Tag: Devil Mouse

The Idiotic End of Indiana Jones

The Dark Herald does not recommend Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Read the comprehensive review at the Arkhaven blog and be grateful for the spoilers that will save you from feeling any temptation to see the conclusive dismantling of another Devil Mouse IP:

The first three Indiana Jones movies (AKA the real ones) were always about religion. The powerful artifacts that Indy rescued, always worked against the wicked men that would try to use them for evil purposes. Since this was written by retarded atheists who were told they were special by their high school creative writing teacher, they went with science fiction. Really shitty science fiction. It makes the last season of Sliders look good. Even Crystal Skull kind of stuck with wicked people trying to misuse a powerful artifact for evil and getting fried for it. I was honestly expecting Voller to be killed by the Dial of Destiny, but he ends up getting shot by Woman King Helena, then dies in a plane crash. I’m positive that none of the writers ever watched the original movies.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is fundamentally incapable of carrying a motion picture. She is not movie star material; the magic just isn’t there. Even if I liked everything about her, I would still be saying that.

This film is an editing trainwreck on a par with The Rise of Skywalker. I now understand why James Mangold lost his shit at some rando on Twitter. When he signed, he thought he was going to have the kind of freedom he had with Logan and Ford Vs Ferrari. Instead, he was drowning in a river of notes from every department at Disney from day one.

I think at this point everyone in Hollywood now gets the picture. Don’t be fooled by LucasFilm’s prestige, the paycheck isn’t remotely worth the ass ache and heartbreak that will come with the massive resume stain that is a Kathleen Kennedy production… I have to say it’s kind of impressive. It took Kathleen Kennedy three movies before she utterly wrecked Star Wars. But Indiana Jones was destroyed with just one.

In conclusion, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a rambling, overlong, incoherent editing vomit pile of film that fails on so many levels I’m honestly impressed by its incompetence

I didn’t see the second or third Indiana Jones movie. Or the fourth one, for that matter. But if there had been any possibility that I might consider seeing the fifth one – and there wasn’t – this review would suffice to eliminate it.

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Disney Adopts Zero History

Once a premier curator of American history, the skinsuit of the company founded by Walt Disney has opted for historical oblivion and the destruction of its own artifacts:

Walt had a vision of himself as one of the Big Americans, that his name would be remembered with men like Ford and Edison. Whether he genuinely felt an accurate record of his life and work would reflect well on him or he knew he was going to be in the history books anyway so he would be well served by writing the history book himself, he is one of the very few businessmen to start a museum dedicated to curating his life, his work and the company he built up from nothing.

So was born the Walt Disney Company Archive. Or simply The Archive. Just about every major or even minor thing the Walt Disney Company ever was a part of was dutifully curated. Decommissioned park attractions that were being dismantled would have disused animatronics packed away and sent to the archive. Every single addition and more importantly subtraction to the parks was carefully noted at the Archive. Artwork from all of the Disney animated features were meticulously cataloged and preserved at the Archive.

The Archive also operates public museums where you can gawk at such diverse things as Disneyland opening day curios, doodads, and tourist gimcrack. Want to see the real Pirates Redhead? She now lives at the archive. Original scripts, props from the Davey Crockett show. Various denizens of Tomorrowland’s obsolete future past are on display at The Archive.

You know what you won’t find at the Archive? Not one fucking thing connected with Splash Mountain. The most popular ride in the history of Disney parks and not one trace of it was curated.

The preservation of historical knowledge is one of the most sacred and important things that can be accomplished even by the irreligious. So it should come as no surprise that eradicating history is always among the foremost objectives of the Zero Historians in their permanent campaign against all that is Good, Beautiful, and True.

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Adjusted Metrics

If you don’t like a product for what are deemed to be the wrong reasons, your vote no longer counts:

A leading film rating site has adjusted its review metrics after it found “unusual voting activity” for a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid that has been criticised for casting a black actress as Ariel.

