Downfall of the Girl Boss: The Market serves the public, not the other way around

If anybody doubted the intention, history would never remember it better than in movies’ ridiculous concept of the “Girl Boss.”  One of the first things I did after the election results showed President Trump losing in 2020 to the dumb old man, Joe Biden, was to read to the public the 45 Planks of Communism from Cleon Skousen’s great book, The Naked Communist, where it was clearly stated, communists intended to infiltrate America and impose their view of the world through captured assets, such as both political parties, and the media.  The proof that had happened wasn’t just in the obvious election fraud that had put Joe Biden in office, but it has been in how foolish the entertainment industry had been with their “Girl Boss” concept, with feminism gone out of control without any market checks to keep it from making a fool of itself.  Once you understand the stupidity of the Girl Boss, a lot of things make sense, and the world becomes more accessible to explain.  It’s also why the pendulum is swinging so violently in the other direction now, and likely all the dumb ideas that the communists who infiltrated our American culture had, are being rejected so outrageously.  The Girl Boss was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  The entertainment industry, particularly film and television, thought that people loved their product so much that they’d consume anything given to them which is clearly not the case.  There are a lot of movie studios that will not survive this stupidity, particularly the big one in Disney.  But it goes to show just how radical, politically, the people running those companies were, and what a mistake it would become because they all had to learn an important lesson, which is unfolding now, and it really evolves into the power of capitalism over the dark forces of communism.  When other countries in the world complain about them being poor, it’s because they adopted too much socialism and communism into their cultures and not enough capitalism.   Being poor is a decision, and if people understood it better, they would have never come up with the dumb idea of the Girl Boss in movies, which is currently destroying Disney in spectacularly avoidable ways, yet they did it anyway. 

Much of this came to the surface due to the Elon Musk lawsuit he is supporting with Gina Carano against Disney for unlawful termination of her contract.  Gina was a famous actor in the Star Wars show on Disney+ called The Mandalorian and was part of the initiative to put more strong women into Star Wars, as outlined by Kathy Kennedy.  But humans are humans, and upon meeting Gina, the CEO of Lucasfilm immediately disliked Carano, likely because she was cute and imposing in person, as a former fighter in MMA.  Insecure women in positions of power are dangerous, as are men in the same state.  But with women, it’s a bit different because with them, their sexual roles in society are to be pollinated, not to pollinate, so there are always insecurities about the men in their lives finding them attractive enough to pollinate.  And when someone like Gina walks into a room, even though Lucasfilm under Disney wanted to promote women in the workplace, they didn’t have women like Gina in mind.  They wanted homely women who were not a threat to their households, women their husbands wouldn’t be looking at with ideas of pollination.  So things started badly for Gina Carano with the boss, Kathy Kennedy, right from the start, and it only got worse once the boss found out that Gina was a conservative. 

So, a conservative in Hollywood, especially a woman, was a big no, no so Disney proceeded to push Gina out of the marketplace and essentially ruin her as an actress to send a message to other actresses that if they wanted to work, they needed to be socialists and they should not look too attractive so to threaten all these insecure movie executives who were now suddenly in charge and directing all these movies and television shows.  The worst example of this in the Star Wars franchise was the character of Rose from The Last Jedi, a movie that was worse than even Barbarella as far as a science fiction movie that tried to put feminism as its central theme and drive the audience to accept it at all cost.  I used to make fun of the Rose character to my kids because I said that Star Wars as a market share would suffer because nobody would buy the Rose action figure.  She was cast as a chunky Asian girl who would certainly not be a threat to anybody’s husbands, and somehow, everyone thought this was a winning enterprise.  Instead, it killed the franchise, as seen spectacularly in the following years as the Target toy racks tried to sell Rose at a discount and couldn’t unload the merchandise.  And it wasn’t just Rose, but it was all Star Wars toys that suffered as a result, leaving the toy maker Hasbro with warehouses of merchandise they couldn’t ever hope to sell because of the bad decisions of the feminists to stick all these Girl Bosses in movies, killed the collector’s market, and Star Wars as a brand was destroyed.  That’s why they can’t make Star Wars movies anymore.

For more than 40 years, Star Wars managed to protect its marketplace brand until Disney came along and screwed it all up with political activism, essentially until that movie, The Last Jedi.  After that, the toy presence of Star Wars disappeared in Walmart and Target, which is a significant market indicator for other kinds of things, particularly along the lines of political sentiment.  As if it had been previously doubted, the entertainment industry would not survive as a propaganda arm for communism, which was the assumption.  Like all other market factors, the market had to serve the needs of the public, not the other way around.  Star Wars would not be used to convert people to feminist thoughts. Instead, people would reject the entire brand, just as they have with Bud Light and the Marvel movie franchise.  Men and women don’t want political propaganda; they’d rather have Superman fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, not some crybaby like Brie Larson in Captain Marvel throwing planets and beating up men nine times bigger than she is and standing over them like a Girl Boss.  The public, men, and women, want what they can relate to and think about favorably, and the Girl Boss was something neither one of them wanted.  And because Disney forced it on them, the public has rejected the product and moved on to other things.  And that doesn’t just hurt the film industry, but it hurts everything it touches, like the theater owners, toy makers, and even restaurants.  When people would sit at home and instead stream the latest episode of The Chosen rather than go to the movies and watch the latest Girl Boss movie, then even dining out is impacted by the decision.  That is the unsaid cost of communism when it is attempted to impose it on society rather than studying market fulfillment and how best to give the audience what it wants.  When it was assumed that the communists were in charge of the propaganda machine and that the public would be forced to obey them, the market reality was crushing for them.  And they have ruined the lives of many people in that assumption.  But the world has moved on.  What has failed are the fools who listened to them, to begin with.  Everyone tried to warn them, but they brought out the Girl Boss anyway, which history will still be laughing at thousands of years from now.

