Tag: Marvel

The Fantastic Four: It all comes down to the Statue of Liberty

The new movie, Fantastic Four: First Steps, was pretty fantastic.  Disney attempted to create a film for the Marvel franchise that would bring people back to the level of the first Avengers movie and the Iron Man film that preceded it.  Fantastic Four was wonderfully not woke, and the characters were all well done.  The acting was top-notch, with significant special effects, music, and story that was all good; it was a lot of fun.  So it is a shame that people are not rushing to the theaters to watch it.  The movie is set in a kind of idealistic 60s art style set into an unknown future, and it had a cool vibe to it.  And it had a great point.  I think the sacrifice of the baby plotline to save humanity is one of those key issues in the human race that should resonate much more than it has at the box office.  But we are talking about trust here, and Disney has lost it.  Marvel has lost it.  After the movie, The Eternals, which features homosexual lifestyles and men kissing in it, Marvel sealed its doom.  Hollywood, in general, was politically way off base and divided the movie-going public from their products, sealing their doom in the process.  I was able to see The Fantastic Four with my grandchildren.  They were interested in it because of the video game Marvel Rivals, so we agreed to take them. The movie turned out to be a fantastic family film, full of excellent ideas and old-fashioned filmmaking.  And the Fantastic Four family itself was one that audiences could all like.  I would recommend the movie and give some credit to Disney for listening and stepping away from their woke agenda as much as possible in this environment.  However, there are some lessons to take away here that might improve things in the future if Disney is willing to listen. I think it’s too late for them; their audiences are never coming back, which is why Fantastic Four is underperforming at the box office.  But it’s always worth trying.

One of the things that is hurting these Marvel movies is that they are too comic bookish for most audiences.  Most people lack a strong interest in quantum physics and the concept of multiple universes.  Comic writers, and now all entertainment writers, have found that the multiverse concept gives them a great deal of creative liberty, allowing them to set their stories within any known historical timeframe.  For instance, this Fantastic Four movie does not take place in a timeline and universe that overlaps with the original Avengers.  Technically, they don’t know about each other, leaving the audience to not invest in the characters.  The story might be neat and fun.  But does it matter to their belief in the reality of the previous storyline?  And I think for most people, the multiverse storylines are just too much for them to invest in emotionally.  Like a dream, people might have them, but they wake up from them never to remember them again, and they become meaningless in waking life.  And that is the problem with the Fantastic Four it doesn’t take place in a world people can relate to.  It’s just far enough out of reality to become prohibitive.  In the original Marvel movies, such as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the Avengers, people could accept the superpowers as long as the universe itself was part of a narrative world built around a historical timeline, allowing them to invest emotionally in the characters.  For instance, in Captain America, his story takes place during World War II, a conflict that people have a grounding in.  And it was patriotic and gave people what they wanted, a defender of American ideas, which the world is very interested in. 

However, Disney and Marvel in general have been pushing for a post-American world of the global citizen, and that element was certainly present throughout the Fantastic Four.  They essentially have a world where the United Nations is in charge of everything, and Sue Storm from the Fantastic Four is in charge of the United Nations.  In many ways, the Fantastic Four was in charge of the world as a government power, which runs counter to the trend of individual lives being self-governing.  That is an idea that people will reject at the ballot box, and they will certainly reject it with their entertainment dollars.  People do not want to be told what to do, especially from the Fantastic Four.  That’s why it’s dangerous to let these Santa Monica types write these movies from the pier, talking to their friends at a bar.  That lefty political view of existence might be fashionable among 20 to 30-year-olds in sanitized settings, such as in the hip Santa Monica region.  However, the world doesn’t like that idea and will reject it completely, and it has.  They did everything they could with this movie to make it as enjoyable as possible, and it’s fun.  People don’t want the Fantastic Four to govern over them as gods.  That is a rejected premise in the world, and it certainly hurts the emotional investment that people are willing to give to these characters.  The movie doesn’t take place in our universe; it’s an alternative universe to the other Marvel stories.  And it doesn’t have a message that people enjoy; it assumes that movie audiences want to be saved by superheroes.  Not that the audiences want to be superheroes themselves.  So that is a fatal flaw. 

