So they hired a scumbag to harass their critics in potentially illegal ways, fired the scumbag, and then were surprised that he turned on them? What a perfect example of what goes around, comes around.
It's remarkable that they still exist as a functioning company. I would have thought that the lawsuits over the hack, the alleged fake accounts, and the general loss of customer trust would have been enough to push them into insolvency.
Its why some companies are so effective at selling Veblen goods to status seekers.
When I was growing up, I got abercrombie/american eagle because it was cool to girls. Today teens get Apple/Nike products.
Not that any of these actually change your status, but the marketers were able to sell that idea/feeling.
As an adult, you see people buying/leasing Tesla's or more expensive cars to do the same thing.
People desperate for social acceptance, which leads to girls, will pay anything. I get it, I used to spend half my time looking for girls before I got married. (other half of my time school, presumably so I could always get a gold digger if need be.)
Can you tell I was ugly growing up? (Lift weights my pals, it changed everything)
I said what I said kind of tongue-in-cheek, because I used to work in advertising.
No, I won't elaborate on it, but the difference in conversion rates between ads of a sexual nature (or even the slightest innuendo of sex) and literally anything else is a huge fucking cliff... and the places where you can even run those ads are super limited.
> Can you tell I was ugly growing up? (Lift weights my pals, it changed everything)
If all it took was working out, I promise you it was your self esteem. Though I agree that exercise definitely boosts your mood and anyone who is out of shape should try it.
I have a pet theory that all humans spend roughly 30% of their disposable income on status products. And that there's no way to escape this. No matter how hard you try.
If you escape spending at LVMH you'll spend it on cars, indie brands or ascetic holidays. Keep going and your money will go towards pseudo-educational leisure activities that make a social statement like submarine exploration or building web apps in Ocaml.
> I have a pet theory that all humans spend roughly 30% of their disposable income on status products. And that there's no way to escape this. No matter how hard you try.
Are you serious? Because wow that's off by a few megaparsecs...
A lot of people don't have enough disposable income to get them adequate amounts of food. Kids making toys out of garbage, just to have a toy. To share.
Do you feel there's any difference between "income" and "disposable" income? I would take it to mean income after paying taxes, and paying for housing, food, clothing, what definition are you using? I suspect the parent comment is using a similar definition to mine
The piece of shit car in my garage I wrench on every night as a hobby while my family is asleep is for status?
I must be doing it wrong then...but you're right about the spending on it part.
I'm no exception to your rule, but are you really so confident that all of humanity shares the same appetite for status signalling? I'm not a particularly social person, but even I can think of some counterexamples in my personal life. Obviously, we can also consider most of the extremely wealthy (Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc) as well.
My income has recently 5x'd and I already was making over 6 figs.
I'm doing the opposite of status signaling. I'm hiding my wealth. I don't need people to know I just bought an expensive computer or 3D printer. Heck, that makes me a target.
It also alienates friends who are insecure. I already ran into this when I graduated college, got a real job, and my blue collar high school friends got weird about it.
Heck, I knew I was going to be very well off. When I had my home built, I made sure the front-most peak of the house was on the first floor rather than the second floor. I didn't want my home to appear grand.
I want to object to what GP says, but whenever I think about it, I realize that I too am evidence in favor. Different methods, different groups. Some spending more of effort than money. Some substituting an idea for a group. But the need to belong somewhere - that is common to all.
I'm confident that all humans enjoy status. I suspect this is an innate characteristic of social creatures. Less than basic desires like food or reproduction but significant nevertheless.
The hypothesis about status signalling is more difficult because many individuals acquire status by rejecting conventional status objects. Many people respect Socrates, AOC and Gandhi in large part because of their modest lifestyles. It's possible to describe their behaviour as buying status via the opportunity cost of other consumption, but I worry the opportunity cost approach makes my theory too overpowered to the point of being unfalsifiable.
I wonder what social status I'm gaining by eating rice and a can of fish per day, and every so often I splurge on maybe a sandwich or instant noodles. After which I'm out of disposable income...
Your pet hypothesis, has yet to be confirmed only after that, will it be a theory.
It depends on the social context. If your friends - or people you want to be friends with - hold it in high esteem then yeah. Also true if a lego is disliked by group of people you despise.
