How many times has it happened now? You’ll see an entertainment company announce that they’re resurrecting an old franchise or IP. A part of you is excited because the story and characters have a special place in your memories. You remember seeing these things on your television screen or reading comics about them during a less complicated and more innocent time.
But that initial excitement deflates as they include phrases about how they’re going to remake it.
“This is going to be remade so it fits modern times” is one you hear too often. Or “this will reflect the people of today.” You pretty much know immediately that this means that the bubbled people in Hollywood are about to inject so much political ideology into it that it’ll hardly resemble the beloved thing you grew up with.
Sure enough, you’re proven right. A handful of my last videos have been about covering this very thing.
Let’s take gay Superman, for instance. DC Comics allowed a social justice-obsessed writer to take control of Jon Kent, the song of Clark Kent. They proceeded to turn him into a gay, climate change alarmist who rarely engages in action and loves to kiss his K-Pop-looking boyfriend. The comic was not been well received and fails to crack even the top 50 in terms of sales. In fact, according to one metric, it lags into the 80s.
Now the comic is being canceled at only issue #18 but they’re now moving the character into a limited six-part series.
(READ: DC Comics Canceling Gay Superman’s Solo Run After Failure to Sell)
Velma from Scooby-Doo has now been turned into a lesbian and/or an Indian girl who makes meta jokes about audience criticism. The new trailer for “Velma” literally focuses on making fun of people who dislike shows for being wildly altered by social justice-obsessed Hollywood types. Of course, that trailer has been disliked into oblivion and the reaction has been nothing short of negative.
Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” has been an abject failure, especially given the amount of money they used to make it. The show is not getting nearly the number of viewers it was hoping for and its reception has been overwhelmingly negative, so much so that Amazon began deleting reviews that were negative toward it on its own website. Moreover, they’re lashing out at fans who denounce the show for its social justice infusion that has made the show insufferable to watch and bastardized Tolkien’s legacy.
The same could be said of “She-Hulk,” which spends more time attempting to bash men and promote a modern form of feminism so much so that it forgets to have a story and/or character development.
These are just some recent examples. The list of IPs and franchises that have bit the dust thanks to political intrusion by activists disguised as artists are so long that it would take a much longer article than I’m willing to write or you’re willing to read.
At this point, the pattern is established. A studio nabs a franchise, corrupts it with leftist politics, fans react negatively, and the left then uses that negativity to paint themselves as victims, their critics as horrible people, and attempt to use that narrative to not only get more people to see it out of some weird form of guilt but also try to push the reaction as a reason why they need to make more things like this. Normalization of their weird views is the goal.
Without these IPs, they would have to push their ideology nakedly and when they try to do that, few people actually buy it. They have to try to push it through something the world knows and loves. A household brand or name that they can recognize, quote, and have fond memories of.
There’s another part of the pattern, though. These ventures fail. They might garner a lot of attention but they tend not to make the money they’d like, and this is becoming more and more the case as time goes on. People are getting more and more fed up with these woke reboots and the makers are getting angrier and angrier that fewer people are biting.
This only encourages them to spitefully make more of the same, and now you see them directly lashing out as they did with the “Velma” trailer.
To which I say…”good.”
As much as I really don’t wish to see any more beloved franchises get infected by the social justice virus, I’d love for these activists to take their attempts at soft social programming to their logical end. Eventually, no one will switch on the television, or pay their way into a movie theater, to see what they knew will be propaganda disguised as entertainment.
The goodwill they had with audiences will completely dry up and, as it does, they’ll become angrier and angrier about it. They’ll begin lashing out at, not just fans, but the American culture and all who participate in it as a whole. They’ll overvalue their sway over the hearts and minds of their audiences and one day look up to see they don’t have one anymore.
Studios, even major ones, will find themselves in the red. Others may crash and burn. Their journey to being taken seriously again will take years.
And in those years, other creators and studios will have a chance to prove their worth and make a name for themselves. Comic book writers like Eric July are already making inroads. July has stunned the comic book industry with his comic “ISOM.” The Daily Wire is already in the movie-making business as well.
As the major studios devolve into struggling for relevancy and eyeballs, others may rise to take their place and grow into behemoths themselves. These artists and creators will have no compunction to introduce their own politics but will focus on entertainment, storytelling, and character development first. It will open up a new age of artistic expression and entertainment.
And I can’t wait for that day to come.
In that hope, let the major studios continue to shoot themselves in the foot and call themselves successful. The lie won’t cover the obvious reality, and the reality is that they’re dying from their own self-inflicted wounds.