Diversity casting seems as much about creating fall guys and gals for the inevitable failure of massive IPs being incompetently mined for profit by woke corps. Amazon’s Rings of Power, the Big Tech retail robber baron’s high draw intellectual property for which it spent $500 million on just the rights, has bombed badly with a 36% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Expect that to change though as Amazon and the media push the narrative that negative reviews of the woke reboot whose producers and writers displayed vocal contempt for the original Tolkien source material are racist and a hate crime, combined with the expected claims of death threats against actors (if there aren’t any yet, Amazon’s PR people will find some or invent some).
That won’t change much.
The core problem is that the new woke era of Peak TV is terrible at producing basic entertaining material. We live in a world in which theaters and TV have converged with streaming and 90% of everything consists of buying the rights to an IP and then making as much of it as possible in order to drive subscription rates. Amazon’s theory is that blowing a billion on Rings of Power will drive new subscriptions and retain existing ones. It’s a dumb business model that burned billions of dollars for the big players during Peak TV. Netflix’s stock price drop should have been a warning. But despite that Peak TV continues with billions in spending by the big players.
Accusing critics of racism, or some sort of phobia, is a convenient dodge to cover up the basic incompetence and greed of the key players in this scheme. No movie or show fails anymore, it’s just beset by “racist trolls” whose views have to be urgently censored lest there be an urgent rash of hate crimes against…
1. The Ghostbusters reboot
2. The Disney Star Wars conveyor belt of garbage
3. Whatever IP is about to waste a billion dollars
But you can only cry racism so much to cover up the creative and economic failures of wokeness. Go woke and go broke.