I would assume it’s because the Mulan live action remake is also releasing that weekend. Black panther was extremely popular and they don’t wanna compete with themselves on the critical opening weekend.
Mulan is straight to streaming though, so it does compete in terms of eyeballs. If folks are preoccupied with a BP screening they may not have time or want to also watch Mulan in the same weekend.
This reminds me of the protests in Reedy Creek in Florida I've heard about. My wife was driving near Downtown Disney (now called Disney Springs) and saw the signs of the protests. They basically held signs saying 'Reedy Creek IS DISNEY' which is basically true as far as anybody is concerned. They're not allowed to have their own police department, but they employ police officers from Orange County. So yeah, if you live in Florida, you'd definitely see how Disney owns more than they probably should.
Disney didn't "stop" theaters from screening Black Panther this past/upcoming weekend. Like most Disney films, it's not available for second-run showings.
Disney has used the "vault" for theatrical showings since 1944, when they reissued Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though the last film actually re-released in theaters was The Lion King almost a decade ago. (Nowadays, a film is "released" from the vault to a reissue of home media (like Bluray).
Eisner was mostly responsible for changing vault releases to home media sales (like VHS or DVD) instead of theatrical releases.
Disney does not generally grant licenses to theaters to show its films second-run (meaning after their initial box-office run) except as part of re-release initiated by Disney. They make extremely limited exceptions to this policy; the Rocky Horror Picture Show is basically the only film in the Disney/Fox vault that they allow to show second-run.
In this case, the theater announced they were going to show Black Panther without actually bothering to get the license ahead of time, and Disney did not make an exception to their policy.
Which is to say Disney stopped the theatre from showing the movie. The reason the theatre couldn't show the movie is because Disney wouldn't allow it to do so.
I think the point is that the headline makes it sound like a theater showing any random movie it wants is a normal, accepted practice, and that Disney was somehow doing something nefarious by stopping them from showing it. In essence, a clickbaity headline.
I know when I clicked on the headline, that's what I expected, and the article didn't actually say why Disney did what they did, but my impression continued to be that Disney was doing something shady. The top comment in the HN comments points out that this is just normal Disney policy, and is entirely a non-newsworthy, non-event.
If you had a different expectation, cool, but I think many people probably expected there to be shenanigans going on, when it's really just long-standing Disney policy.
(A policy I personally think is lame, but that's neither here nor there.)
(Seems like this post is now flagged, so I guess the HN hive mind agrees this is a weak article.)
Which is to say Disney stopped the theatre from showing the movie. The reason the theatre couldn't show the movie is because Disney wouldn't allow it to do so.
No, theaters can't just use any copy of a film to show a movie; those copies are jealously guarded by the distributors and are subject to strict controls, especially by Disney (and Fox too, before the acquisition). Generally, each copy of a film reel must be acquired from the distribution company and returned to it after the theater's second-run showings have ended. (For digital projectors, they use an online check-in/check-out system.)
Disney never gave the theater the film (or file, depending on the theater's projection setup) in the first place. The theater could not have shown the movie without affirmative action on Disney's part.
Disney could have simply done nothing at all, and the theater would not have been able to show the film.
I don't think you understand the meaning of "can". It's not a legal term. The use also occludes the active role Disney and other license holders play in the prevention of screening movies.
A lot of people want to give Disney some money; Disney refuses. The title is an apt description of that, and not misleading. It's a bit hyperbolic, but only if you are interested on the Disney's side, for any other point of view it looks reasonable.
Getting into a pedantic argument of the semantics of "stopped" is missing the point that Disney has a vault into which they put their movies so that they can extract more revenue from their IP by trickling it out on a seasonal basis, stopping anyone screening movies that Disney don't want on rotation.
It's especially pertinent here since the purpose of screening the movie was to commemorate the life of Chadwick Boseman, the lead actor of that movie. Disney didn't even make an exception by unvaulting a popular movie on the occasion of the lead actor's death.
… remember that "stop" used as a transitive verb means "to make impassable," or "to keep from carrying out a proposed action." There doesn't have to be an action in progress to stop it. The theatre proposed a course of action, Disney stopped that course of action by not giving access to the resources required to proceed.
