Since I work from home most of the week I get to listen to a lot of podcasts and I was listening to Nerdrotic and he was talking about current Marvel movies (which he calls the M-She-U) and he mentioned a recent interview where Kevin Feige said that his goal was to have more female heroes than male heroes. Although there will always be normies who pay for the movies, I think over all we will see a decline in interest.
My question is the following... is there a term for what we see in modern day entertainment that generally appeals to guys? I could swear I heard a term for it, but I can't remember. Yes, you will find women who are into nerdy hobbies or gaming but this process of ignoring your main customer base to pander to people who really don't buy your stuff in the same numbers is perplexing. I get that they have to push "the message" but it is still odd to see them ruin their own business.
I have been saying for a while that comic books and Star Wars should be prime examples of what not to do. You can mock the guys who have many long boxes full of comic books at home (like me) but you need them in the long run. With Star Wars I was a huge fan of the old Expanded Universe (still buy the books and comics when I can) and Disney just wiped that out when they could've did their own thing but maybe make animated adaptations of the old EU as a separate universe. Although the dumbest thing was to buy Star Wars because they wanted something to appeal to boys only to do the opposite and talk endlessly about getting more women interested in Star Wars, and I won't get into the fact they could've had Mara Jade who was already a very popular female character.
One last thing about comic books. I get so tired when I see that poll that shows that comic book fans are roughly 50/50 men and women. I know plenty of people who think watching an MCU movie or wearing a Captain America shirt makes them a comic book fan, and of course if I ask them what their favorite comic books are I am the one that is gatekeeping. Nerdrotic also mentioned when he ran a comic book store he would actively try to get more women to shop there and at best it was a 70/30 ratio.
But is there a term for the business model we are seeing? Also, there has to be a way to attract new customers while not crapping all over your original ones.
Sorry for the long message.
The term for the erasure of the original and replacing it to attract a new clientele is called rebranding. What they ideally wanted was market expansion, but figured they had tapped what they could and knew their expansion would not appeal to their original customer base, so deepsixed them. This destroyed their business model and they sought to retrieve previous revenue sources by guilting the fans with "stop being misogynists.
That never worked before, doesn't work now. Just ask every abusive mother, sister, and girlfriend.
These corporations aren’t rebranding these properties, though. Woke companies are keeping the old sign on the door, deliberately, in order to mislead consumers into thinking these properties are the same ones they’ve always loved.
Converged companies are pretending that these brands are the same so that established customers will be duped into supporting products that are no longer made for them. It’s skin suits all the way down, and the cries of racism and misogyny only materialize when the old fans recognize and call out the con.
The goal is to have both your preexisting fan base and a new, bigger, sexier fan base, too. Problem is these two groups don’t actually like the same stuff, so the changes end up ruining the property for old fans. If a new group of fans don’t materialize, the property is destroyed.
For the leftists embedded in corporations, this outcome is just fine; if leftists can’t convert your enterprise to leftism, they’re happy to sink your operation from within.
For the suits who rubber stamp this retardation, it doesn’t really matter what happens on a consumer product level. The executives are compelled to chase those ESG dollars regardless. In the end, we all essentially pay these commies to destroy our favorite stuff, either directly through taxation and ESG investing or indirectly through inflation theft.
That’s it! I get what you mean about abusive behavior. I’ve seen that with relatives
This version of rebranding starts and ends with denigrating your existing audience to gain favour with your hoped-for new audience.
When they started attacking male gamers I remember thinking you do realize men make up a massive chunk of gamers so why are you pushing the girl power stuff into games that appeal to men
The goal is to destroy the medium. Saying it appeals to a (nonexistent) market of "gurl gamers" that can be tapped into is just how they sell it to retard gaming executives.
I disagree.
Not only can they see the legacy audience, they HATE the legacy audience and want to hurt them.
You're still under the illusion that movies and comics are being produced as "entertainment."
Let's throw that idea right out.
See, years ago the Hollywood tribe realized that they could simply follow a generic plotline script and stuff it full of propaganda. That's why every movie they make is so samey and so shitty. There's no need to put real effort in past the basics that are expected. The audience will show up no matter what because it's a normalized part of culture now.
Same thing with comics except it's even more blatant. However the comic consoomer always tended to be more intelligent and antisocial so the conditioning broke and caused comics to fail. Those readers mostly still happily line up for muh new MCU trash though.
You really need to stop giving things the benefit of the doubt. Stop looking at the world through innocent eyes. If you're on this board you should know better by now.
Call me cynical if you want but if you watch their interviews and "behind the scenes" stuff they blatantly tell you all this to your face.
No arguments from me. I guess I can be overly hopeful at times
You have a valid point. I know that Gary has moved to Texas and will be about 3 or 4 hours from me and will open a comic book store for back issues and indies so I plan on going down one Saturday. But I’ve thought the same thing. These companies won’t change so review retro stuff or support good undies. I plan on giving Eric July’s comics a chance.
Maybe "massification" is the term you are thinking of. That's taking something that is either niche or at least has some limited appeal and trying to make it more palatable to a general audience.