Rich Hoffman

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The Failures of Globalism: Making corporations the architects of their own destruction

When I think of the Disney brand, I think of shows I grew up with, like Zorro and Davy Crockett.  Those were great family shows that reflected the values of a good and productive society.  And in many ways, this new show on Disney +, Ahsoka, the latest Star Wars television series, is excellent.  But unfortunately, and this is a theme I have been saying for over ten years, Disney is done.  It’s too little too late, and that was obvious when they started making Star Wars movies again, beginning with The Force Awakens, which wasn’t very good.  It was filled with woke garbage and expressed the main problem with Disney buying Star Wars from George Lucas in 2012.  How do you take a movie franchise made by a radically independent person, such as Lucas was, and turn it into a corporate asset filled with emerging woke politics straight out of the World Economic Forum?  The answer is you don’t.  The trouble was evident when they tried to align the production to all kinds of United Nations projects during the filming of The Force Awakens, which was globalism on steroids.  I tried to remain hopeful, but once the film came out and everything that came after, it was obvious that Lucasfilm under Disney would not be as good as Lucasfilm under George Lucas.  Ironically, the Ahsoka series is struggling with itself as part of the plot: how do you overthrow an empire and then become the next established government?  And the answer is that management of anything is hard.  Throwing rocks and having all kinds of romantic ideas about things is easy.  But it’s hard actually to run things once you capture the kingdom.  And that is what is so interesting about the excellent show Ahsoka.  As Grand Admiral Thrawn says in the show, “Make your enemies the architects of their own destruction.”  Globalism has certainly done that to Disney.  It’s an interesting commentary on itself. 

However, this is the lesson for everything that has gone woke, and I do feel sorry for Disney as a company because all corporations that bought into the woke nonsense will go through it.  It’s not just Disney, which is taking major financial hits these days, with the stock price being what it was over a decade ago, and there are no signs of recovering.  It was surreal to watch the train wreck happen, but as a corporation, they were so stupid, so collective based, yet they had all the money in the world to make success happen, yet they couldn’t.  The same could be said of the music industry, fast food, sports, everything.  Disney had a massive media empire, but now the rumors are quite true that they are looking to sell off the losers, things like ABC, ESPN, and many of these satellite companies that have been brand damaged because of woke politics.  The hard lesson is that it’s gone forever once that brand is damaged.  I’ve always been a corporation kind of person because they generate wealth and jobs for people.  I love marketing brands in partnerships, such as with McDonald’s or Coke, which has been common with Disney over the years.  I always love that about Disney World and all their brand alignments.  I love them so long as capitalism is the objective.  Under the woke rules of military implementation of communism through the policies of the World Economic Forum, the goal is to destroy American capitalism through the generators of its wealth.  Disney was one of the first companies to sign up, and it was a horrible decision for them. 

Like the rebellion in the Ahsoka series, Disney is failing to live under its own well-intended rules.  And those rules were that globalism was the future of all civilization.  They were suckered, and they bet billions of dollars on that eventuality.  They thought their brand was so powerful that they would influence the public toward their market needs.  They forgot that the marketplace decides value and that their brand was fragile.  What they thought was robust was only as strong as wet paper. It fell apart in their hands rather quickly.  And the insurgents at the World Economic Forum had planned it that way.  Plotting and scheming the CEOs of all of America’s most giant corporations right in front of their faces, and they all fell for it like a bunch of suckers.  And the public took their dollars with them elsewhere; they didn’t keep spending money on Micky Mouse as Walt Disney envisioned it.  They turned away and moved on to other entertainment options, which is why there is no recovery for Disney as a corporation.  The young people could care less about them, and a good project like Ahsoka isn’t enough to bring them back as fans.  It was too little too late.  The time to make that kind of Star Wars show was back in 2015 because Star Wars essentially became a spokesplatform for globalism, and people were put off by it.  Now, the market has changed completely; smaller media is considered much more valuable because it’s free, and when people see the Disney logo, they think of a big, woke company aligned with political philosophies dangerous to American ideas, which most of the world loves and wants for themselves.  Star Wars would have been better off just putting out the six original George Lucas movies and leaving things be.  But once they tried to expand into corporate control of the brand, they weakened it like sequels usually destroy an original movie idea.  If those ideas aren’t developed in subsequent stories, they burden the original.  And that was something Disney could never wrap their minds around.

I think all corporations that have dipped their toes in the woke rules of globalism will fail or become permanently damaged in the marketplace.  And companies that are anti-woke will see a massive level of support in the coming decades.  I always have a soft spot for Disney because I liked Uncle Walt.  Just like I will always think of George Lucas when it comes to Star Wars, anything done by corporate control might be fun and exciting at times, but it will permanently be damaged goods you can’t trust as a source of art and entertainment because of all the woke inclusions into the story that have now cheapened it forever.  I still think some of the work done at Disney World at Galaxy’s Edge is remarkable from a fan perspective.  It’s science fiction on overdrive if you like expanding ideas and potentials of technology and science, which I do.  It’s a shame that Disney listened to all the wrong people while developing Star Wars under their ownership.  They should have never listened to the wokesters at the World Economic Forum and the terrorists of global economics and their unveiled intentions for communism, China style.  The marketplace was already changing in a way that Disney would have had difficulty adjusting to, but they made it so much harder on themselves and their shareholders with a poor strategic approach that strayed away from accurate economic measures that worked.  So it’s ironic that the new Ahsoka show’s plot deals with this problem, a self-reflection of Disney itself and how good intentions become evil, and disaster always follows.  As they say about Hell, it is paved with good intentions.  And that is certainly the case with all that Disney does these days, and all who took the bait and destroyed themselves as economic, corporate powerhouses that should represent morality and justice as determined by dollars and not woke, globalist insurgents.

