#Disney Shareholders Meeting

[notclub33]

The Disney Shareholder's Meeting & Walt Disney World

How @RobertIger Plans to Spend $17 Billion at #WaltDisneyWorld. #disneystock #disney100 #disneyyoutube #notclub33 #wdw #money #BobIger

[wilwheaton]

On August 11, day 102 of the 11,500-person Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike, which has largely shut down the film industry coast to coast, aided by below-the-line workers respecting picket lines and bolstered by 160,000 members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), who initiated their own strike on July 14, the studios finally returned to the bargaining table. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the organization that bargains on behalf of the major studios, offered counterproposals, a long-awaited response to the WGA’s proposals. The two sides met the following week and continued to exchange proposals. Then, on August 22, day 113 of the WGA strike, the two sides met again, but with an important addition: previous negotiating sessions had been led by AMPTP president Carol Lombardini, the studios’ hired hand, while at this one, the bosses who make the decisions were in the room. Disney CEO Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley came to the table to face the WGA’s elected leadership in the room outside of the AMPTP’s Sherman Oaks, California, headquarters where the negotiations have taken place. Workers, suffering the devastating effects of a months-long strike, hoped that the studios might finally offer counterproposals that meet their needs. Instead, the bargaining session led to further unraveling. “We accepted [the] invitation and, in good faith, met tonight, in hopes that the companies were serious about getting the industry back to work,” wrote the WGA negotiating committee in a message to members following the meeting. “Instead, on the 113th day of the strike — and while SAG-AFTRA is walking the picket lines by our side — we were met with a lecture about how good their single and only counteroffer was.” The two sides had agreed to adhere to a media blackout, vowing not to leak information about the proposals to third parties. Yet immediately following the August 22 session, the AMPTP publicly released a document highlighting elements of their counterproposal. “This was a meeting to get us to cave,” said the WGA leadership, “which is why, not twenty minutes after we left the meeting, the AMPTP released its summary of their proposals.”

The Hollywood Studios Still Aren’t Serious About Ending the Writers’ Strike

These sociopath CEOs are hearing it from shareholders, who want us to get back to work. The shareholders are making it clear that the psychopath CEOs can release the LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of their compensations to get us back to work.

So the sociopath CEOs put on a big show of coming back to bargain and work this out ... and when the WGA sits down to bargain, these sociopath CEOs have the fucking nerve to just lecture the WGA about how great their absolute garbage offer is. The offer WGA rejected because it didn’t address any of the issues on the table.

These sociopath CEOs are the problem:

Disney CEO Bob Iger, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and NBCUniversal’s Donna Langley 

These sociopath CEOs are greedy and entitled. That any one of them thought that lecturing WGA, then gaslighting members (in violation of not just the agreed upon media blackout, but likely in violation of labor law) would move us any closer to getting back to work tells you everything you need to know about who the problem is.

Fuck these scumbags, fuck their greed, and fuck their gaslighting.

[mammalsofaction]

since you've compiled moments where heinz is the possessive one... could we possibly get ones of perry being the jealous/possessive one? 👀

OH NONNIE I GIGGLED

Let's start with the basics 🙏🏼🙏🏼:

Their entire B-Plot in About Time:

Including their legendary first break up song where Perry started staring into puddles like a disney princess with a falshback montage:

(Here's an extended Alt):

Which led to Perry getting pissed off whenever Heinz is in Seattle without telling him (Meapless in Seattle):

And eventually Perry getting pissed off when Heinz got kidnapped by Peter's situationship and rushing to go save him in Seattle again. (Lost in Danville) (Yes, Perry is not the hugest fan of Seattle)

Heinz ended giving Mystery relationship advice and Peter got to meet Mystery's parents :)

Im running out of the picture limit. I can't find the one where Perry got upset when Heinz brought up the babe Inator, but here is Perry getting upset when Mono's speculating about Heinz's new date:

Perry being an overprotective asshole who won't let Heinz do missions during OWCA files:

Some fucking merch content of all things:

Perry being really sad and reaching for Heinz during their SECOND break up arc in Milo Murphy's Law:

Sending a card that was probably his equivalent to falling on knees grovelling:

Damn did I forget to tell you Perry takes pictures, edits, and keeps a whole stash of his photos with Doof in his wallet? Must've slipped my mind:

Anyway. The misunderstanding in MML was because Perry ends up being Time Industries' (Heinz future business endeavor as the Founder of Time Travelling) first and largest shareholder. He cashes in every penny made in overtime for Heinz to build his company back up.