However, the biggest mistake was when the villain, Galactus, who was the size of Godzilla, came to New York to retrieve the baby born to the Fantastic Four, and he looked at the Statue of Liberty with some disdain.  Just saying, nobody is going to get away with that kind of thing these days.  The world wants to believe in the light of liberty coming from a free America.  And that is represented by the Statue of Liberty.  Having a massive villain that eats planets come to the Statue of Liberty as if to say that there are much bigger things in the universe than the idea of America is a bad move.  It might be the view of radical, Santa Monica lefties, but it’s not what the world wants to hear.  They want someone who likes America fighting bad guys.  Not something bigger than America looking down on our country as if to say that the scale of the fight is beyond the political whims of nation-building.  That’s a line that people won’t cross, and they have rejected it at the voting booth and the box office receipts.  It was a dumb scene.  Galactus didn’t try to smash the Statue of Liberty.  He just gave it a look that was demeaning but did not provide commentary.  Yet, audiences picked up on it; the liberal writers of these movies aren’t going to get away with that kind of thing.  People will see another film.  And that is what they have been doing.  The Fantastic Four is a great movie, but people have better things to do, and if the story is not aligned with the politics of our day, it’s unlikely to do well.  The fantasy that artists can rule the world through liberal politics behind commercial films is a thing of the past.  It was never a good idea, but now there are just too many entertainment options.  People tend to overlook things that do not align with their values.  And that is why The Fantastic Four is not doing well, despite being an excellent movie.  It’s too far outside the known world for people to invest emotionally in.  And that’s a shame. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Anti-Woke Message of Deadpool: It’s all about regeneration and healing

I always have learned a lot from young people.  Yes, adults have lived long lives and have much to teach based on experience.  But kids are freshly created and don’t have assumptions yet baked into their thought process.  So I listened when one of my grandsons wanted to see the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie doing big business at the theater.  It’s one of the rare movies these days to hit over one billion dollars, so that’s a significant financial triumph that is at least good for theater owners.  I want theater owners to survive all this World Economic Forum wokeness, so I was interested in why so many people liked Deadpool.  I’m not a Deadpool fan. I don’t want to see Marvel characters cursing and talking about sex and drugs, and the Deadpool movies are R-rated experiences filled with a lot of bad stuff.  So, up to now, I have had zero interest in anything Deadpool.  However, my policy with my children and grandchildren is to take the edge away of any forbidden fruits in society with guidance.  So when he asked me to take him to the movie theater to see the movie, I didn’t hesitate.  We made it a somewhat family affair, with my daughters going along to watch the film with us and make any commentary about it that needed to be made from an adult leadership perspective.  All the world needs is another kid out there speaking in a trashy way with F-bombs and drug references.  And this was a Disney production now, so here was Disney, who used to get criticized for making too many G-rated movies, putting out an R-rated horror of sin and indulgence.  However, after watching the movie, I noticed much worth seeing, which became apparent quickly.  And I could understand why my grandson liked Deadpool so much.   I have always liked Wolverine from the X-Men, so I thought I could at least like that much of it.  But in the end, I liked Deadpool & Wolverine for many unexpected reasons.

So here’s the lowdown I have talked about extensively throughout the previous decade: Disney is dead.  They have mismanaged the company and are only surviving now because they are too big to fail.  But they have lost their core audience.  They enjoy decades of brand building, and roughly 50% of all adults are willing to go into serious debt to take their kids to Disney World for a vacation.  That trend will not pass to the next generation, so once these current kids grow up and become adults themselves, they will not follow that path.  I am happy I could take my kids, their kids, and their husbands to Disney World last year, which was extraordinarily expensive.  At least my family had a chance to see Disney before it declined into oblivion, and the Deadpool character is very much a cultural symbol of that. Part of what makes Deadpool movies so funny is that Disney is aware of its decline, and that’s part of the strange joke in the film.  Deadpool used to be a 20th Century Fox thing, but after Bob Iger, as the CEO, bought up that media property, they acquired several Marvel characters, such as Spiderman, the X men, and, of course, Deadpool, among other things.  But it was like bringing in Kamala Harris for president over Joe Biden for Disney.  It was a sugar high at best and only delayed the inevitable decline of a media company that had gone global woke and lost its domestic audience toward family value.  It’s hard to become a leader of the global citizen movement as an anti-family provocateur of sexual grooming of children and still be the bastion of family values that it’s known for.  That is why theme parks still get so much respect from parents who want to give their children a good life and think a vacation there will do the trick.  But it can’t; once you lose that reputation, it’s gone forever. 

