Why Hollywood’s woke movies do so badly at the overseas box office
The movie industry has plenty of problems, but some of the biggest ones are related to the pushing of politically-correct woke themes on a public that doesn’t want to be lectured to when they lay out close to twenty bucks per person for a theatrical release, bit counting popcorn.
But it seems that this problem is even worse when it comes to the overseas market, which is absolutely essential to the success of big budget “tentpole” films, which have little hope of recovering budgets that ran ge well into the hundreds of millions of dollars for production and marketing.
Currently, the best example of this phenomenon is Disney’s live action remake of The Little Mermaid. It is full of wokery such as “’drag queen’ Ursula, King Triton the environmentalist, mixed-race mermen, and ‘affirmative consent’ slipped into prince’s love song.”
Based on a tale by Hans Christian Andersen, a man from Denmark where Caucasians accounted for virtually one hundred percent of the populace, the live action remake nonetheless has an African American actress in the starring role despite demands for other demographic groups such as gays, blacks, and Asians to be portrayed solely by members of those groups.
So far the remake is not exactly a hit, but not a disaster:
The Little Mermaid remake has made more than $414 million at the worldwide box office so far, according to Box Office Mojo.
This includes approximately $228 million from domestic markets and $185 million from international audiences.
The overseas market is much larger than the domestic one, and for tentpole pictures, tends to be more important. (The recent Top Gun remake, with its patriotic American themes is an exception, and surpassed a billion dollars gross mainly from domestic audiences.)
Mickey Kaus passed along a tweet from an overseas man-in-the-street interview on politically correct American films flopping in South Korea. I have spent a lot of time in East Asia, and find the lack of political correctness of many (but not all) people there quite refreshing.
See what you think. It’s less than a minute long
Korean explaining why Woke movies are failing so often in South Korea ?
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) June 15, 2023
Photo credit: Twitter video screengrab
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