Dan Povenmire stitched this chibi shorts episode as one SPECIFICALLY MADE FOR A "Specific subset of the Phineas and Ferb fandom" spoiler alert: apparently Perry's less upset about Heinz going around kissing people when it's Perry he's kissing.

Here's a short where Perry is apparently less cool about Heinz getting beat up when its someone else beating him up:

And here's a lil bonus Perry getting upset by a fake platypus Baljeet made when he went missing:

This is a very, VERY limited list, including moments of Perry being Fucking Whipped. I have carefully redacted moments of:

-Perry being sweet

-Perry being supportive

-Them being domestic

-Perry being so, so, so incredibly fond of Heinz

-Perry trusting Heinz with his life.

-Perry being sure Heinz doesn't have a life outside of him, anyway.

And in fact i am sure i have missed a lot more out of canon content. Perry being codependent, possessive, protective and jealous is common knowledge at this point. I've made a post before where Perry the Second Dimension proves that Perry has control Issues and an insecurity of being easily replaced by his loved ones, excaberted by Francis' frequent threats of relocating him at the drop of a hat.

Tldr: Perry suffers from down bad-ism and if you look at Heinz too long he is liable to commit violence ♥️♥️♥️

[alphacentaurinebula]

AU where Crowley is the CEO of Netflix and Aziraphale is the CEO of Disney and when they meet up they admit to each other that the streaming revenue model doesn’t make sense and it is a stock price bubble and they always knew it would eventually screw over consumers and shareholders. Even if the rest of their companies don’t acknowledge it, they can, to each other.

Because they’re on their own side.

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Jennifer Lee, CCO of Walt Disney Animation Studios, via an interview for Fandango... On FROZEN III and IV being made back to back...

“We’re working in a room where this half is FROZEN III, this half is FROZEN IV, we’re standing in the middle going back & forth”

For many observers, this is recalling the grueling production of ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE and how Sony made it seem - up until last year's strikes and that story on alleged animator crunch - that BEYOND THE SPIDER-VERSE would debut less than a year later. ACROSS debuted June 2, 2023, and BEYOND was meant for March 29, 2024...

And yet, they were nowhere near getting that picture off the ground, and it remains date-less. Which is good, but it should've never been given the 3/29/2024 date to begin with if it was nowhere near leaving the station... And I've said before that these dates are really just announced to whet the appetites of investors and shareholders, but... Here's the thing...

After guesting on a podcast recently and talking about all the eras of Disney Feature Animation, I've come to suspect something about Jennifer Lee's tenure as WDAS leader...

And I think it all goes back to her feature directorial debut, the original FROZEN...

FROZEN was changed dramatically within a year of its release. Like as late as June 2013, when its teaser was out... The movie was released in November 2013...

Now, luckily for everyone involved, the film was a critical hit, an Oscar winner, and a financial explosion. Me? I think the film has always been something of a mess, seemingly hastily thrown together and it was evident to me that stuff was being worked on at last minute... But I'm not the rest of the world, who went gaga for the movie. There are parts of it that really work on their own, but I feel it needed another year in the works to really come together as a grand slam.

Every once in a while, an animated movie is taken apart and put back together way too close to release date. Infamously, Pixar's TOY STORY 2 was dramatically overhauled within a year of release, and few feel that that film is anything less than great. But that's a sort-of an "okay, phew, we made it, but NEVER again" thing. TOY STORY 2 is a rare instance where they worked way too hard under such immense pressure, and delivered something really good.

And it should've never happened on FROZEN. I know that the studios "have" to meet these release dates and not miss those scheduled promotional tie-ins (see MINIONS 2 merchandise and early MARIO MOVIE Happy Meal toys, for starters), but this isn't it... Especially when you're seemingly doing it again and again and again.

Before I go on, yes, John Lasseter also did similar stuff. FROZEN was a movie he oversaw after all. ZOOTOPIA saw a protagonist swap and a massive overhaul about a year and a few months away from its release date. One character was rewritten and redesigned for MOANA, with another one's presence dialed down significantly... But only after some merchandise was made. It wasn't as common under Lasseter as it is now, though. Lasseter tended to break stuff apart and boot directors off of movies well before they came out. The issue with Lasseter was that he wanted directors to make the movie HE wanted to make, but he usually got the dirty work out of the way earlier. Not... Less than 5 months away from release!