I think it does change your status. If you go on a date a pick a girl up in a Hyundai and test her with an Android phone many will have a different opinion than if you text with apple and pick her up in a audi.
Being rejected by someone who lets brand-loyalty to billion dollar companies dictate their dating preferences isn't even 'a blessing in disguise'. It's just a plain and simple blessing.
That's secondary/high school level stuff, but sure, it happens. Many teens think like this, and they they grow out of it - that's part of the process. At least most do.
I’m not a part of app dating world, but from my understanding the way these apps work is a series of snap judgements. Android vs iPhone is but one of these. I don’t think the problem is really about Android or iPhone at all, but rather that we live in a reality where people make snap value judgements on these apps based on limited information very quickly, and it just so happens that Android/iPhone is one of those factors.
This kind of shows how out of touch we get when we make 6 figures.
Android or Iphone shows wealth? A $1000 dollar purchase for something you use daily is supposed to be expensive?
But when you are in poverty or lower-middle class, $1000 is a lot of money.
It just doesnt have the same meaning when you have money. I imagine the dating world has a bunch of things like this because you meet people of different classes.
The mystery to me is why a guy's reaction to it would be "damn I wish I had an iPhone so that girl would like me" and not "I'm glad I don't have an iPhone so I can weed out these nutjobs".
Because the dating scene is like the hiring scene. There are 100 applicants for every position and in that situation it makes sense to use very noisy low value signals that are cheap.
And just like hiring where there are great employers with silly hiring practices there are great partners with silly filtering rules. And you can cut yourself off from a large part of the market or play the game.
Unlike the potential employer or partner I'm not going to use a silly filter as my filter.
I think you're giving far too much credit to the reasoning abilities of people who filter their dates this way. They're not carefully coming up with heuristics to optimize their "application process". It's just plain ordinary shallowness.
But that aside, your entire analogy is based on the idea that you need to "win" iPhone Girl. What makes her worth winning, and why doesn't she need to win you?
You're allowed to have criteria too. One of mine is that I won't be with someone who has poor judgement. It's the reason I don't date women who are into astrology, or choose their partners based on the brand of their phone.
To use your analogy, iPhone Girl is a job that pays $30K a year while demanding 70 hours per week. That's not good enough for me, I don't care how nice her campus is.
It might changed perceived status by people who can't afford the illusion. (It wont change the way they talk, which is a dead giveaway to people within that class.)
If you can't easily afford an iphone or Audi, someone who can lease an audi and have a payment plan on an iphone looks like they have money.
Where once you make 6 figures, these seem like just another car/phone. Heck, when you buy cheap veblen goods like an Audi/iphone, it makes you look like you are compensating for your lack of income. Even 250k cars are barely impressive to a 6 fig earner because they can afford it too.
To a 6 fig earner, a hyundai and android are just the best tools for the job.
But iPhones are so common how it is something special anymore?
When I see someone with something that is not an iPhone I instantly become curious to find out what phone it is and why they didn't get an iPhone.
Exactly. I love nice things but I detest how it makes me look. That’s why I debadge my cars, never wear logos, and would prefer it if, generally, people didn’t know I exist.
The idea that people buy Tesla to be seen, is just a complete generalization. I own one because it’s the funnest car I’ve ever owned by a long shot. I keep it polished clean constantly, not so other people see it as nice, but because I prefer how a clean car looks TO ME rather than a dirty car.
I only buy Apple products because I love how they work and how they look and how they feel. TO ME. I could give a rats ass what other people think of me while I use Apple products.
Way back in the day, a friend of mine, not proud of what she did, but she needed the cash, was paid by a 'sugar daddy' web site to respond to messages on their fake profiles to keep people interested. (Long before the days of chat bots, etc.)
Like in that scene in The Terminator (1984), when the skin of the titular assassin melts/burns off/whatever, and it is revealed for what it truly is: a machine. Here, the "death blow" to a corporation reveals its true nature: an artificial intelligence. Implemented in bureaucracy and economics, executing on a runtime that's literally made of humans as processing units. C-suite, employees, customers, partners - all just execution substrate.
So yeah, you'd think that this corporate entity was dead already - but it was never alive in the first place. Unlike the humans opposing it, it doesn't need to be.
I agree Andor was great - I genuinely found myself on the edge of my seat once or twice watching it. But one decent TV show out of several, and no new movies in years? Terrible performance.
