A funny thing happened over the weekend of December 17th – Spider Man: No Way Home blew the doors off the box office, and shattered opening day records. It has since gone on to gross an insane amount of cash in an extremely short space of time.
Has Disney learned its lesson yet?
The last few MCU releases throughout Phase IV have been underwhelming in all cases, and absolutely atrocious per a select few. Yet, here we are, with the latest Spider-Man film going in the completely opposite direction, and tallying the kind of earnings normally associated with classic MCU heavy hitters like The Avengers.
RELATED: Spider-Man: No Way Home Box Office Grosses Obliterate Kevin Feige’s MSheU Phase 4 Installments
There’s a reason: fans understand what Spider-Man: No Way Home is all about, and they like it. The entire film is a nod to an era earlier than 5 years ago, when the woke hadn’t hijacked the entire entertainment industry, and turned it into a dystopian, Orwellian propaganda outlet.
This, perhaps, is a clear indication that the entirety of the industry does not have its collective cranium wedged up its own backside, so the question remains as to whether Disney, a vocal and leading proponent of wokeness, will smarten up.
Let’s not hold our breath, just yet.
Disney is going to chew on the gristle of this embarrassment, specifically from the shareholders who must be wondering how a single film in the Phase IV lineup managed to knock it out of the park, while the rest tripped and fell on their faces whilst sprinting to first base.
Consider Disney’s last MCU release, The Eternals. 49 days after its initial release, the film has managed to rake in just over $400 million dollars, according to BoxOfficeMojo.
Spider-Man: No Way Home grossed $638 million…in 5 days.
That’s an eye-watering contrast, especially for those swaddled in the dubious blanket of denial at Disney. Fans were insulted with every excuse in the book as to why The Eternals flopped so hard, including the standard issue go-to tactic – fear of Covid.
Now, the company has egg on its face, and must deal with the reality that fans simply don’t like what the MCU has been preaching, of late. Phase IV has either prioritized wokeness at the expense of a story, or hired writers who couldn’t pen middle school fan fiction to save their lives.
Now, the chickens have come home to roost, and there’s no hiding from the truth anymore. Disney has been hemorrhaging cash since Phase IV began, both in terms of movies, and its Disney+ streaming shows. The numbers are bad. Audience reception has been lackluster. Budgets are outpacing revenue by leaps and bounds.
The next film in the MCU lineup is Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Will it go for woke, and end up broke all over again? Hard to tell these days, when even Spider-Man’s own Tom Holland is too busy virtue signaling for the woke 2% on Twitter. Benedict Cumberbatch has made similar statements in the past.
RELATED: Benedict Cumberbatch Claims In New Interview He Thought Doctor Strange Was “Dated, Sexist Character”
Thankfully, actors do not represent their characters, as Star Trek alum LeVar Burton recently demonstrated to sobering effect. They’re paid to read the lines in a script, and if that script is good (i.e. non-woke), then audiences will sit down in theater seats.
It’s time for Disney, and the rest of the entertainment industry writ large, to stop with the excuses. People are not, in fact, too afraid of Covid to go to theaters. They will go see a movie that looks like it was smartly written, and entertaining.
They are not, in fact, a bunch of racists, bigots and homophobes/transphobes. They will love any character that is relatable, charismatic, and does not spout off lines like a politically driven automaton that just rolled fresh off the Democratic Party’s assembly line.
When you try to propagandize from an identity politics soapbox, folks tune out.
Period. End of discussion. Snap out of it, and wake up.
The fallback position for any woke failure is for the Left to double, triple and quadruple down, but what happens when one of their films manages to soar into the stratosphere with the kind of earnings that Spider-Man is now raking in? Really, what then? Is it the wakeup call fans have been waiting for?
We suspect there’s a way to go, before that. Never underestimate the denial of the Left, which is just shy of irreversibly chronic, at this point. If Doctor Strange refuses to go woke, and rakes in another hefty tally, then Disney might just think that fans are back in the saddle, and ready to ride along once more.
Never forget, however, the next film in the chamber – Thor: Love and Thunder. It remains to be seen whether the character’s popularity will be enough to compensate for the confirmed wokeness attached to that story, which hasn’t worked a single time it’s been tried.
If it fails again, then Disney might finally get the point. The key word being “might.”
We’re about to see a major cultural paradigm shift back to a semblance of normalcy in 2022, whether the Left like it, or not. It’s inevitable, and unstoppable. The only question is, who wants to profit from the overabundance of sanity that’s about to roll in, and who would rather pick lint out of their pockets, while doubling down on the far Left echo chamber?
Decide fast, Hollywood, because 2022 is the beginning of a multi-year battle to retake the culture, and it’s coming from both the conservative side of the aisle, and traditional liberals, alike. You can’t fight a culture war on two fronts, but go ahead and try.
NEXT: Wokeness, Or Superhero Fatigue – What Exactly Is Killing The MCU?