Tag: movies

Disney: We simply can’t have pedophile partiers who make sick jokes about molesting children directing our movies. You’re fired!

DC: Hey, James Gunn is available now? You’re hired!

Bounding Into Comics has the details:

Warner Bros. confirmed to Gamespot that Gunn will write the next installment of the Suicide Squad. They told Gamespot, “It is confirmed that James Gunn is writing the next installment of the Suicide Squad franchise.”

I wish Marvel Studios would hire Megan Ellison to run it:

According to The Wrap, Annapurna Pictures has run into financial difficulties as of late, culminating in the “jettisoning of two upcoming films with marquee talent” and the exit of its film division head…. Coming in December, Annapurna will be releasing the Christian Bale star vehicle “VICE,” another leftist propaganda film in which Bale plays former Vice President Dick Cheney opposite Sam Rockwell playing President Bush. The film is reported to have cost a “bloated $60 million to produce” when it should have cost only half that. Factor in marketing cost and the film hasn’t got a prayer.

“There is a financial issue going on,” a source told The Wrap. “Her dad has put a lot of money into the company and I don’t think he wants to support her behavior and what’s been going on. There are restraints — the money is not flowing.”

Annapurna also recently dropped its slated film about Fox News founder Roger Ailes just three weeks away from starting production. It had been approved for a whopping $35 million budget.

A source close to Megan Ellison says she has been making political passion projects with zero regard for financial cost or box office potential.

“She makes bad decisions,” the source said. “She wanted to chase all these expensive movies that weren’t going to make money, and she said, ‘I don’t care whether they make money.’ That’s not how you run a company.”

It is if you’re an SJW. From a Financial Times article in 2014:

She is Megan Ellison and, depending on who you talk to, she is either the saviour of an industry that has succumbed to brain-numbing comic-book movies and superhero sequels or a wealthy heiress who splashes the cash on films that don’t necessarily make financial sense.

After reading this account of the falling out between Terrence Howard and Robert Downey Jr., I very much look forward to competing with Marvel in the movie space:

Appearing on Watch What Happens Live, a caller asked Howard if he would ever appear in a future Marvel film now he is civil with Robert again.

Prompting him to reply: ‘You know what’s so funny? Even though I love Don Cheadle so much and I love what he’s done, I still hear a lot of fans asking, “Am I going to come back and be War Machine? Am I going to come back and be War Machine? I think they could have a huge franchise off of it. But f*** ’em.’

The feud began after Howard accused Downey, 53, of abandoning him when he tried to negotiate a better fee to appear in Iron Man 2.

He previously explained: ‘We did a three-picture deal, so that means that you did the deal ahead of time. It was going to be a certain amount for the first one, a certain amount for the second one, a certain amount for the third.

‘They came to me with the second and said, ‘Look, we will pay you one-eighth of what we contractually had for you, because we think the second one will be successful with or without you.’ And I called my friend – that I helped get the first job – and he didn’t call me back for three months.’

In other words, Howard didn’t try “to negotiate a better fee,” he tried to get paid what he was contractually obligated to be paid. Marvel tried to stiff him of 7/8ths of what he was supposed to be paid because they calculated, correctly, that his presence was not required for a successful sequel, so he walked away.

This behavior is completely consistent with what we have learned of Marvel’s treatment of freelance illustrators and colorists; their behavior towards writers tends to be even worse. It’s informative to learn that while Howard has forgiven Downey for not having had his back, he has neither forgiven nor forgotten Marvel’s shoddy treatment of him.

As you may have noted, nearly all of Castalia’s, Arkhaven’s, and Dark Legion’s various creators continue to work with us, and even those few who don’t tend to remain on good terms with us and may well work with us in the future. And on a not-entirely-unrelated subject, Bounding Into Comics is less than entirely enthusiastic about the upcoming Disney Channel film, Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors.

Looking at the Comichron numbers for the one-shot comics under the Marvel Rising brand, they are rather poor. In June, Marvel Rising Alpha would only ship 21,290 units. It didn’t even make the top 100 comics for the month. July would see Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel only ship 17,995 units. And then a different Marvel Rising: Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel would only ship 15,558 units in August.

If one takes into account the average sell-through percentage, Alt★Hero is already competing very effectively with the Marvel Rising brand without taking the crowdfunding aspect into account. And we’re not even in the comic stores yet.