I get the sense that FROZEN director-writer Lee - upon becoming the CCO of Disney Animation following Lasseter's prolonged exit - thinks you can just do that with any animation production willy-nilly and it'll turn out just fine in the end.

FROZEN II had a whole Disney+ documentary admitting to this, RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON had a massive director change about a year away from release, STRANGE WORLD and WISH felt similarly thrown together. MOANA 2 was a Disney+ show first, and became a movie... Seemingly not too long ago. Many directors left under Lee, much like they did under Lasseter. Don Hall left, as did Carlos Lopez Estrada. It seems like no progress has been made on whatever it is Suzi Yoonessi and Josie Trinidad are/were working on.

From my outside perspective, Lee's WDAS doesn't lock a picture a year in advance, making tiny revisions along the way, and hoping for the best when the thing is completed. To me, it seems like they needlessly change and rearrange huge vital chunks of their movies so close to completion, no doubt a strain on the crews and no doubt a reason why some - myself included, as I try to be fair - are a little underwhelmed with their recent work. And then they take too much advice from focus groups, or one of the crew's kids, and then go and re-do whole things because of that... Like, what's going on over there? And it's equally wrong that at Sony Animation, Phil Lord seemed to have kept changing things on ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE to the point where at least more than one version was rolling in theaters...

You just gotta lock the damn thing a year away from release. Novel concept, I guess. If it really isn't working, then delay it. That's what Pixar did with GOOD DINOSAUR and ELIO. Disney Animation did that with THE LION KING... But I guess that's a lot to ask for.

Also, there's your answer as to why WDAS will likely not make any 2D movies anytime soon. Sorry y'all, but Donald Duck's appearance on HOT ONES isn't the sign of a full-on mainstream 2D feature comeback. The studio heads and clout-loaded producers can micromanage these CG films a lot easier, without all that pesky stuff with lead animators and the whole 2D process/pipeline getting in their way, in their attempts to get the "story" right whilst keeping the assembly line going.

And ya wonder why an animation strike is currently underway...

[prettywitchiusaka]

Hello Ben.

Not sure if you'll even take the time to read this. But between the P. Diddy scandal, Harry and Meghan's corporate "empire" falling apart, and that shareholders meeting at Disney fast approaching, I figured I'd at least make one last attempt to convince you to save your skin while you still can.

I'm not gonna be mean about it, I'm not even gonna be pedantic. Rather, I'm just gonna say this.

By refusing to get your act together and save yourself you're letting your fans down.

You're letting me and the rest of the skeptic community down.

You're letting @gatorfisch and especially @aeltri down.

You're letting what few friends you have left in the entertainment industry down.

And most importantly, you're letting yourself down.

You don't deserve this.

You know you don't deserve this.

You didn't do anything to deserve the nightmare you've been subjected to for nearly a decade. You're basically being punished for the crime of existing and being more talented than your enemies, and by not disowning them, you're letting them win.

But that's not how this story has to end; you still have some time and sway, not to mention powerful allies in the industry. Take advantage of them. Let them help you. Otherwise, you'll be hung out to dry along with the people who've wronged you, and I don't think you want that.

So use your resources. Take back your life so you can start to heal. Get back to being the man you used to be. The man we fell in love with a decade ago. Because you're much more likeable when you're just being yourself.

Or rather...well, let me put it this way. If Nelson Peltz gets that seat on the Disney Shareholders board he's gunning for, changes will be coming. If you don't toe the line, there will be repercussions.

And frankly, after the way you were treated on MoM, I think you'd like nothing more than a redemption on that third one.

Or, you can have more of this;

Granted, it's just a rumor. But I think you're just as sick of the multiverse shenanigans as the fans are.

Anyway, that's all I have to say, for now. I leave the ball in your court. Good luck.

[alexaloves]

Footage From ‘The Bear’ Gives Fans a First Peek of Season 3 - Eater Chicago

Food critics are in Season 3.

[feydrautha]

I shake and hiss and snarl like a frightened yet angry chihuaha whenever someone calls fanfiction "content", fic writers "content creators" and fic readers "content consumers"

Idk about you, but I am literally only vibing, writing indulgent little stories for myself, maybe my friends as well if they're in the insanity with me, and if someone else happens to enjoy them, that's great!

You meanwhile seem to be stuck in some delusion where you're attending a shareholder meeting at Disney with how you're trying to mentally monetise something that has its very basis in being a gift economy. Kill the Jeff Bezos that lives in your brain and if not, then don't take him out for a walk

[insanityclause]

In case you didn’t see the Disney shareholder meeting news, they’re holding on to Dwayne Johnson with a live action “Moana” movie.

