Disney’s “Man Problem” Isn’t DEI, It’s SEECA

With the distractions I’ve had this month, I’m late to the game in discussing the recent Variety article that made the rounds, “Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles“. (The continued belief that younger audiences have all the money and none of the sense.) Of course, everybody who’s anybody has already dissected this article and it’s questionable statements. Some came from the culture war conspiracy angle, others from a more creative or business perspective, but there’s one think they all agree on: Bob Iger’s people done screwed up, son.

Of course it’s easy to blame the Diversity, Inclusion, & Equity crowd for the failings to hold onto male audiences. While this primarily means the straight white males, it also includes males of color who see more about themselves than what crayon God colored them with, gay males who don’t attach the totality of their identity to whom they love/sleep with, and even the women they claimed to be going after who also have more going on in their lives than the militant feminists who attack femininity and actually like being women. I just complained about them, and this isn’t even a culture war blog, but the activists have forced their way into conversations about making cupcakes by this point. “Why are the black cupcakes ‘devil’s food’ and the white ones ‘angel cake’?” Even a lousy ad for pants or the usual corporate logo nonsense are touch points in the culture war, and sadly before this article is over I will have to delve into that.

On the other hand, while everyone in my circles are up in arms about DEI, ESG, BRIDGE, and every other far left acronym out there, I’d like to propose a new one at the risk of being part of the problem: SEECA. As Disney was seeking a brand to attract male audiences, they sought to take over Marvel and Star Wars. First, let’s be honest. While Disney is primarily known for Mickey Mouse and company as well as princesses, it’s not like they never made anything that targeted boys. Pete’s Dragon, The Black Hole, Gargoyles, a good chunk of The Disney Afternoon‘s lineup, and Toy Story featuring more boys toys are good examples. There are also stories that tried to give both genders a good showing so they could watch together, and most of Disney’s productions in the 20th century were made for families, not just kids. We could easily separate Disney’s properties pre-Iger alone, including TV movies only I remember existed. (You can keep Jack Sparrow; I’d rather see Black Jack Savage again.) However, “girls brand” is how Disney is perceived and why they went after Marvel and Lucasfilm…and then proceeded to make them girl brands for girls who aren’t interested in the original product because entertaining the women who already liked it would mean still catering to boys.

So what does this SEECA acronym stand for? Let’s go over it one letter at a time, and if you’ve been here long enough you may already figure out where I’m going the moment you see the name.

S is for Snob

Francis Ford Coppola tried to talk George Lucas out of making Star Wars. Ron Moore decided to change everything he could get away with to make his Battlestar Galactica. Todd Philips’ Joker movies came from his hatred for “comic book movies”. Hollywood looks down on anything done with drawings or computer animation outside of overpriced special effects showed on the VFX artists at the 23rd half-hour because the 11th hour was too much time.

Science fiction, especially action sci-fi over some “human condition” thought piece that’s supposed to elicit “emotion” (usually the sad and depressing ones), are always looked down upon. They don’t even get nominated for anything except for special effects. Fantasy is the same. So are action movies. Any movie not determined “meaningful” by the usual suspects are persona non grata in the industry, which is why actors race to have such movies on their credits list, even if the movie is garbage or a bag of lies. They even get snobbish on what it’s shot on. There are still directors who insist the only way to see their movie is in a theater, recorded on film instead of digitally, and it’s an affront on media if you watch it any other way because it’s more convenient at home with cheaper prices, the ability to pause a longer movie to use the restroom, and not having to listen to someone loudly talking on their phone or making their own personal rifftrax.

After all, these are the tastemakers, and heaven forbid you don’t see their work as the masterpiece that will bring all humanity together to see how special they are and how their genre and style interests are the most important thing in cinema since technicolor…which was probably also opposed seeing how many movies have colors so desaturated it might as well still be in black and white. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me the goal was to get rid of these “lesser” genres and media. Again, Todd Philips’ Joker. Most of these snobs are also part of the second group.

E is for Elitists

I’m not sure you can be a snob without being elitist. This is where the “my tastes are superior and your movie tastes are garbage” point of view comes from. They (think they) decide what genres you’re allowed to watch, what “should” be made, what qualifies as a good movie. One critic got mad that the latest Jurassic World movie did better than the latest Superman and Fantastic Four movies, because Rebirth gave people what they wanted somewhere in their crappy story–which just happened to be dinosaurs eating people. Meanwhile Superman spends most of his movie getting his S kicked, literally AND figuratively, while someone thought making Pedro Pascal into a Reed Richards who barely uses his “silly looking” stretching powers and gender-swapping Silver Surfer was a good idea.