So there was very, very disappointing news for Star Wars fans today just a few hours ago. Variety and some other entertainment news sources reported that the woman who is primarily responsible for the destruction of the Star Wars franchise, the ongoing destruction of the Star Wars franchise, has actually been signed to a three-year contract with Disney and apparently is still going to be in charge of the Star Wars movies. Now, I personally think this is fantastic news, I think this is wonderful news, because it means that there is a tremendous opportunity out there for those of us who are creating alternatives. If you look at what has been done with Galaxy’s Edge, if you look at what we are in the process of doing with Faraway Wars, if you look at a lot of the other stuff that people are doing in a similar vein, this is an excellent opportunity for the Star Wars fans to find better and more worthy alternatives because it is now very, very clear that Disney is not going to fix what George Lucas broke.

In fact Disney is going to continue to make it worse. Disney is going to make Star Wars even more converged than it is. You might not think it’s possible, but believe me it is. There’s a good question, “Vox, why do they ruin everything?” They ruin everything because they don’t understand anything. You have to understand that culture and technology and art, all of these things, are black boxes to SJWs. They do not understand what they are,  they don’t understand how they work, they don’t understand the nature of their appeal to other people. SJWs are essentially cargo cultists.

On a related note, John C. Wright provides some characteristically insightful observations in his ongoing critique of the latest generation of Star Wars movies:

The reason why I argue that this is objectively bad, mechanically bad, and not just a plot twist that happens not to please me is this:

There are three components to any criticism of art. One is to look at the mechanics of the art form, regardless of content. That is an objective matter. The poem either has fourteen rhyming lines or does not; if it is a thirteen line poem, or blank verse, good bad or indifferent, it is not a sonnet. The next component is a judgement call: did the artist achieve the effect he was attempting? Was the audience moved as he was trying to move them? The final is subjective reaction: did I like it? And why did I?

It is often said in the modern day that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which, in effect, says there is only one component to criticism: the subjective one. Nonsense. A fair-minded critic could, for example, be no fan of horror movies, or even dislike the whole genre, and still be able to tell John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN is well-made horror movie and Ed Wood’s PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE is not. More to the point, he could tell that MY FAIR LADY is not a horror movie at all.

In this case, in story telling of any kind, in film or print, any plot point needs set up and follow through if it is to be emotionally satisfying.

Example: The set up for a character like Rick Blaine in CASABLANCA, or Han Solo in STAR WARS, who at first wants no part of the fight is to have him show his reluctance. Hence the scene in CASABLANCA where Rick looks on indifferently as Ugarte is arrested and executed; hence the line in STAR WARS where Han will not stir a foot to rescue the princess until he is reassured that she is rich. That is the set up. The follow through is the about-face: when Rick sends away the woman he loves, despite the personal cost to him, or when Han returns unexpectedly to swoop out of the sun and blast Vader’s pursuit-ship as it is closing in on Luke for the kill.

In this case, we saw the set up for Finn’s reluctance in this last film and in this one. He attempts to steal an escape pod, and is zoinked by a zoink-dwarf with a zoink-wand. The follow-through was the about-face and the noble sacrifice to save his friends. Except that the suicide run is said over the radio to be in vain: a pointless gesture. Either Finn would have destroyed the gun by ramming it, or not. If not, it is not a real about-face. It is just a wasted character trying to waste himself to escape this wasteland of a film. But if it would have worked, preventing the sacrifice (at the sacrifice of everyone else) prevents any follow-through on the character arc: he is still, through no fault of his own, back where Rick and Han started out.

Good, bad or indifferent is another matter. Whether you personally liked it or not is another matter. On an objective level, having an event that robs all the meaning out of the set up event, and then leads nowhere to nothing, is a mechanical error in story telling. Story telling consists of telling about meaningful events, not meaningless ones. Even if you want to tell a nihilistic story, whose point is that life is pointless, the story itself must be told in a pointed way, and the events in the story must be meaningful in order to carry the message to the audience, even if that message says that meaning is illusion.

Basically, the story telling is objectively bad when the character in a drama loses all dramatic potential. There is no more story here. What is our Token Stormtrooper now? He is a hero who fails to be heroic. No chance to try again was given, not in this film. If the self-centered cynic, like Han Solo or Rick Blaine, has a certain romantic glamor to him, a cool self-possession. But a flunked suicide? What has he got? He is neither selfish nor selfless. He has no personality at all. The character becomes nothing.

On Star Wars Destroyer Kathleen Kennedy.

The force is strong with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy — for another three years, to be precise.

The veteran producer and chief of the Disney content giant behind “Star Wars” has renewed her deal through 2021, an individual familiar with the negotiations told Variety, following a tumultuous year for the label under her control.

The studio had no immediate comment on the new deal.

