There's a lot going on in the entertainment world right now, topics that I really want to write posts on, but I know I'm not in a place to say anything worthwhile about - at least not yet. Netflix is in crisis after a subscriber loss and resulting stock price crash. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's defamation trial has taken over social media and the Youtube algorithm. Disney is in a fight with the GOP. We're facing down a bare bones summer film slate with big blockbusters being delayed all over the place. Oh, and the Russia/Ukraine conflict is still in full swing, the January 6 investigation keeps turning up more dirt, and this pandemic still isn't over.
Let me focus on the first three stories, though, and why I'm wrestling with what and how much to say on these topics.
I've written quite a lot about Netflix over the years, cheerleading their efforts to be an industry disrupter and create the current streaming status quo as we know it. Full disclosure: I still own some of their stock. However, in recent years the shine has worn off for a variety of reasons. The big one is that the rest of Hollywood has caught up to their innovations, and the streaming wars are in full swing. Netflix, despite knowing that it was coming for years, has failed to account for the competition. They're still clinging to a set of directives that worked well for them in the past, but are now actively holding them back. Owning rather than licensing their available content, releasing episodes all at once to support binge viewing, day and date releases that have antagonized the movie theaters, and prioritizing quantity over quality when it comes to their content, are just a few of them.
Every day there's a new article about the chaos behind the scenes at Netflix. A lot of the mess seems to stem from mismanagement. The Wrap's expose on the "Kids & Family" segment of Netflix Animation is a good example, detailing how Netflix canceled promising projects and lost creators because of draconian rules and metrics that kneecapped shows right out of the gate. There's so much still coming out about the company's dysfunctions and anything I write now may have to be updated in days, if not hours. They're definitely losing on the PR front. All of Netflix's responses so far have been to assuage their investors rather than their subscribers. Suddenly, an ad supported tier is coming after Netflix being staunchly ad-free since their inception. Suddenly they want to crack down on password sharing. It's inevitable that Netflix is going to lose more subscribers next quarter. Everyone with complaints about the service has been enjoying the schadenfreude, but I have much more mixed feelings. Regime change may be in order, but the last thing I want is to see Netflix crash and burn and be eaten up by a competitor, further consolidating the already too consolidated entertainment industry.
On Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, the highly publicized trial isn't telling me anything new that I haven't heard through the usual gossip channels over the last ten years. Depp was one of my favorite actors when I was a teenager and young adult, and when his personal troubles started hitting the press, I quietly resolved to stay out of any of the discourse. My biases have never left me. However, from the evidence that I've seen, Depp and Heard are both deeply troubled people who have been terrible to each other. The degree to which one is more culpable than the other is not something I feel comfortable drawing conclusions about. Public sentiment is clearly with Depp, but I'm not so sure.
And frankly, if that were all there was to the story, I would be happy not to comment at all. The trouble is that the media scrum around the trial has become so huge and so out of control, it's turning Amber Heard into a pariah. I am very, very uneasy about this because it's giving the online misogynist creep community someone to rage and froth against, and the level of vitriol is disturbing to see. If this is who Johnny Depp's fans are now, I don't think I want to be one. At first, part of me was relieved that Depp was seeing some image rehabilitation after the public drubbing he took after the earlier British defamation trial, resulting in his firing from "Fantastic Beasts," and the cancellation of other projects. However, I quickly became aghast that he chose to do this by orchestrating a media circus and subjecting Heard to this kind of deranged witch hunt. I have been trying very hard to ignore the trial, but it's reached O.J. levels of public fascination over the last few days, ensuring that we'll be hearing about this for years to come. I've even caught myself wondering, idly, who will play Depp and Heard in the inevitable made for TV movie.
Finally, there's the Mouse. I can't write a full post about this because so much of it concerns politics, and I try to keep politics out of this blog as much as possible. I have consistently failed to keep any kind of neutral POV on the subject. Anyway, what began as Bob Chapek mishandling a PR situation has now blown up into a full-on grudge match against the Florida GOP over the "don't say gay" law. This is one of the few times I've been unreservedly on the side of the Mouse, though I'm more than a little annoyed that it took so much public shaming to get them to do the right thing. Still, I do understand the hesitancy given that Disney has now attracted the attention of the supremely annoying QAnon conspiracy nuts, who are busy staging protests and denouncing Disney as part of the Coco Puffs cabal, or whatever.
What's more interesting here is how this seems to be part of a trend of greater LGBT normalization at Disney. It's been incremental but it's there. Disney declined to edit out a line of dialogue about a character's lesbian moms, so that the newest "Doctor Strange" movie could play in Saudi Arabia. Their young adult "Love, Victor" series is coming to Disney+, after worries over its LGBT themes pushed it to Hulu for its first two seasons. At this point, I don't think anybody can say that Disney isn't willing to take some risks. They're not particularly big risks as long as Ron DeSantis keeps shooting himself in the foot, but still I appreciate the effort.
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