Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XVI

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

 

Oh Disney, oh dear

Ahab has not any comfort while Naboth hath still his vineyard. Back in early 2016 I noted that we were being lied to, repeatedly and with purpose, by massive entertainment corporations using a media all too happy to shill for the sake of Hollywood glamour driving traffic numbers, and that I had been critiqueing this for almost as long as I’d been writing the blog. I was commenting then on Andrew O’Hehir’s attack on the nonsense surrounding The Force Awakens, and now Disney are at it again; re-releasing Avengers: Endgame, while it’s still playing, in a desperate attempt to beat Avatar’s ‘all-time’ record. O’Hehir said of The Force Awakens, “it’s not quite as ginormous and culture-dominating and universally beloved as Disney wants us to think it is … the idea of its bigness, is a central element of the Mouse House strategy to spin … a marketing, merchandising and entertainment empire.” Thank God for Morgan Friedman and the West Egg inflation calculator. The British National Lottery has a campaign at the moment promising to set you up for life with 10k every month for 30 years. Well, my first thought was that inflation will corrode that very badly. So to West Egg I went. Plugging in a 30 year period of relatively low inflation (1988-2018) I found that what cost $10k in 1988 would cost $21,427.27 in 2018. That is to say inflation at a low level would make 10k a year worth less than 5k in real terms by the end of 30 years. In just 8 years inflation made Avatar’s 2010 takings of $2,787,965,087 worth $3,284,278,512.18 in real terms. And yet Disney is insistent that Avengers: Endgame, with a year’s grace of inflation statistics that can’t be computed right now, and standing right now on Boxofficemojo.com at $2,774,567,541, is within spitting distance of catching Avatar. No, it’s not. It’s not within $13 million dollars, it’s over $500 million dollars away. And Avatar isn’t the most popular film of all time, because nobody wants to adjust for inflation for it either; because Hollywood can’t handle the fact that people are historically uninterested in cinema-going.  I think it is the mania of monopoly that drives Disney to such desperation and such mendacity. It’s not enough to dominate cinema takings in North America to the extent that the 5 biggest films of 2019 are Disney or part-Disney. It’s not enough to digest 20^th Century Fox, now Fox cannot be allowed to have had any record; there was no success in cinema before there was Disney. Every time you hear Disney trumpeting how uber-successful everything is, remember you’re hearing a desperate plea for relevance rooted in monomaniac nervousness and think of Sally Field.