

And Disney has woken up to the fact that it needs to stop hemorrhaging money. It axed the animation staff (or a lot of it anyway) that was responsible for the recent Moana 2 movie, even though it was one of their few successes of late.

Captain America 4 is currently in theaters. It will lose 100s of millions of dollars. Disney has recently put out there, and the access media^‡ has run with the "fact," that the budget for this movie was $185 million. It was reported last year, after the 2nd round of reshoots, that the expenditures had passed $300 million. They may have budgeted $185, but they didn't live within that budget. However, even if you believe the 185 million number, and you believe that they spent a bare minimum on marketing (pay no attention to the Superbowl Ad) the movie will still lose money. It is on track to fall short of $400 million at the box office globally, and studios only get about half of the gross box office. Yes, theaters do get paid for showing films.

Next up is Rachel Zegler's Snow White. The feud between Zegler and Gal Godot is so epic that Disney has canceled some (or all) of the promotional tour and interviews. (Zegler is a "promoter" of the "Palestinian Cause™" while Gadot is a veteran of the Israeli Army.) They canceled the UK Premiere, because they are "worried" about backlash, but it could be that they know the film will bomb, and they are just saving money. (The early projections are that it will bomb.)

That will be followed up by Thunderbolts. A movie no one asked for, featuring a bunch of characters that even comic book nerds don't know, or if we do know of them, we don't like. (A gender-swapped Taskmaster, Discount Black Widow, and Red Guardian, are not the characters we were looking for.)

Then later in the year, coming to Disney+ will be Ironheart, a series about a character added into Black Panther 2, that is guaranteed to be nothing but a Girl Boss trying to take over for Iron Man/Tony Stark.

Finally, there are rumors swirling around Hollywood that Disney is trying to sell Lucasfilm. The only problem is that no one is interested in buying. Kathleen "Put a chick in it and make her gay" Kennedy has destroyed whatever value Lucasfilm once had.

‡ The "Access Media" consists of that part of the entertainment, and gaming, media that requires access to maintain their place in the world. They need invites to early screenings of movies, they need early access to video games, etc. As a result, outlets like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are not in a hurry to question anything that the movie studios say. They will not be granted That access if they piss people off.

As I was editing this, going through the back of my mind is, "Disney isn't even the stupidest movie studio making superhero movies these days." That title has got to go to Warner Bros. They could screw up a free lunch, and it seems that is exactly what they are doing on several fronts.