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The racist backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The Rings is exhausting and extremely predicta

Discussion in 'Too Hot for Swamp Gas' started by philnotfil, Sep 17, 2022.

  1. Gatorhead

    Gatorhead GC Hall of Fame

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    If she ain't Chartreuse I'm offing myself.
    Life ain't worth living...................
     
  2. wgbgator

    wgbgator Premium Member

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    Would white MLK still be freeing black people? If so, that movie has already been made, but I guess the white person wasnt MLK literally.

    Here's the thing, I dont think there are any rules with art, sometimes its fun to break the rules. Though sometimes people do it for stupid or cynical reasons. Ultimately, we can hope for culturally literacy rather than bickering over representation or values people want to imagine are being conveyed, but I think Americans are a lost cause in that regard.
     
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  3. Gatorhead

    Gatorhead GC Hall of Fame

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    I kinda enjoyed watching the Fuhrer get lit up with 3 magazines myself!
     
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  4. oragator1

    oragator1 Hurricane Hunter Premium Member

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    The studio gets around 60 percent of the domestic gross and less than half of the international. So they are going to lose a lot on this one, whatever the reason.
     
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  5. WC53

    WC53 GC Hall of Fame

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    Not watching it. Going to watch the new ghost busters instead;)
     
  6. uftaipan

    uftaipan GC Hall of Fame

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    I feel the same way. I like to suspend disbelief when I’m watching movies. So when I’m watching historical fiction it doesn’t help when the actors obviously don’t look like they’re real-life counterparts. When it comes to ancient peoples I’m ambivalent, because for the most part no one knows for sure what they looked like and they may have looked completely different from what any race of modern humans look like today. But, for instance, Mary Queen of Scots (2018) was dumb and distracting for casting black and Asian actors for English and Scot lords and ladies (historical figures, not fictional composite characters) known to us to be white. That’s not diversity. That’s artificial diversity. And it’s no more right or correct to do that than it was to have John Wayne play Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956).
     
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  7. defensewinschampionships

    defensewinschampionships GC Hall of Fame

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    Genghis Khan was actually one I thought of later after I posted it.
     
  8. WC53

    WC53 GC Hall of Fame

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    Capt Kirk is that you :)
     
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  9. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    Worked for me
     
  10. defensewinschampionships

    defensewinschampionships GC Hall of Fame

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    That’s good. It just is weird for me.
     
  11. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    Was thinking of GK today. The Holy Father is going to Mongolia at the end of the summer and there was this story with the cool statue in the background, but not as cool as the giant one. I would love to tour that museum

     
  12. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    In context (rap musical, very venerative of GW), it worked
     
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  13. defensewinschampionships

    defensewinschampionships GC Hall of Fame

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    Off topic I’ve had a couple of Mongolian students and they are the chillest people I’ve ever met.
     
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  14. tampagtr

    tampagtr VIP Member

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    I have heard similar stories. I really would love to visit the museum - https://chinggismuseum.com/en

    The scale of the statue itself is something I think must be beheld in person

     
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  15. GatorJMDZ

    GatorJMDZ gatorjack VIP Member

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    Waay too early to say that, it was only released May 26. You've also omitted several revenue streams that are factored into profitability...pay per view revenue, DVD sales, merchandising and TV rights.
     
  16. latergatorgc

    latergatorgc Freshman

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    I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a backlash against the new Hollywood staple couple: Handsome white man opposite beatiful biracial woman (who looks sort of white).

    It seems like every movie now. Spiderman, Batman, Joker, Dune, The Flash (upcoming), the Little Mermaid.

    It's so common it's what I expect to see with a when the hero is white. And it seems obvious that Hollywood is trying to do superficial diversity.
     
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  17. oragator1

    oragator1 Hurricane Hunter Premium Member

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    I actually follow movie revenue kinda closely (it’s the nerd in me). Movies typically make half their box office or more in the opening weekend often times (it falls by half roughly each successive week so think of a parabola). It’s already a good chunk of the way to what it will make, unless it gets great word of mouth legs, which I guess could happen.
    Here is an article on the economics, it needs a lot of breaks and later returns to get close.

    “As the previous live-action Disney remake films have made more money at the international box office than domestically, and by a wide margin, The Little Mermaid is in a very bad position to simply reach a break-even point financially, much less earn a sizable profit.

    With a $250 million production cost and a reported $140 million marketing cost, The Little Mermaid, under the most generous of projections, needs to gross approximately $560 million at the worldwide box office, according to Hollywood insiders, to reach its break-even threshold.

    However, this $560 million figure, which assumes a $300 million domestic gross and a $260 million international gross, also includes $100 million in expected earnings from television, both free and pay television, another $100 million from home entertainment, digital and DVD, and $80 million from international television sales and streaming rights. Basically, the $560 million break-even scenario accounts for an exhaustion of the film’s potential revenue streams beyond its theatrical life and leaves little possibility for the film to be able to achieve any substantial profit for Disney.”
    https://movieweb.com/the-little-mermaid-box-office-success/
     
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  18. lacuna

    lacuna VIP Member

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    Why are you surprised? Who, in your estimation, would be behind 'a backlash'?

    Why do you think there arer fewer couplings between Black Heroes and White Women? Through this omission is Hollywood demonstrating a basic or hypocritical dishonesty?
     
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  19. Emmitto

    Emmitto VIP Member

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    If you are butthurt by mermaid actor ethnicity you have taken Doing Too Much to an unprecedented level of absurdity.

    But even if I had some weird obsession with the original, why would the existence of this one bother me?

    I'm trying to think of some equivalent. Maybe Jacob's Ladder. I do indeed really like the Tim Robbins original, and also did see how a tune-up could send it to top shelf. But the remake was a colossal dud. Complete with A Black Dude now playing the lead role. But that was of no consequence. The fake human in the invented plot isn't now White just because Tim Robbins was the first time around.

    This just can't be something serious people are serious about.
     
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  20. wgbgator

    wgbgator Premium Member

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    They just remade White Men Can't Jump, which seems sort of pointless to me, that was a movie very much of a time and place (but not so dated that its unwatchable now, you can still find it streaming). They even put a guy in it who had never acted with predictable results. A lot of what gets made is just the general move away from creativity, into a mindset of dishing out safely vetted-IP that can be tweaked a little for a newer audience and put it in a more recognizable context. I'm not against remakes, but many of them are done for non-artistic reasons. But I'm also not going to go online and review bomb the WMCJ remake because that's something an unserious weirdo would do.