I hadn't seen it yet, but here's the full announcement - including some a longer GotG trailer, too.

[leviathangourmet]

WDW_Pro has a whistleblower who informs him of this. The whistelblower turned over PowerPoint slides of various woke sermons employees were required to attend.

According to the whistleblower:

Since the summer of 2020, employees at Disney were required to keep DEI "virtue diaries" documenting their actions in service of the cause.

Their continuing employment, opportunities for advancement, bonuses and salary increases were all dependent on showing this "virtue diary" and documenting all the DEI meetings and conferences they attended. In other words, if you wanted to keep your job, you were required to participate in the DEI indoctrination sessions.

The whistleblower further reveals that when the "My Not-So-Secret-Gay Agenda" videos from Disney's woke "Reimagine Tomorrow" initiative were leaked, former "Chief Diversity Officer" Thon Newton issued the official corporate lie that these videos were "fake news" and instructed Disney employees to deny that they were real.

The whistleblower then revealed that if Disney's DEI Police saw a Disney employee making any kind of traditionalist or conservative statement online, that person would be summoned to a Human Resources "meeting" and demanded to explain why they transgressed against the one true faith.

WDW_Pro notes that this intolerable intolerance had the desired effect of driving away almost all conservative-leaning or committed Christian workers at Disney.

Disney, if these reports are true, purged all of its conservative-leaning people -- but still insists its movie are "for everybody" and that any conservative who chooses to boycott this vicious Marxist indoctrination factory is a bigot or prude.

The whistlebower says that Thon Newton also instituted a policy in which any minority -- a member of the DEI coalition -- must be seriously considered for any job he or she applied for, even if he lacked the very most basic, essential requirements for the job. Even for highly technical positions, job prerequisites were waved for DEI candidates.

The whistleblower also revealed that Disney changed its bonus payment schedule for jobs like advertising sales. Where previously your bonus was just based on how much advertising space you sold, Disney changed it MBO (Management by Objective) system to include bonuses for such things as "Championing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," rather than actually increasing the value of the company and stockholder value. To receive qualify for this bonus, you were required to attend their biweekly diversity indoctrination sessions. (And note it in your "virtue diary," I assume.) WDW_Pro provides pictures of what the whistleblower says are Disney's corporate materials specifying these special bonuses-for-being-leftwing.

That video below, and Valiant Renegade's follow-up.

Hopefully Blob Iger will be closely questioned about this at the upcoming shareholder earnings meeting in early August.

But then, whenever he gets a tough question, he lies and equivocates, and apparently shareholders have no legal right to get true answers to pertinent questions about how the company they own is being run.

As if that weren't enough -- the producers of the next super-feminist trans-positive lesbian Star Wars TV show The Acoylte brag that their newfanged feminist queer take on the Star Wars property will feature laser-swords.. but not guns.

Because guns are icky, I assume?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.

Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

On Tuesday (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

On Wednesday (June 7), I’m keynoting the Re:publica conference in Berlin.

On Thursday (June 8) at 8PM, I’m at Otherland Books in Berlin.

#15yrsago John McCain vows to continue Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program https://www.wired.com/2008/06/mccain-id-spy-o/

#10yrsago OccupyGezi: the People’s Bulldozer https://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/post/52008000563/peoples-bulldozer-chases-police-toma-vehicles-in

#10yrsago Meet austerity’s millionaires https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/01/top-earners-millionaires-inequality-city-finance

#10yrsago Gas-mask dervish: #occupygezi https://twitter.com/joeman42/status/341492885650292738

#5yrsago Private equity bosses took $200m out of Toys R Us and crashed the company, lifetime employees got $0 in severance https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/

#5yrsago Bernie Sanders rallies Disneyland employees for a $15 minimum wage https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/390430-bernie-sanders-disney-needs-moral-defense-for-having-hungry-workers-while/

#5yrsago UK consumer review magazine Which?: your smart home is spying on you, from your TV to your toothbrush https://web.archive.org/web/20180603221154/https://www.which.co.uk/news/2018/06/which-investigation-reveals-staggering-level-of-smart-home-surveillance/

#5yrsago America is the world’s first poor rich country https://eand.co/why-america-is-the-worlds-first-poor-rich-country-17f5a80e444a

#5yrsago Zuckerberg blows off Facebook shareholders’ demand for transparency, says he’s committed to transparency https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/01/corporate-dictatorship-facebook-shareholders-get-their-turn-to-grill-mark-zuckerberg/

#5yrsago Illinois votes to eliminate inmates’ doctor visit co-pays, equivalent to one month’s wages https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/05/30/the-580-co-pay

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!