 

Rich Hoffman

It’s Not the Fault of Indiana Jones: Disney listened to BlackRock and they’ll never recover

Indiana Jones is a great movie, but Disney mismanaged it by listening to the wrong people

One of the reasons I do these articles on this blog is because people are hungry for real information. Not the kind that the media has grown to give us, usually laced as propaganda to fulfill some NWO vision of centralized control using the China model of communism to determine reality. And there is something really menacing looming behind the various box office results that I say all the time are the ways that people vote for value in our culture. The Sound of Freedom movie is a category by itself, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s room for all these great movies that are suddenly coming out. But the way that the communist left has gained control of the marketplace is by placing the number 1 weekly horse race to movies, all in an effort to make or break their box office results. It’s a baked-in trick by the World Economic Forum types and their media apparatus to pick winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas with the illusion of industry reporting. And I say that as a guy who has read The Hollywood Reporter for three decades. I used to get the magazine version of that publication as an industry guide of great value. So I am quite aware of the switch to this new way of manipulating numbers to tell the kind of story that the financial controllers of communist activism want to tell. And a target early on was the new Indiana Jones movie, The Dial of Destiny. The WEF types wanted to see Disney kill off one of the great American heroes from the 1980s. Early screenings showed that the public didn’t like that. So Disney had to scramble to give the public the ending they wanted, which went against the desires of the BlackRocks of the world. And as a result, Bob Iger and the gang at Disney found themselves between a rock and a hard place with snakes and spikes in between to kill them with a thousand cuts.

See the problem. Even with inflation, this cost structure is ridiculous and not sustainable.

When I look at the box office numbers for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I see a pretty good movie that performs well day to day, even on weekdays. It’s consistently good with the other movies that were done in the 1980s, back in a time when those movies stayed at the movie theater for most of a year. But these days, with movies barely staying in a movie theater for more than 60 days, a film has to have a lot of pop on the front, most of this due to failures of liberalism. The movies are controlled by labor unions who want inflated budgets with unlimited money spent. And if a studio complies, they are rewarded with good press that will take them close to a good box office score. Disney got caught trying to appease everyone, including BlackRock, and they made everyone mad with a movie that had its budget out of control. If George Lucas was producing this Indiana Jones film, he would have kept the budget under 100 million, or he wouldn’t have made the picture. Kathy Kennedy let the budget spike up to around 300 million before advertising. So the standard is the problem, and the controllers expect to rule the marketplace. And Disney has damaged their own brand, so anti-Disney people started campaigning against this Indiana Jones movie several years ago. Then there was the political agenda from BlackRock and Vanguard about replacing Indiana Jones with a woman and killing off the Western hero for global communism. Disney picked the fans for its own survival, and the industry pounced, writing many negative articles against Indiana Jones, hoping to sink the film and punish the studio for not complying with the globalism mandate. 

Ultimately, this Indiana Jones film will be well respected and could have been financially successful if Disney had managed the budget. But it got out of control, and they thought they could spin it into a billion-dollar grosser. But without the support of the industry analysts, who are communist in most of their approaches to everything, the World Economic Forum activists worked overtime to ensure that it would never get there. They would have talked the movie up if Disney had killed off Indiana Jones. But they resorted to punishing the movie because it was a good hero story with a classic character living to see a happy ending. That was a good move for Disney in the long run because Indiana Jones will be around longer than the World Economic Forum. I’m not sure that Disney will make it. I’m telling people to go to the parks now while they are still there because I don’t think Disney will survive what they’ve done to themselves, which they are now the Bud Light of entertainment. When people think of Disney, they no longer think of Mickey Mouse but woke monsters who want to groom children. And once you lose that brand, it’s gone forever in this climate. They played the game wrong, and now it’s going to cost them.   They fixed the Indiana Jones movie in time to save it. But they should have done the same to themselves several years ago instead of committing to the World Economic Forum’s woke agenda of gender desecration, which started to become evident with the killing of Han Solo and that terrible Buzz Lightyear movie. 

It’s not an Indiana Jones problem; over the coming year, most people will watch the movie and like it, whether at the theater or at home on a streaming service. It’s a good family movie, but it’s too late for a course correction by Disney to save it at the box office. Because Disney is having problems everywhere. People are rejecting them as a company. That doesn’t mean that they’ll never have another billion-dollar film again. But they have lost permanent market share because of their woke commitment. And now their woke bosses at BlackRock are punishing them in the trades if they don’t stay committed to the continued desecration of American heroes. So the news isn’t good for Indiana Jones, but it’s not because the movie is bad. But there are undoubtedly many bad characters who are politically motivated on both sides, and Disney mismanaged the whole thing to their detriment. The lesson for everyone is not to pick against the audience, not to feed the everlasting hunger of the trade unions with inflated budgets, and to never align yourself with global activism against good stories and heroes who stand against evil. This is why I said it was a bad idea for Bob Iger to come back. I don’t know what he was thinking about taking a job that was bound to be a loser. There was no way to fix this Disney problem. And instead of being viewed as a pretty good CEO over his years, he’ll be remembered as the guy who let it all fall apart. But the truth is, this started a long time ago when the board started listening to global activists for communism and bending their films toward the China market. All that was a mistake that is showing itself at the box office. And it has nothing to do with Indiana Jones as a movie. If anything, people are supporting the movie more than they otherwise would. The problem is Disney, and I’m afraid that it’s a condition that will never correct itself.  