The re-up comes as the division gets back on solid footing following “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” the Alden Ehrenreich Han Solo spinoff that suffered disappointing box office returns and behind-the-scenes drama after the studio dismissed directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller well into production. They were replaced by Ron Howard, who was tasked with bringing home the pricey standalone (which cost at least $250 million).

Why? Because doubling down is what SJWs do. After all, they can’t possibly admit they were wrong and those evil NaziHaterWhiteSupremacists who said the movies sucked were right, can they?

This is great news, as far as I am concerned. Opportunity beckons….

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

Lo and behold, we have discovered why Disney acted with such alacrity in firing James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and he was supposed to be the director for Guardians of the Galaxy 3. He’d already written the script, apparently, and then, after the weaponized autists of the chans and Mike Cernovich let everybody know what was going on with James Gunn’s historic tweets, Disney suddenly acted very very quickly, very very uncharacteristically, and they fired the guy.

Now this is was very unusual because Disney, in the past,  has actually brought in people who who were convicted child molesters. There’s a guy named Victor Salvia who had been convicted of molesting a young man and they actually hired him to make a film called Powder and this was a big controversy back, I don’t know, fifteen years ago or something like that. Now we’d like to think that Disney learned something from this, but the reality is they haven’t learned anything, but they have apparently learned to stop digging the hole deeper. So that’s what I think a lot of people both in Hollywood and in the media didn’t understand there.

You have cuckservatives like David French, you have the always ludicrous Benny Shapiro, you have these people saying, “oh well you know he shouldn’t have been fired for, you know, some jokes.” And you saw that all over the the left-wing internet media, “no, it’s just jokes, some old jokes, you know, the evil people, the Alt-Right dug up old jokes.” The thing is, the telling thing is, they didn’t actually link to any of them. They didn’t quote any of them, and the reason that they couldn’t was because most of them were so bad. Most of them were simply beyond the pale, and not only that, the frequency of them indicated what can only be described as an unhealthy level of an interest.

Now, I personally think that it’s absolutely fine, in fact, I think it’s an absolute imperative, to go ahead and get guys like these deplatformed under any means necessary. You know if you make a joke about Africans, if you make a joke about the Holocaust, if you make a joke about any of a dozen or more different identity groups or historical events, they will attempt to fire you on that basis. If you joke about it, if you joke about something they consider racist, then that proves that you are a racist, a white supremacist, a bigot, and a hater for all eternity, and therefore, in the words of Ben Shapiro, you must be hunted down and and destroyed and fired. Suddenly, when someone is joking repeatedly about molesting children, about harming and raping children, they claim, “oh that’s funny, oh that’s great, you know, we’re all just having fun here.”

How does that make any sense at all?

It’s just a joke, right. It’s just a few tweets, right. It’s just a hilarious pedophilia-themed costume party, right…

Wait, what?

The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy follows orders from Hollywood PR and throws themselves on the funeral pyre in a vain attempt to change the rules again.

The Guardians of the Galaxy cast has called for James Gunn to be reinstated as director of the movie after he was sacked this month over old tweets.

Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana and Vin Diesel signed an open letter in support of Gunn.

The stars said they were shocked by his removal 10 days ago.

The Walt Disney Co fired him from the third movie in the series after tweets from 2008-11 resurfaced in which he joked about rape and paedophilia.

Left-leaning Gunn has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and the director’s old tweets were identified by conservative critics.

Many of the posts, which include jokes about the Holocaust and Aids, are too offensive to be reprinted by the BBC.

A host of fake conservatives have hastened to follow suit, including David Cole, who manages to project like an award-winning SJW in his fear of a future inability to joke about molesting children.

Kooks like Cernovich are contributing to the cycle of reciprocal accusations and firings. Leftists are not going to respond to the Gunn firing by saying, “Dang, these witch hunts have gotta stop.” Rather, everyone will respond by saying, “Shit, now I really have to watch my words.” So go ahead, cheer James Gunn’s destruction. You want Europe? That’s how you’ll get Europe. People scared to speak freely, people frightened to crack a joke. If that’s what you want, I don’t care if you’re on “my side.” Fuck off.

Yes, because no American is at all afraid to speak freely about women, blacks, gays, Jews, transexuals, or certain historical events that absolutely happened exactly as whatever is supposed to be the current version presently has it.  The thing these idiots never grasp is that gamers instinctively understand what it means when you’re taking enemy fire. It means you’re going in the right direction.

