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Not necessarily. A lot of recent TV shows, movies, and video games have had their creators publicly blaming "anti-woke backlash" for poor performances. The creators themselves are saying this so I would assume they've got some basis for it, and if that's the case then in those instances implementing visible DEI efforts is narrowing the customer base.
This has become a front on a "culture war" and it wouldn't be a "culture war" if there weren't contesting sides. So if you align yourself clearly with one side or the other you're cutting off a part of the customer base. I can see it as plausible that companies would decide "let's just continue to not be racist but not make a big deal out of it and hopefully not offend anyone in the process."
It's a lot easier to point at online trolls' anti-woke criticism of your art than to admit you made shitty art.
It's also very easy for a loud but small group to control the narrative about a movie and get people to assume it isn't a good movie. Even before the movie comes out, it's already box office poison. It happened with Captain Marvel. The minute that movie was announced, the anti-woke brigade went into high gear and found every reason to badmouth the fact that Disney dared to make a movie where a woman was the hero.
It's true that that can happen, but you can't assume it's the case for all criticism. For example, I agree that Captain Marvel was a bad movie for a lot of reasons. However, The Marvels avoided these issues and consequently I think it was a solid movie. Both movies received hate online, although interestingly I think The Marvels got less hate despite having 3x as many women protagonists. So, how do you know which criticisms are anti-feminist and which are legit? It's a case-by-case thing, really. Some movies definitely get the anti-woke backlash more than others though. The only analysis I'm confident is incorrect is "all criticism of [movie] is [legit / just anti-woke hate]", because there are always a variety of takes being lumped together inaccurately.
Well for one thing, you can check and see if the criticisms were made before the movie even came out.
For another, you can check and see who is making them.
Neither of these are difficult, but people don't bother.
That doesn't seem reliable. For one, we know information about the movie before it comes out. This means you can make preliminary judgements about the movie. They may be proven wrong later, but they are not baseless. And I don't trust most people on the internet to judge a stranger's character accurately enough to determine their motives behind a movie review.
This is what is known as "judging a book by its cover." It used to be that people were warned against it.
I would bet you think movie trailers aren't trustworthy. You should if you don't.
Movie trailers reveal far more than a book cover does.
Anyways, it's not like this issue goes away after the movie comes out. People still have opinions and other people still judge if they're based on anti-woke sentiment or not.
Yes, including scenes that aren't even in the movie. All the time.
https://www.gamesradar.com/30-trailer-scenes-not-in-the-finished-films/
Ok sure. To repeat, though:
Once the movie comes out, it's a different issue, actually.
Because no one knows how "woke" a movie is based on a brief summary, let alone "we're making a movie starring a woman as a superhero."
How is that relevant to evaluating someone's criticisms of the movie?
It's relevant, again, to evaluating someone criticizing a movie they have not seen because it hasn't been made yet.
I am not sure why you are not getting this simple concept
How can it be both not made yet and have come out already?
This coming from the person who doesn't know that "performance" can mean "profit" and insists on misinterpreting it as the actor-related meaning elsewhere in the thread even after being corrected twice lmao
Okay, now I am super confused.
You: "Anyways, it’s not like this issue goes away after the movie comes out. People still have opinions and other people still judge if they’re based on anti-woke sentiment or not."
Me: "Once the movie comes out, it’s a different issue, actually."
You: "How can it be both not made yet and have come out already?"
And the answer is that it can't, but this all started when I brought up the fact that a small number of very vocal people started badmouthing the Captain Marvel movie before it had been made and people just accepted it, which is why it was poison before there was even a trailer.
Now, we can move on to the rest of your post:
First of all, do I not know or or am I insisting on misinterpreting it? Make up your mind.
Secondly, I was corrected by you, who wasn't the one who said it. Did they elect you to speak on their behalf?
Edit: Now they cleared it up. And without being a dick about it. Maybe try learning from them.
I've said all I need to about the movie thing; if you have any relevant rebuttals I'd be glad to hear them, but I haven't seen any.
It could be both! Who am I to know?
Didn't need to, I correctly identified the only coherent reading of their argument.
I was pretty civil until you said:
The reason I was confused is because you didn't seem to be answering my points, and I was expecting you to.
Likewise, and yet I did not accuse you of intentionally misinterpreting anything, and I certainly wouldn't claim someone was "corrected twice" with my interpretation of what someone else said after admitting I only hoped that was what they meant.
Because, you know, those are dickish things to say, whereas me saying I wasn't sure why you weren't getting such a simple concept was because I wasn't sure why you weren't getting such a simple concept. Should I have lied and said I was sure sort of like how you said I was corrected twice?
Ironically, this was kind of a lie too. I was being nice; I was very sure what they meant (and explained in great detail why my interpretation was the only one that made sense) but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt until they clarified it since I didn't feel like drilling that point any more than I already had. There was no hoping or guessing or lying about knowing; I knew.
Edit: It occurs to me that you may not have seen this part of the thread, where they confirm my interpretation, before you made your comment replying to them elsewhere: https://lemmy.world/comment/14530165
If you didn't mean your comment as an insult, then I apologize for getting hostile. What was the simple concept you were trying to explain to me?