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

What Happens When Your Little Sister Plays With Your ‘Star Wars’ Toys: The Fate of all woke corporations

There are likely fewer people in the world who wrote as much about Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars property in entertainment as I have, or the fate of a multibillion-dollar investment, the Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida.  I was excited about it.  I have been a Star Wars fan most of my life, which is reflected in my work.  But it’s not just Bud Light that woke policies have crushed that the global push for a certain kind of CEO to now run these corporate boards ran by BlackRock have destroyed.  Knowing Star Wars as an entertainment property and a work of modern mythology, I could see early on the impact and ultimate failure of Disney’s quest to appease BlackRock and the other elements of the Desecrators of Davos, the World Economic Forum’s view of the world.  And it was evident in 2015 when the first of the next generation Star Wars movies came out in The Force Awakens that the future destruction of globalism was making itself most apparent.  What we have now is a kind of stubborn tenacity of globalism to impose itself on reality.  Whereas I have been saying for a very long time, many decades now, in writing, that the trend was going to destroy itself.  That was never more clear in how Disney as a corporation handheld Star Wars as soon as it purchased George Lucas way back in 2012 and have now chased off their audiences, which, prior to, looked to be eternally loyal.  I warned early on to all those who owned Disney stock to sell because the brands they, as a company, were building would fall apart, and that’s precisely what is happening.  As Disney is falling apart, so is globalism everywhere in the world. 

As scary as a post-President Trump world has been with all the horrible revelations that have been revealed, we are actually better off because market forces are proving that wonders of capitalism envisioned by the great Adam Smith book The Wealth of Nations to be as reliable as anyone could hope it to be.  Out of all the presently trained economists with PhDs in the study of social behavior and the flow of money, it really all points back to that seminal work that was released to the world when America was founded that has turned out to be exclusively true.  Disney had the money and power to hire anybody they wanted to be successful.  Just ten years ago, they looked to be an unstoppable entertainment company, but like the world presently is in general, all members of the Bilderberg group, and the World Economic Forum, Disney is a dismal failure that literally can’t do anything correctly.  They can’t produce new content that anybody wants, and what they do put out from their entertainment classics is so burdened with woke politics that it has turned away half the nation from enjoying their products.  Disney bet on their brand and thought it was so great that no matter how much wokeness they proposed, they assumed, as they all did when they adopted this Chinese communist model of corporate rule of the world, that people would follow them as leaders of culture and that progressive politics would rule the day.  Yet what they found out has been completely the opposite.  Markets serve people; they don’t shape culture.  They represent culture. 

That was never more apparent than when Disney built the Galactic Star Cruiser Star Wars hotel in Orlando, Florida, connected to the Galaxy’s Edge Star Wars land at Hollywood Studios.  I was very excited about Disney’s attempts and wanted them to work.  I was a big fan of the Star Wars Land and went to it as soon as it opened with my wife, and we made a nice vacation out of it.  I thought it was a stunning experience for a kid who grew up loving Star Wars, so I wanted the experiment to work.  But I saw the trouble too and had been talking about it, at first, very politely.  I did several radio shows with various guests around the country talking about the danger of woke Disney, which at that time, nobody understood what “woke” was.  And sadly, everything I said as a warning sign for Disney turned out to be true.  Disney didn’t understand Star Wars.  It was being run by a woman, hand-picked by George Lucas, to continue what he had built.  But she got swept up into this New World Order of the global citizen movement and turned Star Wars into what a little sister would do to your Star Wars toys when everyone was kids.  Girls might take your Star Wars figures and put lipstick on them, and instead of them having epic battles, she would sit them at a table and have them drink tea.  Kathy Kennedy essentially did that to Star Wars, designed for 8- to 12-year-old boys, and started producing all the content for girls.  And she thought that the boys would stick around and that the market expansion would now be more inclusive of girls and empower women. 

So when the Star Wars hotel opened as a kind of cruise ship last year, right after the Covid lockdowns, after ten years of development and over a billion dollars in investment, fans were stunned to learn that the $6000 per room 2 day all immersive experience was essentially the little sister version of Star Wars.  Star Wars is about rebellion against tyranny.  Not singing songs and drinking drinks in a bar with aliens walking around.  But Disney didn’t listen to the fans; instead, it lectured them about what it would be like, and the results were devastating.  Just over the hotel opened to great fanfare, it is now projected to close in September of 2023 because it just never took off.  People rejected the idea, and it wasn’t so much the money; the lack of the Star Wars experience ultimately destroyed it, really, before it ever got off the ground.  It proved something that will eventually happen to all corporations who have embraced woke policies, from Ford and General Motors to Bud Light, Miller Light, and Target.  Corporations don’t and never will run the world.  They will always serve society in general.  Not the other way around.  I warned everyone.  Some people listened, and those that did are better off today than they were.  Just as I have warned about the climate that still wants to vote for President Trump as opposed to the corporate approach of Ron DeSantis, they don’t know what they are doing.  Professionals who make their living off these kinds of things have drunk the Kool-Aid and found out that there is a lot of bad stuff in there, and they’ve learned it too late.