[popculturebrain]

‘Moana’ Live Action Remake Set at Disney With Dwayne Johnson Returning

Dwayne Johnson announced a new live-action remake of “Moana” during the Disney 2023 Annual Meeting of Shareholders Webcast on April 3.

Subscribe to the Pop Culture Brain Daily newsletter for more stories like this!

[lurkiestvoid]

yeahhhhh pretty much, except the only thing is it's less individual investors and more Hedge Funds.

Hedge funds use algorithms to maximize profits by any means necessary, up to and including certain tactics that will deliberately tank a stock. If it's not performing well or if they just don't want it to, they can bet against it and whip out a variety of bullshit of varying legality to push the share price down, which causes other HFs to sell to stay ahead of the market, which leads portfolio managers and accountants and regular folks to sell, and then when the selloffs are done the original HFs make fucking bank off strangling the stock. (This also works in reverse: betting a stock will rise, baiting others to buy in, profit, then bet against it again)

So a "strong" company is one with lots of gains and very few/short losses (harder to break/less room to manipulate, generally Big Name stocks like Disney/Apple/etc) whereas a "weak" company with more losses than gains or lots of volatility is a prime target for the piranhas. The people running companies are terrified of stagnation, let alone losses, because it can very, very easily be taken advantage of and even outright kill the company in just a few weeks or months. Perpetual growth is virtually required to survive the market as it is today.

Individual, casual/hobbyist investors with at most a couple dozen shares in a handful of companies don't have the numbers/margins to seriously affect a stock price. Even hobbyist/semipro "traders" who obsess/hoard and attempt to imitate The Big Guys are comparitively few in number and just don't have the weight to affect much more than their own account balance. But hedge funds do have MASSIVE weight in the market, throwing around thousands of shares at a time, several times a day, for dozens of different tickers, in multiple markets and across multiple industries.

And then there are "market makers." These are giant companies whose SOLE purpose is to manipulate the market ensure "market liquidity," or, "a buy for every sell, a sell for every buy." What this means is that if demand is high but there aren't enough shares available to sell, they make more by "borrowing" them, potentially infinitely. If these market makers feel a stock is too "overvalued," they can dump loads of those borrowed shares to saturate the market and drive the price back down. There is extremely little regulation on this, which leads to situations where the same one share can have dozens or hundreds of "owners."

This can happen because regular everyday investors don't actually "own" stock at all. Like, very literally, their "shares" are 1) not real and 2) can be liquidated by their brokers at any time, because, as the go-between third party, their brokers own the shares "on their behalf," and brokers essentially just "deliver" digital IOUs. All Actual Real Shares are held in the DTCC by a company called Cede & Co, and everything else is traded on credit.

If you buy a "share" in a company through a broker, it's not your name on the company shareholder list, it's your broker's. If you're submitting paperwork to your broker for voting for that company's policies at their annual meeting, your broker is pooling aaaaall the votes and "proportionally" voting "on your behalf." And your broker can decide to lend out your shares without telling you (to their own profit) and you may or may not ever get them back -- this is called "failure to delivers" or FTDs and there is a massive backlog of them that just ... never get addressed.

this is hella over-summarized and sloppy but the tl;dr is that supply and demand economics are beyond broken, the entire stock market is more fake than you ever imagined, it's propped up entirely by computer programs trading IOUs-of-IOUs-of-IOUs, and is easily manipulated at the literal whim of bank-and-billionaire proxies.

companies really have got to be okay with stagnant profits. what is wrong with earning the same amount every year? why does it always have to be more? it's not sustainable. there are only so many people on the planet you can profit from 😭

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Estimated $100m second weekend for INSIDE OUT 2... Really out here breaking some records, eh? Rare for a movie, and the first time for an animated movie, should the estimates be on the low end. Very possible the actual is like $98-99m, which is still very impressive, and only an approx. 35% drop.

If it gets over $100m over the three-day, it'll sit with all-timers THE FORCE AWAKENS, ENDGAME, INFINITY WAR, BLACK PANTHER, JURASSIC WORLD, and THE AVENGERS...

