NBA
I strongly suspect that Bob Chapek would love to kill his former boss.
Bob Iger is the one who, after “resigning” as CEO of Disney, negotiated a deal with the NBA to have the 2019-2020 season played exclusively at Disney World.
The deal is that the teams get locked up at Coronado Springs, the Yacht and Beach Club, and Grand Floridian resorts at Disney World. There they would remain in quarantine inside of the “NBA bubble.” In exchange, Disney gets exclusive broadcast rights for this truncated basketball season. It was rumored to be worth about a billion dollars in total for Disney. At the very least it was known that a $150 million check was signed by the NBA for the rental of the resorts.
This deal would have let Iger have a big win as Chairman of the Board and thus keep him in place as the unofficial boss of bosses at Disney. He wouldn’t have the title of CEO but he would effectively have all the power.
It hasn’t worked out so well.
The players stuck at Coronado Springs are calling it the Motel 6 of Disney World. Clippers guard Lou Williams “jumped the fence” and ran off to an Orlando titty bar, thus breaking his quarantine. And between sucking China’s dick and wearing BLM slogans on their jerseys, viewership is down an alleged 20% this year. Considering the NBA has lost 50% of its viewership since 2010 this is a brutal loss.
“Game 5 between the Los Angeles Lakers and Portland Trail Blazers was the least viewed game of the entire series, drawing 2.92 million viewers.”
Today, golf draws bigger ratings than basketball. I’m not exaggerating.
When all is said and done it is not a complete disaster but it’s no where near the windfall that Iger promised the BOD. Look for his retirement to be set in stone next year.
Black Panther
One of the big questions now floating around is will T’Challa be recast?
I dug up this answer from WDWPro:
“Sources familiar with the thinking of Kevin Feige express that the chances of Marvel recasting King T’Challa within the current MCU is slightly less than 0%. It isn’t going to happen, period. But the Black Panther mantel might be given to a new character, and thus a new actor. This seems to be the most likely path forward in the movie, Black Panther 2, currently being directed by Ryan Coogler. However, the script for the movie has not yet been completed, and the diagnosis and subsequent death of Boseman caught Coogler completely by surprise.
Essentially, the script for Black Panther 2 is now gone with the passing of its lead actor. A new script will have to be written, time likely needs to happen between now and the starting of that script to absorb the loss, and Black Panther 2 may not even be titled Black Panther 2 anymore. Whereas Boseman’s terminal illness would have been difficult to hide in normal circumstances, literally nobody at Marvel or Disney knew he was dying due to the fog of the pandemic.“
They knew he was sick, which is why Black Panther was Dusted at the end of Infinity War and only resurrected at the end of End Game, (when most of his scenes could be played by his stunt double). But they didn’t know he was dying.
This is uncharted territory for Marvel, they haven’t had a major lead actor die on them before. The refusal to recast is interesting.
When an actor leaves the MCU his character is retired.
But that leaves the question of, how long can they keep doing that? Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are now out as characters but how well will the audience take the replacement Captain America and Ironman? And now, of course, Black Panther?
This course of action is at best risky.
Indiana Jones 5
The last of the Indiana Jones movies was supposed to be the salvation of Kathleen Kennedy.
She doesn’t understand stories, story structure, or character development. She honestly thinks her treatment has been drastically unfair because she has turned in record-breaking box-office returns for her Star Wars movies.
The woman genuinely can’t be made to understand how much of a narrative train wreck these last three movies have been.
True, the Star Wars attractions at the parks are drastically underperforming but that’s surely the Parks Division’s problem. (Never-mind that she is the one that demanded that the attractions all feature her trilogy’s characters and not Luke Skywalker). And yes, the box office numbers have gone down but the last movie still made over $ 1 billion.
Why am I getting shoved out the door with all of these successes to my name? She doubtless rages in private
But the sure fire hit of Indiana Jones 5 was bound to turn everything around and get her contract renewed, she is rumored to have believed.
Harrison Ford was hot to don his fedora and whip again. Spielberg was on board to direct. True, things had gone a little too far south with George Lucas to get him to come back but then was he really needed? ‘Look at my successes with Star Wars and I did those without any help from George at all,’ Kathleen probably thought to herself.
The truth is, whatever they do with Indiana Jones, it won’t be good enough to rake in the mega-money. Indy is like James Bond. He’s a Gary Stu. His fans don’t care about the character of Indiana Jones, they want to BE Indiana Jones.
And who wants to be Old Indy?
On top of that, Jones has lost the violent edge that made him what he was. The first three movies had very high body. counts. Doctor Jones only killed one guy in the last movie. It feels like he’s gone soft in his old age.