In fact, just last week some alt-right anti-Jewish conspiracy ninny named “Vox Day” accused me of being an accessory after the fact to the satanic Hollywood pedo ring, because according to him I know the names of those involved but choose to remain silent, because Jew. (“Vox” was butthurt over last week’s column, in which I argued that “edgy” comedians who make kiddie jokes are not necessarily pedophiles.) I looked “Vox” up, and apparently he’s a failed garage-band musician and “elves and ogres” fantasy author (amazingly, this guy couldn’t hack it in two of the least demanding professions known to man), and now he’s supposedly some kind of alt-right honcho. Big deal. Being a VIP on the Pizzagate fringe is like being the most handsome muselmann in the terminal ward. In just two years, the alt-right has gone from “Can we admit that there’s nothing wrong with being white?” to “Our prime directive is to hunt down the secret cabal of satanic ritual abusers that only we can see.”

Welcome to #GamerGate, everyone. All we wanted to do was play video games. But then we learned that monsters are real. The ride never ends.

I note that David Cole is not only defending the pro-pedos, he is also lying about what I wrote just last week. His response is amusingly akin to the inept murderer who, when accused of knowing who robbed the bank, angrily declares, “I didn’t rob that bank and I didn’t bury that body in my front garden either.”

Wait, there’s a body in your front garden?

A guy who works in the industry sheds a little light on the corruption of the Hollywood cabal in the chans:

The A list community is broken down like this:

• Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} are abusers (and that ranges from pedophile/trafficker /sacrificer down to having a casting couch).
• Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} are genuine victims (there are literal slaves who believe they are living the high life, down to people who are raped and pressured into silence).
• Somewhere around 30{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} willingly trade sexual favors for opportunities (ranges from begrudgingly, but they know how the system works to being a little cabal darling who loves or even gets off to whoring around).

The remaining 10{4cf702b8037e739e45d2086f5f97594cb665cfde74596f7ff4ca2f44a7f588d4} who are not applicable to the above is made up of:

• People who are self-made and chose never to associate with the cabal. We know them from their own efforts, and they happened to get lucky or strike gold.
• People who are insanely popular and make enough money for THEM that they have the clout to refuse to participate. They are usually blackmailed by credible threats of violence or ruining their careers into being quiet. Perhaps you could consider these people complicit.
• People who are extremely diligent in not allowing themselves to be courted by THEM. This means either not going to or leaving early from Hollywood events and parties, and treating every time another person tests their waters like a joke or over reacting to the small stuff.
• People THEY simply don’t want. Their standards may seem low, but there are hosts of people that the public likes and that came them money, but for one reason or another THEY don’t want them in the group. They’ll allow these people to remain on the outskirts of the group but will never even attempt to invite them to the inner circles.

This board has become known, and some people keep eyes on it. Some people get briefings on it. They are nervous that people are dedicated enough to dig, draw connections, lay them out plainly, then organize/coordinate to put them in front of a wide audience. These kinds of these used to be relegated to conspiracy boards and easily dispelled by mocking.

Current climate knows to fear drawing the attention of the masses. They also know once the hoard has their eye on you, everything they do is closely monitored, which is incredibly claustrophobic for people who thrive on symbolism and covert communication out in the open.

Immense push back on James Gunn’s firing as witch hunt in specific is an effort to shame the masses out of shaming people out of jobs and not let this set precedent.

Many still think and expect they’ll be able to sacrifice a few of the guilty publicly to preserve the rest. Many believe there will be a few more Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys, but they’ll be okay. Some are freezing everything until this blows over. Some see the writing on the wall and oppose publicly to try and stop.

I’m not even remotely surprised to hear that the pushback on the Gunn firing is coming straight out of the Hellmouth. It had the stink of coordination to it. This is confirmation that we should be highly suspicious of the mockers, condemn the defenders and enablers, and press on with even more investigations into uncovering the truth, whatever it may be. The more pressure that they feel, the more some will feel the need to come clean while others desperately try to cover things up. And if history is a reliable guide, it is through the attempted coverups that the whole thing will come crashing down.

Weaponized autists may not be the heroes that we wanted, but they are the heroes that we need.

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

You may recall when David Chappelle inexplicably went off to Africa. I mean here is a guy who was top of his game, making incredible sums of money, who was offered everything in the world, and he turns it all down and just disappears into Africa for no reason that anyone can understand. And he never really addressed it directly, it was portrayed as him having some sort of breakdown or something, but he wasn’t having a breakdown, and he explained it in an interview on Inside the Acting show – I can’t remember what it’s called – but he’s talking to a bunch of acting students and he talked about how important it was to have your price, to know what your price was before you went out to pursue a career in Hollywood. And so it was interesting because he said it’s very important to know what your price is, to know what lines you’re not going to cross, and then he said “hence Africa.” What he was very clearly saying was that he was asked to pay a price that he was not willing to pay for his career.