Marvel Studios was created to ensure some level of fealty to the comics, knowing that would make the comic fans happy and sell merchandise. After Disney bought it, we now have a producer who doesn’t want comic book superheroes in their movies based on comics, showrunners who come up with “better powers”, more prominent woman heroes–which would be fine if it wasn’t at the expense of male ones, and a hostility to the very fans who buy that merch. They see a brand and an easy plot they can make into the movies they actually want to make rather than making their own movies, while the studios just chase what they think is popular without realizing the people they’re giving it to aren’t the right fit. We’ll come back to that.

Hollywood elitists want to run the media the way political elitists want to run your lives. Both will tell you what to like and how to think. That means being an elitist requires also being the second “E”:

E is for Egotists

This includes the actors, who enjoyed what they did so much they don’t understand why fans aren’t fawning over them. We didn’t work with the director we always wanted to, or play the character we always wanted to, and we don’t care that you got to when it means reimagining the characters and world we did want to see. Heroes don’t want to wear their masks, and you can be sure Robert Downey, Jr. will be just as often demasked as Doctor Doom as he was as Iron Man. Also, the studios like to show off, but that’s still later.

Cynthia Erivo hated that the movie poster for Wicked was altered by a fan of the play to more match the poster for that play. She insisted you had to see her playing Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch Of The West, when you shouldn’t see the actor at all. When you see a movie, show, or play, you should see the character they’re playing, and praise the actor/actress when it’s done. That’s how you get lost in the world. When cosplayers at conventions understand this more than someone being paid to dress up, something is wrong with your attitude.

Of course you need to be an egotist to insist your tastes are all that matters. If it doesn’t match you, it’s not worth existing, and to heck with anyone else that it might be for. That leads to the next two, the manipulated and the manipulator respectively. They’re a group on their own and come with their own problems.

C is for Corporations

Told you we’d get here.

When you’re a small studio you have to take chances in order to get an audience. It’s like the rest of the business world. When you start out, it’s to offer something nobody else is, but they might if they took a risk that it wouldn’t work out. The corporate mindset doesn’t allow for that. They’re too big to take a risk even though in theory they have more money to do so. They’re afraid of losing that money, of losing that status…and then are surprised when they lose both. Disney has been doing that for some time now, even before Iger. The longer a company operates under that mindset the more stale they get. Look around your house. See all those bland logos? Go to Logopedia and look up the history of those products and you’ll see more effort to grab your attention with their logo designs. Now it’s just a font with hardly any editing. They’re even trying to get rid of mascot characters on everything from breakfast (they succeeded with Aunt Jemima and they’ve been after Tony The Tiger since at least early this century) to restaurants (they failed to change Cracker Barrel just this week, but when’s the last time you saw Ronald McDonald, nevermind his friends). They tell you it’s for the app, but that’s bull when you should be designing your app’s icon around your symbols.

The corporate mindset should be good for keeping costs down, though that hasn’t been the case with Disney lately. A strict mindset hampers creativity while working with limits can actually boost it for the really clever director more concerned with a good end product than “my vision!!!!”, but I don’t even know what they’re thinking at the corporate studios. It’s all gimmicks and ripping off what’s currently popular. That’s nothing new. “Pokémon is popular? We need something like that. Let’s try Digimon.” “That Yu-Gi-Oh thing seems to be working. What’s this Duel Masters over here?” Meanwhile Digimon is an anime footnote and mentioning Duel Masters will get you confused looks. Sometimes they might try something original rather than just another import. I like Mighty Orbots but it never reached the heights of Voltron, and the Battletech franchise did better when it came up with original mech designs instead of ripping off Macross’ non-transforming mecha. Exo-Squad deserved better but it was no Gundam. You can be inspired by someone else’s work, but unless you bring something new to the game you are going to fail, and corporations are afraid to try anything new in fear of the almighty investors who don’t have a creative bone in their bodies and just want to make money. In this business, stagnation really is death, and these acquisition-heavy corporations are staring the grim reaper in the face and refuse to realize nothing is too big to fail.

