Tag: hollywood

Hollywood: makes films about alternate realities, superheroes, fictional universes with impossible physics – with mostly male leads

Men: YES THIS IS GENIUS

Hollywood: Remakes films with all-female casts

Men: NO THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE 

peaceheather:

abbieprime:

stfueverything:

dbvictoria:

With all the heat Anita Sarkeesian gets for her Tropes series, you’d think it was a new topic, but Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert had a discussion on a similar theme when they were talking about the influx of slasher movies on their show in 1980.

(x)

34 years later and this is STILL relevant

That’s my goddamn lifetime.  

always reblog

Hollywood still has too much to atone for.  The dominance of white males in that system is still largely unchallenged and we still have too many films and television programmes that cater largely to white male audiences.  This dominance has always been a reflection of – and a social assist to – white male superiority in society.  

So long as audiences pay to see the latest white male hero and stay away from films with diverse casting, POC, especially women, nothing changes.  

Films like Ghostbusters, Hidden Figures and Get Out make in-roads, but we’re also on our fifth Jack Sparrow outing no one asked for and another Spiderman no one asked for and another Thor film,  etc –  will be out soon.  This is the dominant form.  

Go see Wonder Woman. See it twice.  Tune out the hundreds of white male hero dramas on telly, support shows with diverse casting and diverse production teams.  We really don’t need another James Bond or Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne or King Arthur or Game of Thrones.  It’s been done.  White hero stereotypes are done. Violence against women and minorities as entertainment – backward and more than done.  Move on, move forward.  

Without progress, we keep spinning our wheels in the same rut and look at society – no better.  Our art should reflect the depth and breadth of what we are and can be – not cater to the egotistical, sexist, racist demands of the needy few.  

Dear Hollywood,

Enough with your apocalyptic grimdark tales of white people being heroic and surviving when all others perish.  

You do see why I’m bringing this up, don’t you?  

Cinema can be a huge (negative) influence on those who are easily influenced by powerful, fictional visuals.  

Take that how you will.  

gayna-scully:

prokopetz:

silkktheshocka:

texasuberalles:

freyjapup:

Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled

Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.

This is so fucked up.

To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth – this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)

It gets worse.

Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast:
“ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”

Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.

So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.

And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?

Source: http://www.themarysue.com/warner-bros-animation-girl-market/

Helps explain a lot of the BS behind the removal of Rey from marketing early in ST: TFA campaigns as well.  

‘Their sexism is sexist.’

Well, yes.

If I were a bit younger, I’d love to have a go writing a book on the privileged white male syndrome in Hollywood and how it has damaged and continues to damage society.  There is SO MUCH material. 

Please tell me someone is doing this or is willing to.  There isn’t nearly enough conversation about it.  

After watching Suicide Squad (and the emptiness that followed), so, so aware how desperately we need change in the film/tv industry, like 150 years ago.  The tough guys with manpain, the creepy stalker/thug all the little boys idolise, the tragic anti-hero who has no trouble beating women, but finds redemption – it is so dull and overdone and needs a ticket on a train to the nowhere it came from. Suicide Squad might have given itself a few points with Will Smith and Viola Davis in the leads (and they were the best things in it), and a character like Diablo, but there was no missing how white everything else was (including the audiences, no doubt).   

We need to see women, POC, queer characters, black characters – all with agency and ability wrecking havoc on these screens. Queer baiting needs to end and real queer content on the screen needs to be embraced, bright and bold. The weakness of the white (straight) (mostly) male hero/anti-hero standard has to be written out. Enough. The racism is so blatant. Write it out.  The sexism is blatant. Write it out.  The peoples of this world are so diverse and we stick with telling the same old stories.  

Next time the hype train pulls up to your platform, forget the ticket, don’t get on board.  Wait for a better train.  

Content creators: build a better train.