Bait and Switch
Disney and Hollywood are capitalizing on the nostalgia for old franchises to deliver remakes that are burning trash heaps of wokeness.
Yesterday, I said that the anti-Western left is making an interesting attempt a rationalization about how contemporary society currently enjoys availing themselves of the liberty, security and social advances Western Civilization created - while simultaneously loathing and rejecting the beliefs, mores and religions that created Western Civilization in the first place.
Thinking about that overnight, that is a metanarrative that flows through every anti-Western institution. Disney is a good example, but it happens in other corners of Hollywood, too. They keep the name of the franchise - Indiana Jones, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, Ghostbusters, and on TV, series like The Wonder Years - and try to capitalize on those traditions while rewriting the entire story to comply with their current sensibilities. They even recast historical figures such as Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth I as another race. The recast male roles as female. A couple of weeks ago, I read about a play where three black actresses were cast in the lead roles of three Jewish Holocaust victims.
Snow White was called that due to her alabaster skin. In Disney's new live action version, she is Latina with darker skin. The Seven Dwarves are now just the Seven Racially Diverse Vertically Challenged Handicapable Magical Beings of Mysterious Origin.
It's all just too much.
If you want to make these movies, make your own. Write new stories, invent new characters - just stop destroying the legacy of Walt Disney, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Star Wars. What you are doing isn’t real and maybe that’s why people aren’t forking over the cash to watch two hours of a trash heap being set on fire and reduced to ash.
Look at the continuations of franchises that have been successful. We have Top Gun: Maverick, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (predicted to be big - hey, maybe Tom Cruise knows something?) and movies like The Sound of Freedom, a movie that tells a real story in real historical terms). People don’t want their heroes and villains to be woke. They just want them to be heroes and villains.
I have to say, I think one of the greatest actor transformations has been John Krasinski, who has transitioned from the mild-mannered Jim from The Office, to a legit action star. Krasinski is married to Emily Blunt, a quite attractive but wokish actress (who had her own non-woke turn as Rita Vrataski in Edge of Tomorrow - with none other than Tom Cruise). I was mildly shocked he overcame his personal politics to successfully portray Special Operator Jack Silva in 13 Hours, a true depiction of what happened on the ground in Benghazi. I was also skeptical when he was slated to play the next iteration of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan in the Amazon Prime miniseries, but he did a great job.
I also think this is why Netflix and Amazon have been successful with The Gray Man (with Ryan Gosling, who was surprisingly good as Court Gentry), The Night Manager (with Tom Hiddleston), The Night Agent (Gabriel Basso) and the dramatization of the first book in my favorite military thriller series, Jack Carr’s The Terminal List, starring Chris Pratt.
Like I said, people just want their heroes to be heroes and their villains to be villains.
I don't know about you, but I can't wait for the new Die Hard reimagining where John McClain is now Jenny McClain, a non-binary transgender female who works as a rapid response mental health professional/crisis negotiator for the LAPD.
Jenny is sent to Nakatomi Tower to de-escalate a conflict between the racist FBA Agent (who is a black white supremacist) and Hans Gruber. Aided by a donut eating, body positive, policeperson of color (who also serves on the California Reparations Commission), Jenny discovers that Gruber isn't really a thief, he's just gender confused himself because his father wouldn't let his mother transition him as a six-year-old, and taking hostages and threatening to blow up the building isn't violence, it is just a cry for help.
The situation is resolved when Jenny helps Hans realize he is really Greta with the pronouns They/Them, and Greta breaks down in tears when they realize they hate their father. The climax of the movie is when, in a dream sequence, Greta faces their father and declares their intent to live an authentic life as a female. The scene is punctuated by the movie's catchphrase, "Yippee kye yay, motherfucker!" as Greta makes their case to their non-lactating male co-parent.
It is going to be a blockbuster!
>New die hard. You'll never be able to imagine a plot as twisted as the woke would come up with.