Putting the right person on the right project also takes common sense, and when your CEO, writers, or producer is opposed to what you’re making that’s not happening. You wouldn’t want to see John Hughes’ A Nightmare On Elm Street any more than you’d want Ridley Scott’s The Breakfast Club. A documentarian isn’t right for your science fantasy action flick unless you’re going for that look. The reverse is also true. The John Wick creators are not who you tap for adapting a Jane Austen novel no matter how successful he is otherwise. Some directors can do multiple genres, but that’s a rare talent because it requires you actually caring about what you’re working on, even if you aren’t huge fans of what you’re adapting. You just have to remember the audience is, and if you can’t see that you shouldn’t be on the project. The corporations just see “you made money on that so let’s put you on this” whether they’re right or not. Then they’re surprised they lose the very money they’re trying to make.

Their biggest mistake? Listening to the last group, who have infiltrated the creative spheres, the marketing spheres, and were already snobbish elitist egotists. Sorry, but we can’t ignore that…

This is what happens when you spend your formative years trapped in hypertime instead of being trained by Superman.

A is for Activists

I said they aren’t the only problem, not that they aren’t a problem. Activists are just the politically motivated chapter of the “everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd. Even the stuff they don’t care about needs to made for them, especially if it’s popular. Star Wars is popular, so it must now reflect their world instead of Star Wars’ world. Superheroes are popular, but they represent things activists resent, like treating people you don’t like with respect, diversity of thought instead of being enslaved to some exaggerated version of an outdated stereotype being pushed as “representation”. When you have a political view, you will judge and create a story based on that view, but a good storyteller can be balanced and try to make an effort to be fair to the opposing opinion even if yours turns out to be right by the rules of your world. If a villain is based on an opposing opinion, they should be evil enough that even people of that opinion sees the villain as a fanatic, because if you don’t think your side has fanatics, maybe check to make sure you aren’t one.

The reason the activists are so successful beyond their stealth takeovers of popular things they only care about in service to The Cause (kind of like how they treat children) are that they are part of the same mindsets. As snobs they look down on anything that’s counter to said Cause. As elitists they think everything should cater to them and their worldview, usually the view from a coffee shop in Los Angeles or New York. As egotists they refuse to believe good people wouldn’t support their changes because clearly they made it better now that it caters to them…not that they’re going to spend time and money on it. And like corporations they don’t care about anything besides their goal, while also taking advantage of all those groups by massaging their egos, conning them into believing the activists are the majority, and that listening to them will save the industry, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

So is the solution to tear it all down? Maybe, but dirty bathwater shouldn’t reflect on the baby. In that Variety article they talked about Disney believing making original IPs would bring in the Gen Z males, but they already had something that men and some women already enjoyed and ruined it by tossing out everything that made those IPs popular enough to want them in the first place. The problem is these people don’t understand what the audience wants because they don’t care. They’re convinced they’re right and need to educate the people that their tastes are superior to what they love, that they are more important than the characters, that they should run the world and you should bow in tribute to their majesty. These things were going on before the far-left activists took over, and maybe even before the far-right activists of the 1950s ruled Hollywood. It’s funny that we have Hollywood doing things straight out of the Hayes Code and McCarthyism, just from their political view and their egos.

We should make new IPs but as with the new characters that shouldn’t be at the expense of what came before, things that existed in many cases before they or even their parents were born. Superheroes in general and many specific ones lasted since 1939 for a reason. Science fiction shouldn’t be pigeonholed into being one type of story. Fantasy may not mean much to people who refuse to see anything other than their world, but for those with expanding minds it brings fun, excitement, and maybe a bit of hope. The activists are just building on what the snobs, elitists, egotists, and corporations were already doing. In a proper situation, the studios would greenlight projects they think will be successful, put them in the hands of people that understand the genre in general if not the property specifically, use the big blockbuster money to push smaller films, and put the egos in check and activists on a slow boat to China…preferably with a swiss cheese hull. And it’s not just the movies and shows, as comics and video games are suffering from similar problems, but the indie creators have better odds because some games and comics are even made by one or a small number of people and don’t need the large group of creators, performers, and investors when they have crowdfunding and word of mouth should what they’re making be of high quality and respect the target audience.

Instead of fighting them, they should be seeing what they do best and seek a better solution than letting the SEECA remain in charge.