Yet that is the theme of the new Deadpool & Wolverine movie.  Both characters are about regeneration; when wounded, they heal almost like reptiles.  So, the movie and the characters are more about second chances than anything else.  And in a social context, that is the same thing the nation and world are going through.  Most people can relate to Deadpool and all his mistakes because, at his heart, he is a person who wants to do good and be respected.  Ultimately, Deadpool wants to become a respected Avenger and to be one of the good guys, which I found surprising given the R-rated nature of the content.  However, the movie is very self-aware of its situation in society; it is essentially an anti-woke movie in the style of an old 80s film that checks all the boxes of the World Economic Forum investors who require excessive wokeness to be produced.  There are a lot of gay references in the film and discussions about drugs, but not in a way that promotes them as much as Deadpool has to overcome them to be who he wants to be.  But yet, the plot is filled with overt references, which, of course, the wokesters out there love.  I don’t support any of that, but as a running commentary on our current social status and the position of Disney as a media company that is undoubtedly headed on hard times ahead, it is an interesting observation of itself. 

The Marvel films had a plan that started with a series of movies in the last decade that were very traditional heroic enterprises.  I loved the Captain America movies, and the Civil War between Captain America and Iron Man, with all the tag-alongs, was terrific cinema.  But then we entered the overt woke era of the most recent movies, and there are a lot of horrible decisions made, starting with Captain Marvel and moving into The Eternals, which I thought was a horrendously lousy movie with overt gay characters in it that just made the whole thing no fun to watch.  Disney continues to make horrible decisions, such as what they are doing with their Land of the Villains announcement for Disney World, their closing of Tom Sawyer’s Island, which is my favorite part, and embracing villains in their family offerings because these days, so many people see themselves as Deadpool sees himself.  They can’t relate with the good guys anymore.  But at least with Deadpool, he wants to be a good guy, even though he’s been essentially a bad guy.  Marvel is trying to do as the characters in Deadpool & Wolverine: regenerate themselves and heal.  Their new Marvel movies are trying to get back to the basics.  As America tries to make itself Great Again as a country, media companies are also trying to do the same.  Everyone is looking in the mirror and asking if this is where we want to be.  That is what the new Deadpool movie is all about, asking those essential questions.  So it was pretty good.  Too late to save Disney.  But it’s a good thing to talk about as a patient lays dying on an operating table as a last thought and sentiment.  There is a humanity in Deadpool that people are clinging to, which surprised me.  And I certainly understand why young people would be attracted to that message.  They want to have hope that their future can be better than the past.  Because for them, they don’t have any memory of the good ol’ days.  Just the days of woke losers and political hacks who have ruined the world with bad decisions and tried to sell the mess as redemption.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Disney Stock is Down 31% to the Year: And its never coming back

I warned everyone years ago, Disney stock is never coming back. Currently, as of this writing, it’s down 31% of its value for the year, and this was before the big battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida occurred, where the tax status and self-governing control is in jeopardy. The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Being a Star Wars fan, I was encouraged when Disney bought Lucasfilm, which makes Star Wars products. I have wanted it to work. My wife and I had one of the best vacations of our 34-year marriage in 2019 when we went to Disney World and enjoyed all their creations to celebrate the opening of the Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance. No company but Disney could have made a ride like that or built a Star Wars land like what they had in Florida at Hollywood Studios. So I don’t report this news about Disney happily. I’m a fan and have wanted it to succeed. But reality is headed in an entirely different direction.

I’m the guy who used to go to Target in September when the Holiday toys would come out for Star Wars and buy up the cool stuff before anybody else did at midnight. The toy aisle at Target and Walmart used to be filled with Star Wars figures just from the movies that were made in the 80s and 2000s. But after Disney bought the brand, and the company headed in the direction indicated by the Desecrators of Davos globalists, like Klaus Schwab, the brand of Star Wars has died. Gone are the toys or the demand for them. Kids have moved on to their favorite YouTubers, and when you see what Disney has done to a really solid brand, like Star Wars, you can see what they are doing to everything else that Walt Disney built. Disney as a brand is damaged, and it will never recover, and those are the facts. Get your money while you still can.

The truth is that in a free culture like America, the Davos plan for our complete economic destruction by hijacking our brands and destroying them from within with ESG scores will fail. If Disney isn’t going to provide a family-friendly place, then someone else will come along and do what Walt Disney did. America will not be deprived of what we want. We made it in the first place, and we can make it again. Disney World was built when I was a real little kid; I was there when they started digging out the big lake in front of Magic Kingdom. I remember it. It hasn’t been that long. If the family value dollars aren’t going to Disney, they will go to its eventual replacement, whatever that may be. But American brands won’t just go away, as has been the plan by those who hate America, and which to desecrate all the corporate branding directed through finance to a global change state to a one-world government managed by the Desecrators of Davos. The playbook is out, and people can now see what has been going on for a very long time. Being close to Star Wars, I watched how fast Disney destroyed the brand in just a few short years, and now we can see that brand damage everywhere.