In general, what happened to Disney and the Star Wars hotel and brand is a warning of what will happen to everyone in the future of corporate globalism.   People don’t want woke and corporations who assume that their products are so beloved by the public that people will follow anything.  Corporations who believe that have another thing coming.  And that was never more obvious than in the closure of the Star Wars hotel so soon after it opened.  The smartest people in the world with the most financial resources could not change the kind of reality that Adam Smith articulated in his economics studies.  And those rules apply in every market sector.  Entertainment just being one that is obvious.  Which is a fine indicator of things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

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Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

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Disney Stock is Down 31% to the Year: And its never coming back

I warned everyone years ago, Disney stock is never coming back. Currently, as of this writing, it’s down 31% of its value for the year, and this was before the big battle with Ron DeSantis in Florida occurred, where the tax status and self-governing control is in jeopardy. The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Being a Star Wars fan, I was encouraged when Disney bought Lucasfilm, which makes Star Wars products. I have wanted it to work. My wife and I had one of the best vacations of our 34-year marriage in 2019 when we went to Disney World and enjoyed all their creations to celebrate the opening of the Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance. No company but Disney could have made a ride like that or built a Star Wars land like what they had in Florida at Hollywood Studios. So I don’t report this news about Disney happily. I’m a fan and have wanted it to succeed. But reality is headed in an entirely different direction.

I’m the guy who used to go to Target in September when the Holiday toys would come out for Star Wars and buy up the cool stuff before anybody else did at midnight. The toy aisle at Target and Walmart used to be filled with Star Wars figures just from the movies that were made in the 80s and 2000s. But after Disney bought the brand, and the company headed in the direction indicated by the Desecrators of Davos globalists, like Klaus Schwab, the brand of Star Wars has died. Gone are the toys or the demand for them. Kids have moved on to their favorite YouTubers, and when you see what Disney has done to a really solid brand, like Star Wars, you can see what they are doing to everything else that Walt Disney built. Disney as a brand is damaged, and it will never recover, and those are the facts. Get your money while you still can.

The truth is that in a free culture like America, the Davos plan for our complete economic destruction by hijacking our brands and destroying them from within with ESG scores will fail. If Disney isn’t going to provide a family-friendly place, then someone else will come along and do what Walt Disney did. America will not be deprived of what we want. We made it in the first place, and we can make it again. Disney World was built when I was a real little kid; I was there when they started digging out the big lake in front of Magic Kingdom. I remember it. It hasn’t been that long. If the family value dollars aren’t going to Disney, they will go to its eventual replacement, whatever that may be. But American brands won’t just go away, as has been the plan by those who hate America, and which to desecrate all the corporate branding directed through finance to a global change state to a one-world government managed by the Desecrators of Davos. The playbook is out, and people can now see what has been going on for a very long time. Being close to Star Wars, I watched how fast Disney destroyed the brand in just a few short years, and now we can see that brand damage everywhere.

Even the great Pirate films with Johnny Depp are going through a wake rethinking with his court trial, destroying his personal brand attached to the Pirate films. Not having anything really coming to rebuild the Disney brand, no new Johnny Depp Pirate films, no great string of Marvel movies like they had with the Avenger films, Star Wars damaged the way it is with woke politics, there is nothing on the horizon that will help Disney recover the damage that has been done to it. There are Avatar movies coming, and next year there is an Indiana Jones film. Those might be entertaining, but we are in a different world now with entertainment where streaming services are driving entertainment value, and the days of the billion-dollar blockbusters worldwide are becoming less reliable. Covid interrupted that cash flow for Disney. They played along with the woke politics of it, and now they are going full ESG, and that is not a replacement of value for investors or fans. That has left Disney in a tough spot that they put themselves in. They incorrectly played the wrong side of politics by fully embracing Rocky Horror Picture Show politics from the radical communist left. In truth, their real fan base is Trump conservatives. 

Disney has always been about family-friendly content and a safe space for boys and girls of all ages. But now that they have come out against the very popular governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Disney has essentially cut off half of their audience. Some of the squishy Republicans who have booked their Disney vacation a year ahead of time don’t want to take a moral stand at this time. Still, as the trend continues, which it will, they will stop booking those vacations because the nostalgia of doing it is going away. And Disney can’t survive with its top-heavy costs. They are essentially where General Motors was before 2008. They are only floating along with inflated value perceived by theme park attendance. Their Disney+ service is struggling. The current show that is so hot there, Moon Night, which I think is fantastic, isn’t enough to justify its existence.

Disney can’t produce enough content to keep young people interested. YouTube is by far the preferred path for young people because daily content is new and refreshed daily. Production value isn’t a concern for young people of the Minecraft video game generation. They only care that what they see is new. Disney has lost that next generation, leaving them to desperately cling to these left-winged communist radicals because they bet all their chips that America would essentially become China. In 2022, that is clearly not going to happen. Trump is going to be back in the White House in 2024. Ron DeSantis is establishing the new rules for being a state governor, and the political pendulum is swinging back to the kind of America that Walt Disney provided entertainment to. The future of America may well be the most conservative in the history of the world once the smoke clears from all this, and Disney is nowhere close to appealing to those types of people. They are now positioned among the radical types, the anti-family movement. That doesn’t mean that good, family-friendly entertainment is gone forever. It just means that Disney won’t be the provider of that entertainment. They are not agile enough to react to these changing markets, and instead, they are digging in. So those stock prices are gone forever. Their value in 2019 and early 2020 was their high-water mark of real value. Inflation may make things appear to be better than they are, but the public sentiment toward Disney has been destroyed. And unfortunately, it has been destroyed forever. Yet, someone will come along and replace Disney. America will be what America is. The attackers of our culture want to destroy our companies and us like Disney. Like Star Wars. Marvel. But it’s not the company itself that makes the content or buys the product. They just provide the transaction, and anybody can do that. And they will. Disney can die, but the need for what they offered will live on, which will be the next great investment. 