The film, which was released in May, had a 7/10 rating on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) website, despite 15,000 of its 39,000 user-submitted reviews having given it one star.

In a notice posted on the film’s page, IMDB said: “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title. To preserve the reliability of our rating system, an alternate weighting calculation has been applied.”

The lesson, as always, is this: convergence eliminates an organization’s ability to perform its primary function.

What is the point of a review site that does not permit reviews? The fact that it is permissible to dislike a movie for one reason, but impermissible for another reason renders the entire service of the review site irrelevant. After all, if one person doesn’t wish to see a movie with a black protagonist, this point is presumably of interest to anyone who happens to share their opinion.

Such as, for example, the entire population of China and most of the population of Asia.

The self-immolation of the Clown World corpocracy is serving to create one global business opportunity after another.

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Saving the Devil Mouse

Conservatives are literally retarded. When they’re not trying to save liberals from the obvious consequences of their actions, they’re trying to prevent the Devil Mouse from immolating itself in its own wickedness.

Movieguide Chairman and Founder Ted Baehr, is calling on parents to petition Disney+ to stop the release of Pauline on the platform.

“We can’t let this twisted and disturbing content corrupt our children’s values and beliefs,” he shared.

“Let me be clear. Pauline is not just another piece of entertainment,” Baehr added. “Horrifically, this series even portrays Satan as a romantic partner! By normalizing and promoting such a relationship, Pauline sends a dangerous message to young viewers that associating with demons, Satan, and evil is acceptable and even desirable!”

Baehr said MovieGuide is partnering with Citizen-go to stop the series from premiering on Disney+.

“If released, there will be millions of young viewers who may perceive this twisted and disturbing story as desirable and exciting,” Baehr warned. “The show’s attempt to normalize and even promote demonic association is a blatant attempt to blur the lines of morality and make evil desirable.”

“We must act now to petition Disney to reconsider their decision to platform this evil show. We need to inform the studios that there are still discerning viewers and parents who won’t allow this content to be viewed by our children,” he added.

Baehr continued, “Pauline has not been released yet, and we can still STOP this show from progressing any further…we need to act fast.”

This is wrong. This is retarded. This is ridiculous. We don’t need to act fast. In fact, we should not act at all. Of course Pauline is awful. And worse is still to come. Let Disney be Disney, shake the dust of the Magic Kingdom off your sandals, and let the flames of its descent into the Hellmouth warm your back as you walk away from it.

UPDATE: The Dark Herald observes horrors beyond your imagination at Disney World, which is to say, trans-princesses for Pride month.

Mickey the Franchise Cannibal Rat is now devouring his own. This is exactly why I was laughing my ass off when various content monkeys started to claim with perfect conviction that Disney was getting rid of the Woke. That was impossible. Not given the board of directors it has and not given Bob Iger’s personal inclinations that he is now too old to successfully hide anymore.

When we snarl about Pedo-Mouse this is exactly the kind of shit we are talking about. It’s not just Princess Poppers greeting the kids at the door. Apparently pixie-dust can now change little boys into little princesses if they have the kind of mother who should have been forcibly sterilized before graduating college. What should be a very special day for a little girl is now the Disney Princess Drag Race. Do you have a perfectly normal little girl? Disney can fix that for you! With the right horrors implanted where cherished memories should have been, she’ll be a fat-shaven-headed bisexual activist before she graduates from grade school! That’s the Disney Magic!!!

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The Little Trashmaid Sinks

The media is claiming that the blackwashed live action version of the classic Disney film is a big success.

Disney’s The Little Mermaid has topped the box office at the number one spot over Memorial Day weekend with a whopping debut of an estimated $118 million.

The live-action remake, which is also mixed with CGI animation, stars Halle Bailey playing the leading role of Ariel, whose casting initially sparked backlash, Melissa McCarthy as sea witch Ursula and Jonah Hauer-King portraying Prince Eric.

