The Marvel franchise has jumped further down the Black Lives Matter rabbit hole with the recent premiere of the television series “Cloak and Dagger” on Disney’s Freeform channel.
The eponymous hero, Cloak, is re-cast as a black teen who tries to avenge the shooting of his unarmed younger brother at the hands of a white police officer. Of course, this backstory is reminiscent of numerous media narratives regarding the shootings of unarmed black men in the past few years, including the 2014 Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo.
This is just one of many examples of Disney’s recent push to refashion beloved franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, into liberal propaganda. For instance, in this year’s Star Wars film, “Solo,” a screenwriter for the movie revealed that the character Lando Calrissian is “pansexual,” or sexually-attracted to anyone or anything.
What this character’s sexual orientation has to do with the Star Wars universe is as remote as the galaxy far, far away, but it’s no coincidence that Disney has chosen to inject far-left ideology into franchises explicitly marketed toward young people.
Are we to believe that the executives at Disney are earnest in their conviction that young people are craving leftist buzzword-concepts like “inclusivity” and “social justice?” Is this simply a case of Disney getting its target audience’s likes and dislikes wrong?
No, otherwise, Disney’s executives would not have canceled their hugely-successful sitcom “Roseanne” after a racist tweet from actress Roseanne Barr, which they are desperately attempting to resurrect without her out of fear of a massive loss of revenue. Nor would figures, such as Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, claim that some of their fans feel “threatened” by the increased gender, sexual, and racial diversity on screen.
In these and many other cases, Disney’s executives and content creators have implicitly acknowledged the unpopularity of the changes they have made with their audiences.
If Disney were operating strictly with an eye towards maximizing profit, they wouldn’t go out of their way to inject leftist ideology into their products. In fact, they would presumably seek to steer clear of politics altogether, or even attempt to selectively cater to both left- and right-leaning young people, especially if recent polls denoting the increasing prevalence of conservatism of Generation Z are taken into account.
In light of these facts, the only explanation for this move toward espousing leftist causes in the Marvel and Star Wars franchises must be a political, rather than an economic, motivation.
But if leftism is as bad for the bottom line as it now appears, Disney won’t be promoting it for much longer. Either they will run out of talent to fire or run out of audiences to indoctrinate.