Rich Hoffman

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My Defense of the ‘Star Wars’ Hotel: If it brings joy to people, which is does, its worth doing

I think it’s a huge story, even if it only concerns a small part of the overall population. After all, the topic of the day is shareholder capitalism that is attempting to be destroyed by the Desacrators of Davos strategy of stakeholder capitalism. And few companies are a bigger target for them than Disney Entertainment in the United States. Progressives have jumped all over the Disney Company. And now the Star Wars property they purchased from George Lucas in 2012 reflects the attack accurately from the Desecrators of Davos, the progressive incursion into all our lives not through the front door of politics, but through the backdoor of finance and business. Star Wars is an excellent meter to measure this kind of thing. It started out from the mind of George Lucas as a warning to 8 to 12-year-old boys how not to grow up to become evil. And today, it is the very definition of state control and authority to the compliance of the nanny state; everything Star Wars wasn’t. Naturally, fans are very upset about it and are letting Disney know. And now, after working on it for a decade and spending over a billion dollars developing their live Star Wars experiences at Disney World and Disneyland, the much talked about Star Wars hotel called, The Galactic Starcruiser is open for business, and all eyes have been on it. Many Star Wars fans are hating it and have been speaking out against it. So I have been watching it closely, and I have thoughts on it that are very much relevant to all our corporate problems in America. The challenge of wrestling away from the Desecrators of Davos insurgents our American concepts of capitalism from the imposition of state-controlled stakeholder capitalism is the challenge. Ironically, this Star Wars hotel finds itself right in the middle as a form of art displayed for all the world to see.

Star Wars is all about fighting back against institutionalized systems. But under Disney, they are all about yielding to that institutionalization. That was the critical error Bob Iger, and Kathy Kennedy made with Star Wars under the ownership of Disney. They should have followed the George Lucas plan. Instead, they ended up with a massive mess that will never be fixed. That is sad, but it’s why fans are so angry at Disney. However, I see some good in it all, and I think personally, Galaxy’s Edge in Disney World is one of the most fantastic things I’ve ever experienced. I will never forget my vacation there in 2019 with my wife. We had about two or three days of the best time I’ve ever had visiting the Star Wars park there at Hollywood Studios and other attractions. It was the first time she and I had been kid-free in about two decades, and we were able to enjoy all that just as a couple. So I am still grateful for that experience, and I can see why people would want to go to the Galactic Starcruiser, which is essentially a Star Wars cruise in space. It’s very ambitious; it costs around 4 to 6 thousand per person to do and is essentially a Fantasy Island experience.   For three days and two nights, you enter the world of Star Wars all immersively and practically live a live Star Wars novel, which I think is pretty cool. Now I’m a gun at my hip kind of Star Wars fan. Not a sit around and play games kind of guy, and eat food and listen to music. If I don’t get to wear a DL-44 on my hip and go laser tagging, it’s not a lot of fun for me. It would cost me about $100K to take my clan. I checked it out, thought about it, and decided they’d like it, but not for that price. But, I know quite a few employees at Disney, many at the executive level, and I understand what they’ve done. They did their best. I also follow quite a few influencers on YouTube who work in the Orlando region, and they love the Starcruiser. They are much more social butterflies than I am, and I think it’s great in the world we are living in today that there is something like the Starcruiser for them. And in that context, I hope the Starcruiser is successful for Disney. Because I’d like to see, it remain an option. 

While at the Cincinnati Comic-Con this past September, I had a chance to talk to Timothy Zahn about this modern Star Wars stuff, and he’s pretty much where I am. He’s the guy responsible for all the great novels that came from Star Wars, going all the way back to the 90s when he started the trend. My wife and I have read well over 200 Star Wars novels. We are not fans of the new stuff since Disney bought Lucasfilm and turned radically more progressive. But at that Comic-Con, as Zahn signed a few books for me because I do love his books, we talked about the joy of those comic cons. There are people there who have had bad childhoods, society has let them down, religion has let them down, and they find refuge in Star Wars. They like to dress up and escape the world’s disappointments with some form of art, and Star Wars gives them that refuge. And I remember how it was in Hollywood Studios in the early days before Disney bought Lucasfilm. There were Star Wars weekends in May that were actual celebrations. I can’t blame Disney for wanting to give those fans what they dreamed of, a Star Wars land all their own, and even a hotel experience that allowed people to cosplay for three full days eating, thinking, and living Star Wars in a much better way than they would a comic con. That’s one of the reasons I read so many Star Wars books. In my crazy, very stressful life, those books were great places to relax and think about big concepts. I love them or have loved them. The Star Wars hotel was a chance to throw away the disappointments of politics, life itself, and live a fantasy. And that I think is a very useful thing. 

Even with all the politics, I might still do it with my family at some point. Seeing what Disney has done, they have tried hard to thread the needle and give everyone what they want, which usually means everyone is a little disappointed. But, knowing what we do about the world, I think we should all feel proud that we have a culture that can actually pull off something like this for this amount of money and commit resources to even attempting to do it. The Galactic Starcruiser is enormously ambitious, and if it survives, it could evolve over time in a positive direction. My grandchildren would get quite a kick out of it because the experience is essentially an escape room, a broadway play, and a novel all wrapped up into one experience. I can think of people who are very sick and dying of cancer, who are kids who would love for this to be the very last thing they did in life. They would die happy. They want to escape their problems, and art does that for human beings at its highest form. It’s not so much hiding from the pains of life as much as it gives the mind emotional distance from massive disappointments. And if this Starcruiser experience can do that for people, at any cost, then I think that’s a wonderful thing. And I hope that Disney can keep it going because there sure was a lot of love that went into it for all the right reasons. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Iniquitous Intent at Disney: When it comes to ‘The Book of Boba Fett,’ it’s all about a “Return to the Primitive”