On Friday alone, the film raked in a total of $38 million in ticket sales in celebration of the anticipated project’s release in theaters to kick off the summer season. Through Sunday, The Little Mermaid garnered $96 million in the box office, and over the span of the entire holiday weekend, the movie is expected to make $118 million in the domestic markets, making it the fifth highest Memorial Day opening in history, per Variety.

‘This gives Disney the green light to keep mining its vault. With an opening this big, I think you’re going to keep seeing these live-action reboots.’

Wow, apparently people really want to see black people replacing their redheaded icons after all, right? Well, not so fast. The Dark Herald puts the numbers in their true perspective at the Arkhaven blog.

This is a disaster for Disney.

Not that you would know that from the level of spin going on in the trade media.

“BOFFO BOX OFFICE BONANZA FOR THE THE LITTLE MERMAID THAT COULD! $163 MILLION ON ITS OPENING WEEKEND!!!

If that was just the domestic total then, awesome, boffo indeed. But it’s the grand total. Just for reference, the godawful CGI Lion King remake hauled in $269 million on its opening weekend and that was in 2019 pre-Bidenflation bucks. In today money it would be $358 million.

The Little Mermaid’s domestic haul is an acceptable-I-guess $95 million.

But the International market has cratered at $68 million. That is a catastrophe for Disney. Simply put, the critically important international market is blatantly and obviously not going to get better from here.

More importantly, Disney desperately needed The Little Mermaid to overperform due to the number of recent flops it has released in the aftermath of the shutdown of its parks. Because Indiana Jones: The Old Guy’s Last Hurrah or whatever it is called, is already more doomed than the temple of the second film.

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Torching Indy

Disney has burned the effigy of Indiana Jones. The Dark Herald explains how on the Arkhaven blog:

The original Indiana Jones Trilogy of films all revolved around religious artifacts that held immense power.* In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the Antikythera Machine turned out to be a time machine, created by Archimedes. A machine created by the One True Science and not religious at all. The Spear of Longinus is in this thing too and has no power at all because religion is now fake and gay in Indy’s new horrible world. Everyone knew this thing was going to be a disaster when we heard that Fleabag had been cast. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has become a greater harbinger of impending franchise doom than any plague spot. Woke Hollywood is still determined to make her thing and she’s not and never will be. But they will be getting over that soon.

Truth be said, this movie had a much worse casting decision going for it. Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. I’ve said before and I’m saying it now, the attraction of Indiana Jones wasn’t that you wanted to see his movies, it was that you wanted to BE Indiana Jones. Young, mid-thirties, Nazi-punching Indiana Jones. Nobody wants to be old-as-fuck 80-year-old Indy. Bringing him back to the franchise was a terrible idea… Unless you were planning to obliterate Indiana Jones and the rumors all said the same thing, that, that was what they were planning to do. Indiana Jones would be humiliated by Fleabag for the entire movie then, time travel back to his forties, meet his younger self, and then his younger self would be killed. Banishing Doctor Henry Jones Jr from all of his adventures. Then Fleabag would pick up his hat and have those adventures for him thus cucking Indy, his audience, and all men everywhere.

LucasFilm actually had the nerve to be surprised when the test screenings bombed. Much to her rage, Kathleen Kennedy was ordered to unfuck the ending.

The ending was resentfully changed to Indy getting heroically clocked by Fleabag, because he wanted to stay in the past. He wakes up in the present and is bummed about it until Marion walks in with some groceries. At the start of the movie they had been divorced, and that got Butterfly Effected away. So now it’s a happy ending.

I stopped watching Indiana Jones after The Temple of Doom. Frankly, I thought the greenscreen Apple II game Aztec was vastly more entertaining. But it’s still nice to see the satanic corporate skinsuit of what was once Disney crashing and burning repeatedly this summer. As Razorfist mentioned in his epic rant on UATV, it wasn’t all that long ago that Disney was flirting with bankruptcy. It’s looking increasingly possible that they’ll go down for good this time.