Rogue one was excellent movie wise. Mandalorian was ok, at least season 1 was downright good.
But yeah, it's no longer a guaranteed good time. But was it ever? It seems to me half of the first 6 movies stand up on their own. Then probably 1 out of the next 3 involving Ray.
Each new entry in a franchise is contagious against old entries in two ways
1. It typically carves out new canon about its universe, and
2. Closes old loose ends
Canon when added haphazardly can:
A. retroactively create in-universe plot-holes (if X existed in the universe, then Y happening in the originals made no sense, they would have known about it),
B. remove magic and mystery from an existing universe (famously in Star Wars’ case, quite literally, because now “The Force” is a bunch of little biological creatures) or
C. otherwise trivialize what were previously key moments (someone who was portrayed as a big bad previously was later just shown to be some powerless, boring low-level lackey who was irrelevant)
Additionally, loose end patching is infectious to older entries of a story:
A. When an older work presents a mystery, when you have a solution in a later work and that solution is lame, it taints the original by the knowledge that the loose end is, forever after, a broken promise by the writers.
B. It typically crowds out the potential of better solutions later (typically in film, franchises have to reboot to backtrack on canon),
C. prevents the solution from being the potentially better “that’s just where the story ends, use your imagination for what happens next!”, and
D. makes it retroactively hard as a fan to justify recommending the series to new fans, because if they feel passionate too, you know there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for incoming fans, since you know how it ends and know that it’s not rewarding.
I enjoyed watching the best show of all time. (Of course I did!) Up until Firefly got canceled, anyway, which was enormously frustrating. But at least I got to keep the sense of mystery and the potential of big reveals.
Then they made Serenity. Which I enjoyed, don't get me wrong. But I had to do some mental gymnastics to treat it as something other than a continuation. I had to think of it as its own thing, and then I could be okay with treating it as a good movie.
But it wrapped up several loose ends up a wholly unsatisfying way. If that was what the original series was leading up to, then I could no longer care when re-watching or just thinking about the series. It wasn't so much wrapping up loose ends as snipping them off. It was a 90° turn into a different story. So I treated it that way, and it was really nice when my kids were old enough that we could watch the series together and accept that it terminated abruptly at the last created episode.
Indiana Jones, as a franchise, mostly exists to present-day audiences as a series of Harrison Ford movies. Which, to sidecar a bit, seems like a shame when the point and click titles made by the Monkey Island folks were absolutely fantastic. I'd say Fate of Atlantis is a way better 4th installment than Crystal Skull.
But at any rate, following up a movie generally viewed as mediocre with what's shaping up to be one of the most expensive box office failures of all time after a delay of many years seems like it could only damage any lingering value in this IP. If it's not outright "murdering" the franchise, I'd say Disney has left Indiana Jones in a much worse spot than it was 20 years ago, and not just because the original movies are 20 years older.
Revisited Fate of Atlantis recently and was just reminded of the awesome rollercoaster in Disneyland, and it is kind of mystifying how this entire franchise was apparently allowed to slip away from relevance. Not just in movies - The Uncharted games are fantastic, the new Tomb Raiders sold many copies, people want swashbuckling adventures and the market's been saturated with milsims and scifi for years. The last 20 years of the franchise just look like one big missed opportunity parade.
20 years is a bad comparison point for "did Disney kill Indiana Jones." Disney bought Lucas just over 11 years ago. So what was the shape of the franchise at that point?
After a well-received film in 1989 and a well-received but niche Fate of Atlantis video game in 1992, and a TV series for a year or so (so not a smashing success, though I remember people liking it) in 1992-1993) it went dark movies/TV-wise, and none of the followup video games amounted to too much.
So the franchise wasn't in great shape or popular relevance pre-Crystal Skull, and that film certainly didn't help. It was largely disliked by audiences, and Dial of Destiny actually seems better received by audiences so far. Personally I thought it was a far better film, though not a "must see" - but how much blood is in that stone to squeeze out with an aging Harrison Ford compared to, say, Uncharted?
Anyone blaming Disney for the state of Lucasfilm franchises seems to have a huge chunk of selective memory for the 2000s. (E.g. for me, I stopped paying attention to a lot of new Star Wars media for a while after Vector Prime in 1999 and the resulting story arc.)