It may seem iniquitous, but when you know a subject very well, it’s easy to see the changes over time and trace those changes to particular injunctions that contributed to a demise. And that is precisely what I saw as I looked at an earnings report for Disney stock and noticed how many shares BlackRock owned recently, then saw episode 7 of the new Book of Boba Fett on the Disney+ streaming service. The imprint of Larry Fink and his fellow board members of the World Economic Forum was unmistakable. Additionally, I used to write screenplays, and I have a good understanding of the politics of movie-making. When I was a young guy, I had several projects that won screenwriting awards at film festivals and made the circulation around Wilshire Blvd selling them, so I’ve been told more than once by the people of finance, “he who owns the gold rules.” So, I sympathize with what Dave Filoni, Jon Favreau, and even the original creator, George Lucas, went through to make this new show. They tried to do with The Book of Boba Fett, an original character from the old movies, bold and ambitious things. But at the end of the series, Star Wars fans were left feeling shortchanged. That’s the standard review of the show now that it’s completed, and a year of waiting left fans flat and looking for much more. It had some good stuff in it, but the overall message was filled with wokeness, and to my eyes, it points back to the owner of BlackRock owning too much stock in Disney and dictating creatively what ends up on the screen. I’ve seen it before in much smaller ways, and that is certainly the case with what is going on at Disney these days.

My review of The Book of Boba Fett is that its space meets Dances with Wolves. Clearly, the current makers of Star Wars projects, specifically Filoni and Favreau, used to enjoy playing with Star Wars figures, as I did. We are all kind of the same age, and when it comes to Star Wars, we just want to put what we wanted to see as kids on screen. Most people who watch these Disney+ shows and go to the modern movies feel that way; it’s more about childhood nostalgia than what is actually good about it. So it was strange to see the gunslinging bounty hunter from the classic film The Empire Strikes Back, running around in half the show dancing with Tusken Raiders around a campfire, acting like some hunter and gatherer. The purpose of the entire show became quite clear by episode 7, where Boba Fett and another bounty hunter called Cad Bane had a gunfight duel to the death, which was the ultimate climax and apparent purpose for putting the whole thing together. But this is where things get iniquitous, and the influence of BlackRock and other forces come into play. The show’s creators wanted to put on film what they thought about as kids, a gunfight with Boba Fett and some ultimate gunslinger. Woke Disney, essentially not run by Bob Chapek but by the owners of the most stock options, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, changed the story’s nature to reflect real-world tactical goals for global domination. That is clear by what Larry Fink puts in his ultra-liberal letters to CEOs showing the woke parameters for which the show must be done. 

When people ask, “what’s wrong with Star Wars,” well, I would point to the loss of ownership of George Lucas, who over time have listened to people like Larry Fink more in his old age than he would have like a 20 to 30-year-old. Star Wars was about standing up to people like Larry Fink, not being told what to do by them. So now that extreme characters of progressive causes are calling the shots on the finance end and sticking their nose into the creative process of the much more woke Disney than it ever has been before, Star Wars comes out as if Darth Vader made the movies instead of Luke Skywalker. I could recite the production meetings as if I had been there when the pitch for The Book of Boba Fett was made to Disney executives who had an eye toward stock prices and the massive control BlackRock has on it. “You want to make a Disney+ show about a villain from the original movies to win over the fans from all the mistakes that Kathy Kennedy has so far made? Well, you’ll have to make the bad guy into a good guy and to do that, we must make him identifiable with indigenous people, which parallels the gunfighter against the Indian in American history.” So from there, the show’s writers had to figure out a way to get their big gunfight with Boba Fett and Cad Bane done in a way that made the show sympathetic to Disney’s woke needs to stabilize their stock price. Ultimately, they had to make Larry Fink happy, and to do that; Boba Fett had to Return to the Primitive.

Fans feel shortchanged because the whole thing was out of character for Boba Fett. When he finally had his gunfight with Cad Bane, the bad guy beat Boba Fett to the draw not just once but twice. That meant that Boba Fett had to rely on the new skills he learned from the Tusken Raiders to defeat Bane with a Gaffi Stick in the end. It was like a gun duel with an Indian (native American), and the Indian winning with a bow and arrow. Undoubtedly, a hidden message implied that primitive traditions are superior to technology and that, ultimately, the West will fall to tribal unity. Again, I know this subject very well; I just wrote a book called The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I run into people like Larry Fink all over the world. They have been trying to promote China, indigenous people of all kinds constantly over the technology of the West for years. Such an assumption is at the center of Lean Manufacturing. And of course, Disney couldn’t have given me a better example of why I felt the differences between the West and the East needed to be pointed out in business transactions. The message behind The Book of Boba Fett was that in the end, to be the good guy and to beat the bad guy, the classic Star Wars villain had to learn to embrace the primitive tribes of Tatooine, the scary Tuskin Raiders. But in the original movies from 1977, the Tuskin Raiders were thought of as villains. That basic flip of the script is why people are so upset with the Disney-owned Star Wars productions instead of what George Lucas produced on his own originally. Once you start worrying about stock prices, woke politics, and the letters to the CEOs from Larry Fink, what you end up with is a bunch of garbage nobody wants. But suppose Disney wants to keep their stock price up. In that case, they have to do what The World Economic Forum tells them to do, and that is to bring down the West and to sell those asset bubbles to China, where their new world order will emerge under a communist flag and a foot on western civilization that is meant to choke it off, forever. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Failures of Institutionalism: Disney’s New Star Wars Hotel Rejected by the Fans

