Netflix’s Next Target: Narnia

After seeing how Amazon demolished The Silmarillion and Disney pillaged both Indiana Jones and Star Wars, Netflix has decided to join the fun by defacing The Chronicles of Narnia.

Netflix has the rights to make Chronicles of Narnia movies now, and it has chosen actor and director Greta Gerwig to make said movies. I’m not joking. Netflix wants her to write and direct two Narnia films.

Gerwig is an interesting choice given during the press tour for the Barbie film she’s made numerous comparisons between the film and Christianity. Most recently it was revealed in The New Yorker that when Gerwig originally pitched the film she did it “with a poem in the style of the Apostles’ Creed.”

Back in May while discussing the relationship between Barbie and Ken with Vogue, Gerwig said, “Barbie was invented first. Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes and in the world. That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.”

The Barbie movie isn’t out yet, but a woman who sees a movie about dolls for little girls as “the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis” might be the last person that C.S. Lewis would have picked to adapt his books. In fact, she might be the exact type of person his books warn about.

Gerwig, who was raised a Unitarian Universalist, was also the director of the 2019 Little Women movie, which some regarded as woke and feminist.

In the film, she took out the faith in God that was so crucial to the characters – the thing that all else revolved around – and replaced it with tones of feminist empowerment through the deconstruction of the Christian worldview.

Take out the Christian worldview from Narnia and what is left? Some animals talking and a shallow fantasy kingdom with various overtones and subplots that will be considered irredeemably racist and culturalist by today’s standards.

Still think it’s “all about the money”? Still think it’s all about impressing their fellow elites at cocktail parties? How many more financial disasters that all just happen to relentlessly undermine the icons and the culture of the West do you need to witness to understand that there are other, darker motives at work here?

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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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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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When Failure is Inevitable

Booster Patrol’s latest recording, THA RANGZ OF POWER, is an epic lesson on why one would do well to avoid watching Amazon’s The Rings of Power. The Dark Herald further explains:

Some things get a little better when you think about them for a little bit.

This ain’t one of them.

Whenever you are surveying the smoldering wreckage of a horrifying man-made disaster, the same questions are always asked. How was this allowed to happen? Wasn’t it someone’s job to prevent this? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? How is the richest man in the world this fucking stupid?

These are all valid, simple questions with complicated answers. Which I shall endeavor to answer for you…

The secret to the Bad Reboot school’s success is a combination of an established reputation for success, superb salesmanship (I have to give them that), and a mastery of studio politics as well as fashionable politics in general. Additionally, Bad Reboot skillfully manages its relations with the press. Finally, the disciples of Abrams rigidly follow their business model and always get out before the burning building collapses on top of them. If they were trying to make anything good, I could admire the professionalism.

The fundamental problem is that they don’t know how to make anything good. It’s like cotton candy, it looks big and smells great but once you take a bite the only thing you have in your mouth is empty sugary grit. If you are only trying to grind out pablum like summer tentpoles then that is good enough. Honestly, most fandoms really do only want that, just consume product and get excited for the next project.

Problem.

Tolkien fans aren’t remotely like that. The magnitude of this disaster would have been manageable if they had just invented their own IP that kind of looked like Tolkien. But as it is, they put The Lord of the Rings label on this, so that was the standard they would have to meet.

Ha! Ha! Ha! (gasp…wheez…gasp) Ha! Ha! Ha! (wipes eyes)

Expecting Bad Reboot alumni J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to meet that standard is like expecting Ariana Grande to win the Noble Prize for Physics. Theoretically possible… But not likely.

Tolkien fans have been arguing over the same five books for better than half a century. The body of scholarly work based on it is gigantic. It is the entire bedrock of modern fantasy. Every fantasy writer has to consciously adopt or reject the Lord of the Rings, but you can’t possibly ignore it. There are frequent and violent arguments over what exactly the Valar were. What was the nature of Tom Bombadil? How much of the legendarium was adopted from Celtic myth? This was not the kind of fandom that you can use as a base for a popcorn burner. And there was no way in hell a couple of graduates from the Bad Reboot school of non-writing were going to be able to fake their way through a five-year series. This project was doomed from its inception.

There were several people at Amazon whose jobs it was to prevent something this bad from happening. As near as I can tell, all of them were circumvented. There is no way in hell these scripts looked good.

This may be the best fan comment that has surfaced yet:

I liked the bit where Galadriel said “I’m gonna fight Sauron alone! and then went home instead. And then she said “I’m never going to give up fighting Sauron!” but then decided to go on holiday. But just before she got on holiday she decided to drown herself instead because her brother said something sad to her when she was a child.

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