Huh, what? What a weird post.
I guess you must have missed the whole Zwarte Piet debate here in the Netherlands too. We live in the age of 'THE MESSAGE' and everything has to be made secondary to pushing that onto us. Just look at the Eternals and the entire marketing. If you had to take a shot of alcohol every time some movie talking head used the word 'diversity' to praise the movie you'd be on the intensive care with alcohol poisoning.
Hopefully it will make a lot on Blu Ray & DVD sales.
Maybe? But for that to happen part 2 has to be made, because why buy a DVD or blu ray to a story that you know will never conclude?
Nope - conventional wisdom has marketing and other costs roughly equivalent to production costs.
Wow, then everyone is wrong? Then Black Widow, Chang Shi and the Eternals should all have made bank by now. Instead of, as Disney said in its earnings reports, turned in a loss.
Why?
It made absolutely zero difference to the plot line. The only ones who noticed were book purists. Anyone coming to the movie never having read the book experienced no meaningful change to the storyline as a result of this change.
If it has no meaningful purpose then why do it? And also, the WB marketing team HEAVILY played up this race and gender swaps. Trying to sell the movie as woke to the Hollywood press who LOVE woke stuff. Which might have hurt the movie as it caused a lot of people to have doubts about it.
Because Villneuve liked that actor in that role. It was his artistic choice.
True, and that was usually always the answer. And we always used to be fine with it because we knew it was an artistic choice. But we live in the age of the wokepocalypse. Where EVERY white male character gets gender or race swapped. And sometimes both. And where in comics basically EVERYONE is baseline bi or trans now and superman is gay. Which means that every race and gender swap in a movie has become suspect. Did they change it for artistic choice, or because of 'THE MESSAGE'.
Bezos famously wanted Wheel of Time to be Amazon's Game of Thrones. I suspect he might be disappointed.
Thing is, you can't make another Game of Thrones just like you cannot make another Metallica or another Animals as Leaders or another David Bowie. They're originals and anything trying to be a copy of a successful original will always remain in the shadow of that original. If Bezos wants a major hit like Game of Thrones he should go look for an interesting original story. And most definitely not woke it up like he's doing with the Lord of the Rings series. Which will be shit regardless, because he's adapting what is basically a history segment from the Silmarillion withhad none of the Tolkien dialogues that made LOTR a success and only the barest of outlines of a story. And we've seen with GoT what happens when TV writers run out of book to adapt and have to make up their own thing.
Personally I think if Bezos wants a major hit show he should have his people read up on African folklore and history. There should be interesting tales full of unexplored historical, supernatural, personal and mythological stuff there. In the 80's we had the Shaka Zulu TV series and it was MASSIVE! Water cooler TV at the time. Which shows there is potential for something interesting from that continent.