Your point that the franchise wasn't in a great spot at acquisition is noted, and I'd agree with it. I'm not the same commenter who originally voiced the broad anti-Disney polemic, I'm mostly just chiming in my general disappointment at this one franchise's lifespan in hindsight.
But, I'd say it's only gotten worse over Disney's ownership. It's not much of an achievement for any film to be better than Crystal Skull, and results seem to be indicating neither movie is a successful new installment for the franchise.
I was going to give Disney credit for Lego Indiana Jones as another positive moment for the franchise, but that game actually predates the acquisition!
On the note of squeezing blood from the stone that is Harrison Ford as the protagonist, James Bond has switched its eponymous leading act many times and remains a pretty strong franchise (and has endured quite a few clunker releases) - for some reason the various writers of Indiana Jones over the years decided to do the opposite with these films.
Neither the lego game nor Atlantis feature any voicing from Harrison Ford, but they still capture the "feeling" of the original trilogy of movies better than either of Disney's sequels, IMO. I think the decision for Indiana Jones 4 to be led by Ford again could be a good example of a franchise -steering decision by Disney that's really only been to its detriment.
The Lego games in general (across all the various properties) really seem to have been made by actual amateur fans (in the sense of amour) who love the material and respect it whilst poking fun.
I assume they had very little high level management oversight.
It wouldn't suprise me if Lucasfilm pre-Disney may have intended to use 4 to hand things off to Shia LeBeouf, but, well, whoops.
The Bond model is an interesting one, I wonder how well it would work for Indiana Jones. First I guess you gotta decide if you are gonna bring it forward in time or not. If you do, I think there's something of a bad guy problem. Raiders and Last Crusade both benefited a lot from the Nazis being on the other side of things. Keeping that scale + keeping the focus on archeological finds vs whatever Bond McGuffin can be imagined seems a hard job to me... And if you leave it set in the WWII era... there's only so much you can plow that land too.
And once you're 30 years after major media relevance, recasting your hero is a highly risky move. Does Indiana Jones without Harrison Ford have more pull? Or even less? (Compare to, say, Uncharted, which opened to less money than Dial of Destiny, but was cheaper to make at least).
(Of course, "highly risky move" also has to include spending $300M to make a new entry after that long... so... whoops again)
Casino royale was a remake of an older bond movie with the same name, using a rather well known actor at the time. Could've been a nostalgia cash grab but ended up being so great he's still the only James bond some people have known.
That was a risk taken and it pulled off greatly. Can we ever imagine seeing billion dollar studios taking similar risks?
It was originally designed to emulate serials which had no end of (literal) cliffhanger stories. Temple of Doom didn’t rely on Nazi’s and is not told in sequential order with the other movies.
The Indiana Jones franchise exists because of the Indiana Jones character. People that go to one of those movies want to see him.
If you setup a Mary Sue that treats him like an useless geriatric waste of a man, and finish the movie by having this Mary Sue knock him out, you're basically pissing in your own franchise. And since Harrison Ford won't be able to do another one, this is how the franchise ended, with a sour note.
And yet the audience reaction to that has been largely positive - both in aggregate and in the theater I was in - it's the critics that have been more sour compared to how they reacted to Crystal Skull (while the audience disliked that one much more).
If you wanna say "don't make a movie about an old version of that character," fine. But give it a fucking break with the idea that the filmmakers are attacking you by showing that an 80 year old version of the character wouldn't be the same as a 40 year old version.
Let's remember that the last successful film in the franchise made EXCELLENT use of aging and the effect of that on the character's relationships with a great premise and execution by Ford and Connery, too. We were already getting to peek beyond just "here's Indy again doing Indy things"
“Audiences,” seem to have a very positive reception to every Disney movie no matter how bad it is or the average person thinks it is. This isn’t proof of anything other than Disney has very effective marketing
> And since Harrison Ford won't be able to do another one
I don't know, maybe ask Holo-Reagan or Holo-Tupac what he thinks about that? Or we've got holo-leia or holo-tarkin even within the star wars universe already.
You just have to face it, death isn't the obstacle it used to be. There's lots of dead actors out there living kickass lives.
I absolutely abhor using a dead person's image or material for new material. I don't want to hear an AI Beethoven or read an AI Hemingway.