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Devil Mouse in Danger

The Dark Herald explains how Disney CEO Bob Iger has placed the wicked corporation in a perilous legal position concerning the nature of the relationship between the Walt Disney Company and the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

This was clearly and obviously a legal fiction.

HOWEVER, it was a legal fiction that Disney absolutely and under all circumstances had to observe. The Chinese wall separating the Walt Disney Company from the Reedy Creek Improvement District had to be as big as the Great Wall of China.

And yesterday Bob Iger bulldozed through it.

During the question-and-answer portion of the Disney Annual Investor Meeting, an already flustered Bob Iger answered a question that at first seemed like it was from a friendly or at least neutral quarter.

An Ameriprise Financial Advisor asked, ‘What are you doing to protect stockholder value because of the Reedy Creek problems with the State of Florida?’

Iger went into a long and rambling answer that demolished fifty years of carefully cultivated legal fiction. He briefly and biased covered the history of the Florida Anti-Grooming law and Disney’s hysterical reaction to it. And then said, ‘The governor of Florida got angry and decided to retaliate’, (here is the kill quote) “including the naming of a new board to oversee the property and the business.”

Disney’s Chinese Wall was completely blown up.

Done.

It is ended. It is over.

Bob Iger acting in his capacity Chief Executive Officer at an official stockholder function effectively admitted that the Reedy Creek Improvement District was directly connected to the Walt Disney Company. There was no effort at conflation at all. “…oversee the property and business.” He has now stated that the two were inseperable. It was unbelievable.

The real question now is if Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature are simply posturing for conservative voters or if they are serious about dismantling one of the primary engines of evil in the country. Because Bob Iger has foolishly handed them the very tool they need to do it if they have the will.

Read the whole thing, which is a rather fascinating lesson in how corporations have managed to literally place themselves above the law in some states.

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Devil Mouse Shenanigans

Disney is going through some massive legal contortions in order to avoid being accountable to the duly-elected state government of Florida after the state removed the special status of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that allowed the Devil Mouse to do whatever it wanted without oversight for most of the last 50 years.

On the very last day of the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s existence on Earth, they gave all of their powers to do, planning approval, building code oversight, construction permitting, and well pretty much everything including building a nuclear power plant if they feel like it, to the Walt Disney Company.

AND…

These agreements shall remain in effect until 21 years after the death of the last decedents of King Charles III of Great Britain as of this date.

Are you fucking kidding me!?!?!

The Disney lawyers must have gone through all of Florida’s legal history going back to when it was owned by Spain and found something that was still on the books as a valid legal precedent.

When the new oversight board was convened, they were shocked to discover that they had almost no power to do anything because of agreements made “in open public forums in compliance with Florida’s Sunshine Law.”

Disney Gives Florida the Finger Again, The Dark Herald, Arkhaven

It’s always fascinating to see how the ticket-takers are never held accountable, in any way, by anyone, even as they fold, spindle, and mutilate the law in order to control the behavior of others. This is pure wickedness in action, and demonstrates why conservative appeals to “the law” are not only blitheringly stupid, but totally irrelevant.

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Star Wars is Dead

The Dark Herald checks his watch and calls it.

The second episode of The Mandalorian aired last Wednesday and I have yet to hear a peep out of Fort Mickey. Whenever the streamer studios have one of their exceedingly rare wins they screech it from the rooftops… Today Samba.TV released its numbers for the opening episode of The Mandalorian and they are b-a-a-a-a-d.

Disney+ ate its own seed corn when the Book of Boba Fett was bombing. Tearing off Mando’s admittedly good third-season starter and stuffing it into the Book of Boba Fett was like pouring an entire bottle of expensive perfume on a pile of shit. It wastes the perfume without making the pile smell any better. Favreau had to slap together a replacement season opener out of spare parts and abandoned scripts. It was a weak start when it needed to come out strong.