The same one I've been saying the entire time- that a small vocal group can bring down a movie's performance before it is ever even made by announcing that it's woke and that you can tell very little about a movie's quality if a movie has yet to be made even if it still later turns out to be a bad movie.
In fact, even movies that people expect to be terrible sometimes aren't bad. Uwe Boll made a whole lot of god-awful movies and he also made Rampage, which was pretty good.
It didn't matter in the end whether Captaim Marvel was good or bad- I will note that I have looked it up now and both user opinions and professional reviews I am looking up seem to agree in general that it was good and its sequel much less so from everywhere from the IMDB to Rotten Tomatoes- because it was doomed before a screenplay was written.
I should also point out that you initially said this:
And yet the latter did far worse at the box office than the former. It was a complete disaster.
Oh. Yeah I agree that people can tank box office performance by calling a movie woke. My point was that not all criticisms of such a movie are based on its wokeness. I thought that was clearer than I may have made it. Sorry for being a dick about it.
It surprises me that professional reviews rank them in that order.
Yes, their basis is they wrote a shitty show, hoping the diversity would make up for their bad writing, and decided to blame the diversity for it instead of their own failures.
In my unprofessional opinion: yea
FTFY
Just because the upper class is using their influence to encourage conservative hate, that doesn't mean that they aren't currently hateful.
Regardless of why there are contesting sides, the contesting sides are still there.
I'm not arguing for or against any of this, I should note. I'm just pointing out that this division exists. If a company advertises "we're DEI!" Then that may attract some new customers but it may also repel some existing ones, so it's something that needs to be done with care.
Personally, I wish that companies would just go ahead and do their best to not be biased in who they employ and who they cater to, and that that would be enough.
You are seriously exaggerating here. A few have said that. Not a lot. And the entertainment industry is a tiny slice of American business and one that relies less on speaking directly to individual customers like, say, AT&T or Kroger.
Budweiser also experienced a backlash-based boycott over issues like this, it's not just the entertainment industry.
My point is just that "DEI generates more revenue because it broadens customer bases" is not necessarily true. It's an overly broad statement, there are cases where that's not the case and so companies should take that into account and perhaps be cautious about advertising their DEI initiatives. It's become political, which means taking one side necessarily puts you at odds with the other side. That's potential customers.
What are you even talking about? DEI has nothing to do with either the entertainment industry having more diverse characters in movies or about Budweiser contracting a transgender spokesperson for what should have been an insignificant media campaign.
But your objection to people who are not white and heteronormative in the media is noted.
And here's why this is such a dangerous topic to touch on, it instantly becomes "us vs them" and you see a fight to be fought even when it's not actually there.
I made no such objection.
This is what you said:
So you're saying [what you think is] DEI causes poor performances but you don't object to it?
Yes.
It's a true fact that a hospital could cut its costs tremendously if they were to secretly euthanize people with terminal illnesses. Stating this fact does not mean that I am in favor of secretly euthanizing people with terminal illnesses. It happens to be quite the opposite.
In one of my other comments in this thread I said what I'd like to see:
Okay? What does that have to do with diversity in movies resulting in movies with untalented actors?
It doesn't have anything to do with that. You've brought things into the discussion that I have not said anything about.
This is the statement that I was responding to:
And I pointed out that it doesn't always broaden the customer base, it sometimes narrows it. There are customers who will avoid a product that is associated with DEI initiatives.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't. I'm not even saying why they would avoid it, or why they would claim to avoid it. Just that in some situations DEI initiatives don't broaden the customer base.
You literally said that:
So again, what does this have to do with the talent of actors in movies?
Oh, I think I may have figured out where the misunderstanding lies. You think that when I said "poor performances" I was talking about acting performances. I was talking about performance at the box office.
Studios don't really care about the quality of the performance, they just care about the profit.
Ah, okay. I get it now. Thanks for clearing that up.
No problem. Didn't occur to me that "performance" had a double meaning when it came to commercial media like TV and movies.
That seems consistent. Why would they care if companies lose money on DEI? It's about what's right, not what's economically viable.
What does losing money have to do with performances in a movie unless the performances are bad ones?
I believe they meant performance as in box office performance, like, how much money the movie makes.
I guess it's up to them to clear that up.
I'm sure they will. I'm pretty sure I'm right though-- how could backlash to the movie affect the actors' performances in that movie? That makes no sense. Backlash affects the reception to the movie, which affects the profit. If you reread the thread with that definition in mind, the replies to your comments might seem more reasonable/coherent.
No one is interpreting it that way.
What it looked like to me was that they were saying to me was that diversity meant that bad actors were hired.
I hope that wasn't what they meant
It wasn't. I'm talking about the backlash that these movies have been receiving from fans over overt DEI-related positions.
The original comment I responded to was FlyingSquid saying:
And I was pointing out a situation where that's not necessarily true, where DEI narrows the customer base.
Thought so, glad we agree