Besides the character only really works well in the setting we first saw him in. Pre-war 1930s. He just didn’t feel right as a 1950s Commie Puncher and god only what he’ll look like as a Vietnam era college professor.
But worse, Steven Spielberg was making a LOT of noise about how it was time for a girl to take over the part.
Apparently, George Lucas quietly informed his old friend that it had been done already.
Spielberg has been in the industry almost as long as I’ve been alive. He’s got an instinct for studio politics and he can tell when someone’s ship is sinking and when it’s time to stop following the herd because it turns out they are Lemmings. The ‘turn the heroes into heroines’ thing has a track record of 100% failure. I wasn’t sure if anyone in Hollyweird could notice the issue but apparently, Spielberg did and dropped out of the project.
And due to contract codicils, he took his script with him.
Ford was only willing to accept one guy as Spielberg’s replacement. James Mangold, the director who did Logan. Not a bad choice really and maybe he will come up with something halfway decent.
However, whatever he comes up with will not be Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Worst of all so far as Kathleen Kennedy is concerned, he can’t do it before her current contract is up. It was supposed to be released in 2021 but due to the Wu-Flu it has now been pushed back to 2022. Which means Kennedy will be out as president of Lucasfilm by then.
So much for her last hope of hanging on to Lucasfilm
Okay, I’m done here.
The Dark Herald 
Boseman’s death really hurts the MCU because they were running out of leads. Two of the big three won’t be back at all and Downey would be doing cameo’s at most. Plus Scarlet is dead. They built up to a crescendo and it feels done. Right now, the later MCU movies look like the equivalent of “After MASH.” If Boseman was that bad off even with Endgame, it would have been better to offer him a heroic death.
Basketball in the US is dead as a national sport. College only gets attention for the tournament at the end and betting pools. The NBA is propped up by China. It’s almost completely a black sport with the rules changed to make it unwatchable. Of course ESPN has been pushing it like mad for the past decade. Meanwhile ESPN trashed baseball which is the one sport that comes close to US demographics. But blacks can’t express themselves so it’s a problem.
Indy 5, why? Spielberg hasn’t had his touch for a long time. He’s not a hack by any stretch. He doesn’t have the Midas Touch though.
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Indiana Jones might work if they recast the character and make it a prequel series set in the 1920s. The only problem is, what kind of artifacts is Indy going to go after? The first trilogy was centered around religious artifacts, and today’s woke Hollywood isn’t going to like that. Nobody liked the crystal skull aliens from Indy 4. Maybe, since it’s the 1920s, they could do a Lovecraft crossover with the series, but emphasizing the adventure aspect of it over the horror aspect. Hell, The Mummy (1999) did a good job of turning a horror franchise into an adventure franchise. It can be done.
What I want to know is when am I going to get my Tales of the Gold Monkey reboot?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083488/
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I’m honestly surprised there isn’t a Jock Lindsey series on Disney Plus.
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Religious artifacts are alright with Wokewood provided they aren’t Christian artifacts. Something Chinese would do nicely so far as Disney is concerned.
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No Christianity eh? How about Indiana Jones and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten? Though I should add I consider Indiana Jones to be done and dusted for quite a while now. No more movies required, thanks.
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About Black Panther: I think there’s something they’re not telling us. I find it fishy that Boseman was able to have a starring role in BP, but then they had to reduce it to a couple of cameos for IW/EG, despite those movies being filmed closely together; moreover, if they knew about this since 2016, how could they hope that Boseman was going to be able to have a starring role in BP2?
About the possible recasting: what’s this about Feige being completely against it? Do the names Terence Howard and Edward Norton ring any bells? Not that I think BP2 is going to actually be made.
About Indiana Jones: another problem this franchise has is that millenials care about it even less than they care about Star Wars or Terminator – for them it is, at best, an historical curiosity from the ’80s; so sure, a female lead (hopefully played by Maisie Williams) would be the coup de grâce, but the patient is in irreversible coma anyway.
About popculture dying in general: Star Trek Discovery Season 3 will have a “trans man” lead and a “non-binary” lead; for some reason, I doubt there will be a Season 4.
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JJ/Kurtzman Trek is dead. No one is willing to fund them. Netflix and Amazon have both passed on their respective distribution rights for STD and Picard. They have also rejected any new series. CBS is running out the clock to get new show runners in-place. Star Trek has always been a niche property. It is well known, but the audience was never huge. Paramount/CBS understood that in the 80’s and 90’s. They never spent huge amounts on the property. Instead it was always deliver quality effects, reuse sets wherever possible, stay on budget, and give the fans what they want.
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“so sure, a female lead (hopefully played by Maisie Williams) would be the coup de grâce, but the patient is in irreversible coma anyway.”
Skip straight to the trans, I say.
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