Even the great Pirate films with Johnny Depp are going through a wake rethinking with his court trial, destroying his personal brand attached to the Pirate films. Not having anything really coming to rebuild the Disney brand, no new Johnny Depp Pirate films, no great string of Marvel movies like they had with the Avenger films, Star Wars damaged the way it is with woke politics, there is nothing on the horizon that will help Disney recover the damage that has been done to it. There are Avatar movies coming, and next year there is an Indiana Jones film. Those might be entertaining, but we are in a different world now with entertainment where streaming services are driving entertainment value, and the days of the billion-dollar blockbusters worldwide are becoming less reliable. Covid interrupted that cash flow for Disney. They played along with the woke politics of it, and now they are going full ESG, and that is not a replacement of value for investors or fans. That has left Disney in a tough spot that they put themselves in. They incorrectly played the wrong side of politics by fully embracing Rocky Horror Picture Show politics from the radical communist left. In truth, their real fan base is Trump conservatives. 

Disney has always been about family-friendly content and a safe space for boys and girls of all ages. But now that they have come out against the very popular governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Disney has essentially cut off half of their audience. Some of the squishy Republicans who have booked their Disney vacation a year ahead of time don’t want to take a moral stand at this time. Still, as the trend continues, which it will, they will stop booking those vacations because the nostalgia of doing it is going away. And Disney can’t survive with its top-heavy costs. They are essentially where General Motors was before 2008. They are only floating along with inflated value perceived by theme park attendance. Their Disney+ service is struggling. The current show that is so hot there, Moon Night, which I think is fantastic, isn’t enough to justify its existence.

Disney can’t produce enough content to keep young people interested. YouTube is by far the preferred path for young people because daily content is new and refreshed daily. Production value isn’t a concern for young people of the Minecraft video game generation. They only care that what they see is new. Disney has lost that next generation, leaving them to desperately cling to these left-winged communist radicals because they bet all their chips that America would essentially become China. In 2022, that is clearly not going to happen. Trump is going to be back in the White House in 2024. Ron DeSantis is establishing the new rules for being a state governor, and the political pendulum is swinging back to the kind of America that Walt Disney provided entertainment to. The future of America may well be the most conservative in the history of the world once the smoke clears from all this, and Disney is nowhere close to appealing to those types of people. They are now positioned among the radical types, the anti-family movement. That doesn’t mean that good, family-friendly entertainment is gone forever. It just means that Disney won’t be the provider of that entertainment. They are not agile enough to react to these changing markets, and instead, they are digging in. So those stock prices are gone forever. Their value in 2019 and early 2020 was their high-water mark of real value. Inflation may make things appear to be better than they are, but the public sentiment toward Disney has been destroyed. And unfortunately, it has been destroyed forever. Yet, someone will come along and replace Disney. America will be what America is. The attackers of our culture want to destroy our companies and us like Disney. Like Star Wars. Marvel. But it’s not the company itself that makes the content or buys the product. They just provide the transaction, and anybody can do that. And they will. Disney can die, but the need for what they offered will live on, which will be the next great investment. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Disney’s ‘Eternals’ is All About Guys Kissing and Abortion: How people like Larry Fink are ruining the world

More news sites don’t talk about things like this one does due to freedom; I am freer than most anybody who would write an article like this, so the information never gets out. In most cases, everyone has a master, which is undoubtedly the case with Disney. After a horribly progressive movie like the Eternals, Disney is the obvious target for criticism. The same with how they have handled Star Wars. It’s easy to get mad at the traditional family company without realizing all the Woke politics that are going on behind the scenes, which are literally ruining the world, starting in America with our art and entertainment. To understand why Eternals is such a terrible movie, you have to understand the latest stock report of Disney, where they had a record-breaking quarter to close out the year. Yes, more people than ever are flocking to the amusement parks in Florida. People have been locked down with Covid, and they want to get out there and spend money on something, anything. So attendance is up. The new Spiderman movie was great, a Marvel production that ultimately boosted interest in the Disney + streaming service. Some things make the stock price look attractive, so the shareholders are happy and empowered to continue to do something as they have, which produced the disaster Eternals with all the arrogance that Woke culture could muster. However, I’m in a position where I am free to have an objective opinion about Disney, one that most in the industry just can’t because the money flow they need to live is controlled by the elements that are killing Disney, despite the smoke and mirrors that come through on the stock report. Disney is an asset bubble that is poised to burst, and the evidence is in the movie Eternals, which is now streaming on Disney + for all to see.

