Disney Exec Blames Woes on Racist, Sexist Fans
Newsletter reveals corporate arrogance behind Mouse House's fall
Few would deny Disney is in serious trouble.
Stock woes. Box office flops (“Wish,” “Haunted Mansion,” “The Marvels“). Theme park struggles. Beloved brands struggling for relevancy after years of culture dominance (Indiana Jones, Pixar, “Star Wars,” the MCU).
There’s a cottage industry of alternative media outlets documenting Disney’s decline.
- Nerdrotic
- The Critical Drinker
- The Quartering
- Film Threat
What went wrong?
The company’s hard-Left turn, for starters. Disney declared war on popular Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, pushed a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and embraced DEI principles behind closed doors.
Yet the company may not be listening to fans all but shouting for the Mouse House to course correct, and fast.
Bulwark Culture Editor Sonny Bunch shared a snippet from a recent Puck Newsletter suggesting Team Disney isn’t about to change its ways. The teaser comes from Matt Belloni of Puck News fame who spoke with an unnamed Disney executive on the company’s woes.
Said executive blamed consumers, not the company, for its problems. Audiences are too sexist, racist, etc. to embrace Disney product.
It’s not us. It’s you (racist).
I love this, from Matt Belloni's newsletter. Disney cannot fail, it can only be failed by the mouthbreathing bigots who refuse to acknowledge the greatness of their films. pic.twitter.com/83jkY4DL0x
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) February 19, 2024
“Everyone says ‘It’s the movies, stupid,’ which is an easy thing for people to say. More
appealing movies are a great way to jump the political issues. But more and more, our
audience (or the segment of the audience that has been politicized) equate the perceived
messaging in a film as a quality issue. They won’t say they find female empowerment
distasteful in The Marvels or Star Wars the latest trilogy starring Daisy Ridley], but they
will say they don’t like those movies because they are ‘bad.’ So ‘make better movies’
becomes code for ‘make movies that conform to regressive gender stereotypes or put
men front and center in the narrative.’
Except critics aren’t so keen on Disney’s recent product, either. Films like “Wish,” “The Marvels” and “Haunted Mansion” all fared poorly at Rotten Tomatoes. Others earned more positive reviews but hardly the kind of raves past Disney product earned.
Survey Says … It’s Complicated
A Puck-produced brand survey offered mixed results for Disney. On one hand, Disney, Inc. is suffering for its political leanings.
All 29 companies have high favorability ratings (that’s consistent with most opinion surveys of major companies), and people actually carry pretty positive feelings about the major studios. But Disney clearly scores the lowest, with 21 percent unfavorable. No other entertainment company had an unfavorable rating above 11 percent, meaning Disney is nearly twice as disliked as any other Hollywood entity we included. (Hulu, which is owned by Disney, scored especially well at only 8 percent unfavorable, indicating the problem is the Disney brand, not any of its sub-brands necessarily.)
Yet the same survey suggests consumers won’t take that into account if the Disney product in question seems entertaining.
Long story short?
If last year’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” trailer looked exciting, few would have connected the sequel to Disney’s ongoing woes.
It didn’t. The film proved to be a flop based on its gargantuan budget ($300 million versus $383 million worldwide gross).
Disney: Come See Our Films, Mr. and Mr. Racist
Disney still has considerable assets to build a comeback upon, including future sequels (“Moana 2,” “Inside Out 2,” “Toy Story 5”) effective belt-tightening measures and allegiances to the video game revolution.
Blaming audiences for the company’s problems, especially suggesting naysayers are bigots, hardly seems like the best way to heal the company’s financial wounds.
If one unnamed executive is saying it, chances are he or she is hardly alone.
Disney what is your point of acting like you don’t know what the problem is. YOU KNOW! We are not going to tolerate you trying to shove the LGBTQ lifestyles down our throats and in front of our children who clearly are not Gay ect… and never will be because we now know how to stop the lies that Satanic entities are feeding our children at a young age. You and your Drag Queens just sealed the deal with no one wanting to bring their children to a TOXIC place that is nothing but a Cesspool of devil vomit spewing all over Disney and we are not going to subject our children to your brainless ideas of this Cesspool nonsense you created in a children’s environment. It takes everything we got not to vomit ourselves when you are showing movies of two men kissing and making out. If you are not gay then you don’t want to watch that kind of sickening behavior, so blame it on the ones who brought LGBQ out of their closets and decided to parade them in front of us!