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s premier was 2.14 million unique views.

The Mandalorian third season opener was 1.5 million unique views.

This is truly dire for Disney because The Mandalorian has lost half of its audience. It only edged The Book of Boba Fett by 2%.

And apparently the Marvel Cinematic Universe is rapidly going the way of the Star Wars Universe.

The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger signaled that the company plans on cutting back on Marvel franchise films in the wake of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania performing abysmally in the box office.

During an appearance at a Morgan Stanley conference, The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin reported Iger signaled the company plans on cutting back on how many films they make around certain characters.

Iger said, “What we have to look at at Marvel is not necessarily the volume of Marvel storytelling, but how many times we go back to the well on certain characters.”

He elaborated, “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance? Or is it time to turn to other characters? There’s nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand. I think we just have to look at what characters and stories we are mining.”

Convergence kills. There is no way back for any of these franchises. They’re not necessarily going to go straight downhill, as there will be overperformances and underperformances, there always are, but the general trend is perfectly clear. And as AI improves, the cost of producing alternative entertainment is going to decline as well, thereby creating new opportunities for Arkhaven and other independents.

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The Marvel Implosion Continues Apace

The Dark Herald reviews a new Marvel movie that apparently has something to do with Antman, and possibly, The Who, on the basis of its title which I can’t even bother to learn.

I have rarely seen a genre movie so dripping with contempt for its core audience.

Nineteen eighties Mexican sword and sandals videos had more respect for the people that would be seeing it than this flick did. There are no characters, only cut-and-paste caricatures. This is no plot, only a series of ridiculous contrivances. This entire motion picture has been built around appearance for the sake of appearance. It is a Disney Frankenstein. This film is broken. Like its namesake, there is no substance to Quantomania at all.

The Antman character was a problem for Marvel Studios. The problem was that Ari Arad cared about Marvel Comics back when the studio had to listen to him. In the comic books, Hank Pym and his second wife Janet van Dyne were the original Antman and the Wasp, and they were also the founders of the Avengers. Back when Ike Perlmutter made sure that Marvel gave a rancid fart about the canon, not having an Antman in the team that Antman founded was a problem. The thing is Hank’s first wife was murdered by the Hungarian secret police which was why he became Antman in the first place. Bob Iger and Kevin Feige were at best uncomfortable with Hank’s anti-Marxist baggage. But there was no such problem with the Scott Lang version. A hero on a redemption arc is easy to write and easy to make a movie about. Consequently, Scott Lang settled into a role of Antman as a lovable loser trying to make good.

This is the part where I try to ruin the whole movie for you by spoiling it in detail, but this thing is such an inconceivably disjointed trainwreck that my brain keeps shutting down in self-defense when I try to recall the details.

The film opens with Scott strutting down a sidewalk in an alternate universe San Francisco, where he isn’t trying to avoid stepping on broken needles and human shit. The theme from Welcome Back Kotter is playing as Hank has a montage about what a great life he is having as a superhero. The whole city loves him. Apparently, he landed a book deal and has a number-one bestseller. We are meant to believe he wrote it himself; this is the least of the contrivances that are about to pummel an unsuspecting audience.

Montage ends when Scott has to bail his new teenage daughter out of jail (she was recast). Cassie was protesting for the rights of the homeless to establish her unassailable moral superiority over her Generation-X world-saving superhero father, and it is done with such brutal impact that passersbys suffer blunt force trauma. She shrank a police car and was apparently allowed to keep it in jail so she could put it on the comically outraged cops’ desk at the county lockup. She is allowed to leave rather than be arrested again for GTA of a police car because the movie has to get to the next scene as fast as possible. Cassie is such sassy.

I do so love the smell of an imploding converged comics industry in the morning. Throw in a little Devil Mouse in decline and it’s practically a party.

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