Actors are the same. Those are not the real artists, just what some corporate shill thought those actors would do. If you enjoy that, understand that it's not different at all from watching an animated movie.
I think the visual effects made a huge difference. The practical effects were good enough to be impressive and believable. But also some placed limits on the craziness of the story. Modern VFX has just destroyed that balance.
How could this be unclear? They are both narratives. They both have characters. Why wouldn't a concept about characters from one map to the other? Do you think fanfic characters and official movie characters are incompatible types? I have never read or written a fan fic and encountered this term countless times in discussion of media.
I'm honestly baffled how you can't imagine a movie with a character embodying the qualities described in the tvtropes entry.
I'm going by the description in the source you provided me, which provides a detailed and specific meaning in the context of fanfic and then says the term is also used as a general pejorative. If I'm not meant to use the description in that source I'm not sure why you linked to it.
Well, Harrison Ford is literally 80 years old. I think Indiana Jones is about 80 in the latest movie as well. Complaining that a *gasp* woman could beat up an octogenarian is more of a commentary about you than the inevitable march of time.
No. It's specifically the "Mary Sue" part that he's annoyed by. That term is never used online to refer to male character.
Of course, a dude that can not only be athletic, can read every inscription in every ancient language, is an expert in every ancient civilization, and use a bull whip as a grappling hook at will gets a pass.
No, then they're called a Gary Stu, Marty Stu, Marty Sam or Tom Sue and they exist too. They too are annoying and numerous, but less common.
Harry Potter, Scott Pilgrim, James Bond, any character Vin Diesel plays, etc.
Mary Sues are called out rightly because they're a shitty trope used by lazy writers. Nobody (with any intelligence or credibility) ever said that George Lucas was a particularly great writer. It's popcorn entertainment for a mass market.
Indiana Jones movies came out in a time where movie studios thought audiences were fucking morons and we have much higher standards today after being fed decades of high-concept movies and television. Hence the flat reception and pushback. Even Crystal Skull had its asshole ripped open by audiences without needing misogyny to be a diversion/excuse to explain the turd released by the studio.
Movies can't cash in by gender/age/race-swapping classic franchises because if you released those movies as they were today they would ALSO bomb. But Hollywood is certainly trying and trying and scratching its head wondering why it isn't working.
I can't agree with the second half of your post. Indiana Jones started reasonably strong with Raiders and has been on a steep descent ever since. The secondary characters in Temple of Doom were truly annoying and the franchise only got worse from there. I could be coaxed into watching the first again, but none of the sequels.
And the state of modern blockbusters shows that mass audiences haven't developed more sophisticated taste, they still gobble up slop like Marvel for a dozen+ sequels/spinoffs with thunderous enthusiasm until they eventually, finally, get bored of the premise and start looking for some new slop. MCU isn't failing because audiences got more sophisticated between five years ago and now; it's failing because they've been putting out the same movie with reskined costumes for 15 years now and that was never going to keep people interested forever. It still had one hell of a run though, proving that audiences today don't have more taste than audiences in the 80s.
Come back when any of those characters you listed are called Mary Sue.
Let’s use Star Wars for an example. A teenager with little education, grows up on a backwater desert planet immediately uses the Force and flies an advanced space craft into battle, becoming the focus of attention of a galaxy spanning fascist military, and a hero in an under resourced underground partisan movement.
You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker, but Rey? OMG, the knives were out after the trailer dropped.
To deny this dynamic after almost 10 years of it playing out very visibly online and off, at this point is willful ignorance at best.
> You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker, but Rey? OMG
That's because Luke took a long time to get good, including impulsively running off to fight and losing his arm, and was a whiny so and so, and was only good at certain things.
Rey is a classic MS because she's good at everything from the start; she wins every fight, including against the scariest Sith baddie around; flies spaceships perfectly despite having not done it before; fixes the Millennium Falcon in a way that Han Solo, its owner, didn't understand; was an expert boat navigator across a stormy sea that the locals wouldn't sail across, despite having grown up on a desert planet; everyone likes her (e.g. after Han dies Leia, who's met Rey once before, emotionally hugs Rey and not Chewie); she has random helpful encounters out of nowhere; etc etc.
I get some characters are unfairly characterised as [MG]ary S(ue|tu), or unfairly not as, but this doesn't seem one of those cases. You might say it's because Disney exec leadership and directing of episodes 7-9 were terrible and fragmented, and you'd be right, but the above still stands.