Really shows that the original INSIDE OUT is beloved after its blockbuster run in 2015, and it shows that audiences quite like this movie and are back for more. Might even make a play for INCREDIBLES 2's $608m domestic total, unadjusted of course. (The actual total in today's ticket prices is around $720m, per The-Numbers.) That would make it the highest-earning animated movie domestically, but right now, Pixar's Supers hold that title. Adjusted, it will always belong to SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.

But if anybody was gonna beat Pixar, it was gonna be Pixar. I don't see another studio getting a shot at this, maybe except cousin studio Disney Animation and their MOANA 2... Or DreamWorks if SHREK 5 really lands like a meteor in a few years from now.

Worldwide, INSIDE OUT 2 sits at $724m. Again, within two weeks of release. Already circling the original's $857m take. (Before anyone says it, the film saw a small re-release in July 2020 that pushed the take to... $858m. Know that I refer to original release grosses, lol.)

And with this movie doing so well, I see all the Chicken Little-ing... Over the wrong problem.

"We're NEVER getting an original movie from this studio again"

Okay... Let me try to debunk this.

I don't think an animation studio of this size can feasibly ONLY make sequels, because eventually... Wells run dry. Also, the people who yell this often online... Are they aware that ELIO exists and will be released next summer? Are they aware that Domee Shi, director of TURNING RED, has a new movie in the works at Pixar? (It's not ELIO, she is likely just doing story/script on that one.) Are they aware that Pixar has a movie slotted for release in late winter 2026 between ELIO and TOY STORY 5?

I'll tell you something funny... There was a fellow who insisted to me in December 2015 that Pixar was going to be done with original movies after THE GOOD DINOSAUR became the studio's first money-loser. That they'd put COCO on hold, and that would be it... LOL. This person also claimed to be a shareholder... That speaks volumes.

But no, really... You need to keep making untested or original movies in order to have things to make sequels to in the first place. And one of Pixar's recent losses was... A spin-off of TOY STORY featuring a version of one of their most recognizable, practically synonymous-with-their-name characters. Yeah, that epic movie about Lenny the binoculars!

So, please... Never making originals again? That's just a bad business plan and completely not feasible.

When originals/non-sequels don't meet the corporations' expectations (because I refuse to call SOUL, LUCA, TURNING RED and ELEMENTAL "flops" in any way, shape, or form... *Especially* the first three), the studios don't stop making them... They stop making them in a specific way.

Hence, Pete Docter - likely with Bob Iger pointing a gun at his head - saying Pixar won't make "autobiographical" movies anymore. Basically no more TURNING REDs, and more... Well, whatever the early 2026 movie is going to be. (Which is not this "Ducks" thing people keep insisting it is, as far as I know.)

The other studios do that, too. Off the top of my head... DreamWorks had a bunch of these fantasy movie in the works circa 2011. Stuff like THE GRIMM LEGACY, RUMBLEWICK, ALMA, fantastical stories with something of a darker bent to them. They were also considering adapting GIL'S ALL FRIGHT DINER... They had all these really cool movies in the works that would've redefined what a DreamWorks movie could be, post-SHREK. And then after a movie called RISE OF THE GUARDIANS lost money (even though it had good legs and became a cult hit thereafter), all of it never happened. ME AND MY SHADOW, which was in some form of production and was HOTLY anticipated by the animation community, got canceled. They proceeded to finish TURBO and MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN.

Both of which also "flopped"... I remember Jeffrey Katzenberg, when he was still running that place, saying something to the tune of: "Well those failed because we tried to aim at preteens and teenagers." Really? TURBO and PEABODY, which were overpriced to begin with, were aiming for that age group? The plan going forward was "We're going to make movies for kids and their parents." Whatever the hell that meant. Eventually, Comcast bought DreamWorks, a little over a year later. And the flightplan constantly changed after that.

Studios don't give up on movies that aren't sequels, they just re-route them. They find "reasons" for previous movie failures, and usually it's the fault of the filmmakers and the stories they chose to tell. It's never any outside circumstances, which are actually often the case with money-losing movies. The very movies that go on to be big on home video and streaming, and attain cult followings. With today's line of thinking, Walt Disney wouldn't have even gotten past PINOCCHIO's disastrous original release results.

So instead of yelling "we'll never get original movies again", I direct my energy elsewhere... And I say "Well, hopefully the future movies - both original and sequel - don't fall flat because of needless executive interference that attempts to *correct* a perceived problem." That to me is the issue, not the fantasy of Pixar completely stopping making original movies altogether.