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.
This version of rebranding starts and ends with denigrating your existing audience to gain favour with your hoped-for new audience.