> You’re hard pressed to find anyone complaining about Luke Skywalker
That's just not true. The whole "chosen one" premise is extremely common in fantasy and scifi and widely criticized by people with sufficient taste and media literacy to become aware of the pattern and grow weary of it. Media that fits this pattern is considered adolescent; adults who are obsessed with Star Wars or Harry Potter are called manchildren. "Mary Sue" is gendered language that isn't used to describe male characters, but that doesn't mean this same exact sort of bad writing for male characters doesn't exist, or isn't recognized as such.
Off the top of my head: Harry Potter, Star Wars, the Matrix, virtually all shonen anime, The Wheel of Time, anything Branden Sanderson has written... all of these are considered adolescent (have I pissed off everybody yet?) It's extremely hard to think of any example of "chosen one" media that isn't considered adolescent... Dune maybe? This trope is so common, it taints the reputation of all fantasy and sci-fi by association.
So one of the main features of a Mary/Marty Sue is that everyone seems to really like them and be invested in them immediately. Rey has that (Finn latches on to her quickly, Han starts treating her as a surrogate child very quickly, Leia hugs her instead of Chewie, even the antagonist Kylo seems to have an interest in her, etc.) but Luke doesn't have that.
Leia seems to think he's a bit useless at times during the escape, Han thinks he's a backwater rube, but these characters grow close over the course of the story.
I admit that a lot of people do leave off the "is treated as super important and great by everyone immediately" bit when they define a Sue a lot, but I think it is a significant part of the definition and I also think it is a big part of what people don't like even if they often fail to articulate it. There's a "look at how cool and perfect our character is!" feeling you get when sequels introduce new characters into an existing setting and all the old characters fawn over them immediately that just isn't fun to watch.
Lastly characterizing Luke as "immediately using the Force" is bullshit I am sick of seeing. Firstly, we do see him practicing and failing at it on the trip to the Death Star, secondly he only uses it in incredibly vague terms to blow up the Death Star in a way that is way closer to "having faith" than "using a super power" in the context of the story. Luke sees Obi-Wan do a mind trick in the first half of New Hope and we don't see Luke even attempt it until Return of the Jedi. The first time we see Luke use a force ability outside of the Death Star run, which again in terms of how it is presented isn't really the same as other times the force is used, is to move his light sabre on Hoth. This is months after New Hope and he still really struggles to do it. But even if I cede the blowing up of the Death Star as Luke using the force instead of trusting in the force, we still see him actually practice trying to still his mind and use it before it happens, which isn't something we get for Rey.
Don't forget Wesley Crusher. I don't know why people pretend that the male version isn't also disliked, but I don't think it's a rational stance. People don't like either.
Other characters on the show find Wesley obnoxious, and he nearly washes out of Starfleet Academy after covering up a stunt that killed one of his friends. I don't see him as a wish-fulfillment character at all.
He is for a long time. Everyone likes him; he's an extremely high achiever; he easily impresses a beautiful girl, and in the same episode outwits all of the Enterprise's security staff to save the Enterprise; he even has special powers that somehow make him a more advanced iteration of the human species.
I'm not sure if the OP meant it, but there's a decided different in my mind between "murdering" a series and "ruining" it. A bad new entry doesn't make the old ones worse, but it may effectively foreclose any chance of making another better one later.
For people who maybe were hoping for another good Indiana Jones movie in the same vein as the first few, having these last two be received terribly means we're unlikely to see another attempt for years, if ever.
I think the closest I’ve ever seen to ‘murdering’ a series by releasing new media was the final series of game of thrones retroactively killed the cultural phenomenon that it was.
> the final series of game of thrones retroactively killed the cultural phenomenon that it was
I agree with you on the observation. Subjectively I feel the same. I wonder if someone has hard data on this. I wonder if there is some executive somewhere looking at a graph of polling results, or merchandise sales or anything like that and feeling terrible that they have screwed up (at least privately, even if they would never admit publicly).
I believe that the latest few seasons removed from my enjoyment of the whole franchise. It even made the earlier episodes worse, in the same way a flat punch line ruins even the most masterfull lead up of a joke. But does this feeling also appear on the bean counting level? Fundamentally a franchise is a business enterprise with the goal of making money for the owners. Does “ruining” a series this way also effects the bottom line in a way which can be expressed in the accounting?