The top stock owners of the Disney Company are the Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street Corporation, and Morgan Stanley. Vanguard, for instance, owns 137,572,834 shares of Disney stock. BlackRock, with all the Woke advocacy strategies of Larry Fink, owns 119,795,456. The shares go down to the local buyer who just wants to pad their investment portfolio with some entertainment options. But when you understand that these large investment firms believe they are too big to fail and control the world’s governments through finance, they become the next generation of tyrants on earth clawing for power. And in the case of Larry Fink, who comes up a lot these days when talking about all things Woke, we have to address the issue as a menace that has not been on anybody’s radar up to this point. Nobody talks about it because they most always have some financial stake in the company, like Disney. Even though the actual controls come from shareholder pressure, Disney doesn’t care about the ordinary people who might buy a few hundred shares of stock and post negative reviews about Eternals on some social media platform. The Board of Directors and ultimately the CEO Bob Chapek care about what BlackRock thinks about what they make, and when it comes to Eternals or Star Wars, the garbage that ends up on screen is precisely what Larry Fink wants. A Woke message that will poison the West and destroy it for consumption, China intends to take over the world and restore itself as the dominant power. Something they think about a lot and have people like Larry Fink to be their flaming arrows of warfare at the helm of all finance which ultimately controls everything. Bob Chapek may make a lot of money as Disney’s CEO, but he is not free to have an opinion on the matter. When BlackRock calls, or Vanguard, he does what they tell him because one thing Bob can’t afford to see happen is a quarter to quarter slide of the Disney stock price. And if Larry is displeased with the level of Wokeness coming out of Disney, then BlackRock could dump its stock and send Disney tumbling with a massive sell-off. And that would be the end of Bob Chapek, so ultimately, that is why the movie Eternals was so terrible. 

I had high hopes for Eternals. I had wanted to see it at the theater. Generally, the Marvel movies are great, so a film about some beings who inhabit the universe like white blood cells in a body and are born from planets seemed like a cool premise. But sadly, the whole point of the movie was to show guys kissing and to drag a nearly three-hour movie into an event of torture as it was a bunch of dysfunctional characters of all nationalities arguing over dumb things to ultimately have an abortion at the end of the movie to save the earth. The whole point of the Eternals was a kind of metaphor on abortion; to save mother earth, we had to kill the baby, the Eternal that was being born from it and was the point of 7000 years of human evolution. For the Eternal to be born, mankind had to create culture, which then fed the baby as it grew in the egg of the earth. So in that way, the Eternals became a vehicle for all the modern progressive causes that people don’t like, yet it was crammed down their throats with this monstrously bad film. The movie wasn’t about entertaining the audience; it was about forcing progressive politics down the viewers’ throats who thought they were showing up to watch the latest Marvel offering. And what they got was essentially the strategy of Larry Fink, large doses of progressive ideology that they thought would open the door to a modern political platform that embraced gay rights and forever abortions. The decision at the end of the movie to kill the Eternal so to save “Mother Earth” is so evident that it’s almost like sitting in an abortion clinic with a daughter who wants to kill a grandchild so that they can go clubbing later that night and not have the burden of being pregnant. It was bad, bad stuff. 

Yet Disney is the company that gets all the shots of criticism, and it will be Bob Chpeck who gets lacerated at the shareholder meetings if he doesn’t come up with some way to make Blackrock happy. The everyday people willing to spend $10,000 on a Disney vacation package in Orlando get ignored. Disney was built on solid Main Street traditional American values for the people who go to the parks, so they are willing to spend the money. But people like Larry Fink don’t really care about the money they make in their investment firms. They care about the power they have amassed through finance to control the creative process at companies like Disney, and it’s in that way that Eternals even found a way to make it onto a screen, and ultimately the Disney + streaming platform. Eternals breaks all movie-making rules and presents everything they don’t want into a movie to audiences. But the arrogance of Disney shows more than just a bad movie; it’s an assumption that the path of least resistance runs through the audience and not through BlackRock and Vanguard. Ultimately, who controls what Disney produces isn’t the fans, it’s the investment firms, and those investment firms feel empowered to impose Woke politics onto our culture at every opportunity. And Eternals was so bad that it’s almost a dare for the public to rebuke it. Otherwise, Larry Fink and the investment hounds beyond the stock prices will crush each and every one of us, or so they think unless we do and say everything they want, without a thought.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business