Corporate Failure

To understand why and how liberalism is failing currently and will continue to fail, a great example of what’s to come was displayed when Disney released a preview video for their new Star Wars Hotel experience.  Fans had been waiting for over eight years for the opening of this more than a billion-dollar investment, and what Disney showed the public instantly went from ambitious hope to fandom scorn for the immense wokeness contained in the project.  I certainly wanted to give the project a chance. I would have liked to take my grandchildren and children to this hotel if it looked any good.   After all, I raised my family on Star Wars and the various stories of good and evil in such a modern storybook fashion.  But what Disney did with Star Wars and the hotel experience was full of contemporary liberalism in every way that we can see it failing, from the Biden administration to the global greenie weenies at the United Nations.  These people at Disney, who had infinite resources to spend on this hotel experience and Star Wars itself, didn’t understand what they had bought from George Lucas. They presented the ultimate failure of liberalism, which I found very interesting and relevant to our modern observations.  After a very long wait, the hotel is supposed to open in a few months, March of 2022.  The video itself looks like a child made it, and for what Star Wars means to people, everyone expected from Disney a lot more. 

Part of that billion-dollar investment went into making the Galaxy’s Edge experience at the two Disney parks in Florida and California.  My wife and I went to the one in Florida once it opened, and I thought it was magnificent for the price of a $100 admission ticket.  To see some full-scale props from the movies was worth the money.  I enjoyed myself and thought it was a great experience.  But this hotel experience was poised to be something like a “West World” experience, or Fantasy Island from the old television show where you came to Disney to realize a fantasy of living in Star Wars for a two-day affair.  And for that experience, it would cost around $6,000 to $10,000.  So naturally, what they were selling was very ambitious, and people were excited about it.  The point of releasing a preview video, which they did in mid-December 2021, was to book reservations for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.  But the video turned out to be so bad that the opposite happened.  People started canceling their reservations as soon as they saw the video because it looked and felt nothing like Star Wars.  I covered this problem years ago on a radio show with a guy who is now a Disney employee.  Way back in 2013, when this Disney Hotel was just announced, we contemplated the problem Disney would have with its anti-gun politics when Star Wars was all about guns.  How do you have fun with Star Wars without promoting “war?” When fans attended the hotel experience but couldn’t wear around their blasters, it wouldn’t feel like Star Wars, and that is precisely what the first problem was with the video promo. 

It looked like the people who developed the concept for the hotel were more in love with the movie, The Fifth Element rather than Star Wars.  The cantina singer as the feature in the video was a clear sign that the Disney creators thought Star Wars was all about funny colored aliens, space, and orchestral music.  They didn’t understand the heart and soul of what made the films so beloved in the first place. It’s the kind of corporate failure I see all the time and talk about extensively in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  I wasn’t upset by the video, but it certainly solidified my plans for 2022.  There was no way I would spend $20-30,000 in 2022 to take my family to this Star Wars experience.  To understand their target audience at this hotel, the Disney planners would have done well to study the current video games, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.  With the amount of money Disney wants for the hotel, they should know that, at a minimum, they should be offering some kind of competitive laser tag experience, something that simulates pulse-pounding action with real consequences to the story.  People were not going to spend that kind of money to watch people sing and eat food.  But to be fair, the Disney philosophy had no chance out of the gate; as a woke company going after what they think is the emerging middle class of China, they are not prepared to tell Star Wars stories.  They believe that as a media company, they set society’s values instead of offering the products that society wants. It’s a fine line that they have lost, but it’s more a condition of modern liberalism in general and institutional failure on a massive scale.  Institutions are not powerful if they don’t embody what the public wants as a consumer class.  And Disney has lost its way the more corporate they have become and moved away from the foundations of Uncle Walt Disney himself.  That is the same thing that has happened to Star Wars the more they have moved away from George Lucas, who created the franchise. 

The mistake was that the modern corporate Star Wars approach had all the tools for success right in their breadbasket, but they approached it all with the wrong philosophy, which carries over to the more significant message here.  If all the values of institutionalism were as they assumed, the Star Wars Hotel would have been a slam dunk for Disney.  They had the money.  They had the best and brightest of modern college graduates.  They had a proven brand that spanned decades as a money maker.  What could go wrong?  Well, wokeism, for one.  But deeper than that, it’s the corporate approach that fails in all companies to some degree or another, whether it’s McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, or Nike.  Once a product becomes affiliated with a political movement, such as globalism, it loses its use as art. It becomes simply a tool of a detached class of people stuck in their own versions of quicksand in life.  Star Wars was always about rebellion against tyranny.

Here were the Disney people all too happy to be a compliance culture trying to make a Star Wars experience for people, complete with masks indoors in a state-run by Ron DeSantis, who has been the best against such idiocy.  Because of their political intentions toward liberalism, Disney masks their employees and guests on purpose.  They didn’t have to, but they wanted to be part of that “woke” culture they think the world will be driven by.  In the video, they put out there were no signs of masculinity, which is essential because Star Wars was always designed for boys 8-12 years of age.  Trying to create an “expanded market” with outreach to girls and people of color has only destroyed the original base of the franchise.  So now Disney has made something that nobody wants.  Their target audience for this hotel experience would have been the Comic-Con types who would spend thousands of dollars on a Star Wars experience.  But now, they have all those types of people against them as they are insulted by Disney’s approach.  And after watching all this, it looked like our nightly news and the perplexity that many global institutionalists are having when they wonder why people don’t want Build Back Better, the CDC, or to be controlled by the United Nations.  When institutionalism and the necessities of individuals are not aligned, we can see these kinds of failures everywhere.  But what’s essential about the Disney case is that it proves that no amount of money can solve the problem and make people think something they don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business