That's actually a good example - The early seasons aren't necessarily worse because of the end of the show, but it definitely killed a few spinoff shows HBO was planning, and also killed the Star Wars movie that the showrunners were working on.
Obviously we're still getting House of the Dragon, but if you'd told me before the last season came out that we'd only have 1 spinoff GoT show now, and that it wasn't that big of a deal, I'm not sure I'd have believed you.
The new material has franchise/brand association, and the privileged production (eg. as opposed to fan cannon) cements it. They're now cognitively inseparable. The mental space the OT and PT occupied now has Disney's hands all over it .
Once especially cherished, Star Wars is a completely ruined universe in my mind. The mystery of the larger universe has been filled in with things I don't like, and there's no more magic left. I can't imagine anything that can salvage it. I don't care to see any more, probably ever.
I'd rather support independent films and small creators anyway.
I'm with you. I think most of the star wars movies are pretty bad, but some of them are pretty good. And the bad ones don't make me feel worse about the good ones.
I think there has been a serious cultural shift in this regard sometime during the 00s. Most people used to understand that sequels are generally shitty and didn't make a big deal of this. S-tier classics from the likes of Disney used to get shitty straight-to-DVD sequels (e.g. Lion King 2) and nobody even thought to whine about it. Even movies that had very well received sequels would sometimes receive further sequels that were stinkers, and nobody started ranting about how the original was ruined because of it.
Alien and Aliens were great, then you got Alien 3, AvP, etc.. a bunch of mediocre slop to put it nicely (actually I like 3, but I admit it's deeply flawed). But when did you ever hear somebody say that AvP or Alien Resurrection ruined how they felt about Alien or Aliens? Terminator and T2; great movies that got a bunch of shitty spinoffs and sequels, but nobody said at the time that their enjoyment of the first two was ruined by what followed. James Bond has been a rollercoaster of quality for decades but it keeps going and fans enjoy calm respectful debates about which are their favorites. The Godzilla franchise has lots of quality interspersed with lots of crap, I don't hear many people saying that the horrible Minilla retroactively ruined King Kong vs. Godzilla, or for that matter, that King Kong vs. Godzilla ruined Godzilla (1954). The first Jurassic Park wasn't said to be ruined by the cashgrab sequels. The Land Before Time is still warmly remembered, despite 13(!) direct-to-dvd sequels.
Even in the early 2000s, I heard a lot of people saying they didn't like the Star Wars prequels, but I didn't hear many people saying the first three movies were ruined. Not until a few years later did this attitude start to find traction.
I'm not the biggest fan of the reboot either, but I suspect that my generation is no longer the intended target audience.
The young professionals at my workplace seems to be really enjoying it, and have praised its action sequences, diverse and inclusive casts, and themes that are relevant to them.
I'm in Hong Kong, I don't get what you mean. There's no porn or snuff movies on it here either, how tame is it in the US ? I bought it for my 5yo to get her Disney dose, do you guys buy it for even younger children ?
What other countries do you think exist outside the US? Why are there "different animals" of Disney streaming services ? Have you pursued your thought down to even quoting a few examples of what you imagine would happen in Tokyo, Johannesburg or Milan if you started Disney+ ?
In the US it's trying very hard to appear kid/family friendly. To the point where the Disney+ versions of PG movies and many TV shows have extra censorship (you can look around online for lists of content that's been bowdlerized on Disney+)
Harrison probably had the complete data from the company ready to go for any purpose. Maybe it was released with a deadman's switch or by a friend after he got suicided.
I don't think OP is suggesting they might have murdered him in retribution for the hack. As the article describes, there was quite a lot of animosity between the contractor Harrison and the owner of Ashley Madison, including a harassment campaign from Harrison that started two years before he killed himself and three years before the hack.
Maybe to keep someone from registering it for malicious purposes? At one point, archive.org would follow robots.txt retroactively. So if you lost control of the domain, someone else could wipe all of its history.
I'll rephrase "can the family of the dead person sue people for causing emotional - and potentially financial - trauma due to people making false claims of criminal activity?"
I also get there's a glib "you can sue for anything, but it can always be thrown out" response, but that's a non-answer.