This is something that is relevant to me personally at the moment because now we have a successful line of comics, now that people are becoming aware of the quality of our books and the potential that they have in various mediums and various media, whether it’s film, whether it’s cable, whether it’s streaming, or whether it’s games, so there are people that are interested and that are talking to us, and one of the things I make very clear is that if they’re interested in trying to offer us success in exchange for compromising our principles, our faith, or our souls, they can just stop the conversation right now. We will do it ourselves, then maybe we won’t be successful – so the fuck what?

Jesus Christ turned down the entire world, what price a TV show? Why would you sell your soul for a TV show, for a movie, for a career as a second-rate movie star? I mean seriously, who has a better career in Hollywood than Tom Cruise, is there anyone you can think of? He’s in all the blockbusters, everybody knows his name, he’s about as famous as you can be, he’s been in a number of hit franchises, he’s been in movies that are part of our cultural language, several of his characters are iconic figures, and how many of you would trade places to live in that guy’s freakish life? Why would you ever why would you ever want to live like that?  And that’s the best that they can offer! That is the Heaven on Earth that they can offer you. What an utter nightmare!

 Are there any other celebrities you believe will be exposed?

Yes I think that lots of people will be exposed. If you go to Neon Revolt, if you go to 8Chan, if you go to Crazy Days and Nights they are all naming names. Now, I’m not going to name any of those names because I have no direct information about any of them. It’s not my world. I’m glad it’s not my world. You know if you want to talk about game designers, I was talking to Derek Smart today. I talk to people in the games industry on a regular basis, and I can guarantee you that we don’t do any casting couch bullshit, we don’t make anybody engage in bizarre rituals so that they can work on games with us. I mean, that sort of stuff would be totally insane.

Do you believe Hollywood’s destructive influence on dismantling Christian culture was intentional or a side-effect of encouraging their own depravity?

It was absolutely intentional: these people hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate Western civilization, and they even hate Christmas. It’s really astonishing when you learn to see it, and once you see it, you can’t un-see it.

On a not-unrelated note, Ben Shapiro being a Hollywood Jew with Hollywood values is not news to me. I knew the background of the Littlest Chickenhawk – now there is an unexpectedly dual-barreled nickname – from the start. But Ben Shapiro’s background never seemed relevant to my criticism of him until the “conservative” talking head inexplicably leaped to the defense of James Gunn:

Late Thursday night, Mike Cernovich, a centrist social writer-activist and childrens advocate who has aligned himself with right-wing political movements over the past two years, began sharing Gunn’s insidious tweets. Less than 12 hours after Cernovich, who was amplified by One America News’ Jack Posobiec and the film, An Open Secret, which documents the systemic sexual child abuse found throughout Hollywood, began sharing this evidence with the public Disney fired Gunn from the upcoming sequel.

Gunn tweeted these comments in his forties. He is reportedly worth $100 million and the writer-director of a teen film series. These aren’t tweets from a college kid trying to get attention, or a rising standup comedian trying to bombast their way into the public spotlight. This wasn’t a careless retweet, or a foolishly shared comic. These comments should be damning to anyone, like Shapiro, who strategically positions themselves on the most archaic of social conservatism.

Strange, isn’t it? Maybe not. Shapiro grew up, and still lives, in Hollywood. His mother is a power-player within the industry and his cousins are actors Mara Wilson and Daniel Ben Wilson….

• Was Ben Shapiro defending of James Gunn on his Twitter, the Daily Wire blog, and podcast because Gunn had defended him?
• Is this tribal Hollywood protecting Hollywood?
• Was Mike Cernovich’s takedown of James Gunn the reason why Shapiro opposed it?
• Are there any disclosures Shapiro would like to make about himself or his family’s relationship with Gunn, his associates, or Disney or its subsidiaries? 

These are questions Shapiro won’t host a debate on. Why not?

Because Shapiro is an evil little fraud. He’s terrified of debate with anyone who isn’t a left-wing halfwit. He’s a midwit, a gatekeeper, and a media construct who has been relentlessly pushed on American conservatives since he was in junior high. Any Christian or conservative who considers himself a Shapiro fan is a naive fool who has been taken in by the propaganda program. The same thing goes for Jordan Peterson.

These heavily promoted wormtongues do not speak the truth, they do not believe what their fans think they believe, and their objectives are to protect evil by distracting and confusing those who would otherwise stand against it. William F. Buckley. Glenn Beck. Ben Shapiro. Jordan Peterson…. when are conservatives going to stop falling for these obvious frauds?