There are eight senses of the word "stop" when used as a transitive verb, and your pedantic argument relies on choosing one sense of the word and ignoring the others.
The content of a post affects the comments it brings.
A post describing the technical and design decisions behind gab.com would bring tons of comments about how racist the site is, and would probably be flagged.
I consider Black Panther to be racist, and I consider it important to bring that up(since nobody else does).
A movie set in Africa is racist for having a majority black cast? That’s just having an accurate cast demographic; It would be racist to have a cast representative of the US population (ie. a majority white cast).
This would be a good point, except for the double standard that is being applied to most movies nowadays. Almost all big movies based sometime in the past are being cast with a cast that is not representative of the racial outlook of the times. New WW2 movies are extremely diverse(edit: er maybe not).
This wasn't some small movie trying to be historically accurate. This was a massive big-budget movie that made the conscious decision to hire an almost entirely black cast(edit: and crew) for political reasons.
Such racial discrimination needs to be pushed back against in my opinion, especially as the racial makeup of the country continues to change. Just as the cultural changes of the 70's echo through today, the cultural changes that we put in place now will have ramifications for decades. I don't want it to be a culture of racial discrimination.
One of the main villains, and two of the supporting characters are white.
While the director and screenwriter were black, the film's producers and editors were white, and the rest of the crew itself was made up of the usual assortment of Hollywood crew members, without regard to race. (I have several non-black friends who worked on the movie in the camera, prop, makeup, 2nd unit aka "stunt" unit, and VFX departments.)
If you're going to be racist, at least have the intelligence to look up the cast and crew and IMDB before you spout your Trumpian nonsense.
If this is true, then I learned something and I appreciate you telling me. I'll verify in a couple hours, and will probably change my perspective of the movie because of it.
What I don't like is the personal attack. I got my information not from Fox News or something, but from mainstream media news sites going on and on about how progressive it was that their cast and crew was almost completely black(or at least that's how I remember it). I made the post I did because I wanted to push back against racism.
Again, thank you for the productive portion of your comment. I will learn from it.
I got my information not from Fox News or something, but from mainstream media news sites going on and on about how progressive it was that their cast and crew was almost completely black(or at least that's how I remember it). I made the post I did because I wanted to push back against racism.
Citations required. I read the mainstream media sources too, and I don't know of any that characterized the Black Panther crew as almost all black. The majority of the cast was black, simply because the majority of the characters of the underlying comic are black.
What's next? Are you going to complain if David Copperfield is played by an Indian guy?
Yeah, the usual thing being noted was that it was a predominantly black cast in a major Hollywood film being marketed as a general blockbuster and not as a “black film”.
You are right about the news. I went back and looked, and they only discussed the cast, not the crew(except for some fringe sites that don't warrant discussion). This is most likely a result of my insecurities and biases warping my memory or perception of those articles.
Thank you for discussing this with me. It's easy to assume bad faith and ignore people, but your engagement taught me a lot.
I looked and yup you are right. I misremembered. Thanks! My point still stands with affirmative action being common in movies, but I'll try to avoid unintentional hyperbole.
Trying to remember the diversity in the most recent Hollywood WW2 movies: THERE WASN'T ANY.
1917 was completely white. Dunkirk had two minority characters, both in extra roles. Jojo Rabbit had no minorities, though Hitler was played by a New Zealander of 1/4th-Maori ancestry. Overlord had 1 black character in a supporting role. Midway's cast was 1/4th Asian, and only because 1/4th of the movie is told from the Japanese viewpoint.
Yeah, take your racism back to 4chan or whatever basement board you crawled out from.
1917 wasn't completely white. There were multiple black soldiers in the trenches here and there, which was obviously done just because someone was uncomfortable with "completely white" cast. There is no other reason to do that. With the same logic there should be a white guy somewhere in the background in Wakanda, but there weren't any. That's what the parent comment wants to say.
With the same logic there should be a white guy somewhere in the background in Wakanda, but there weren't any. That's what the parent comment wants to say.
He was complaining about a strawman that existed only in his head. There were multiple random white guys in the background in the city scenes (Wakanda and elsewhere), and multiple named and speaking white supporting characters in the foreground, including Bucky Barnes, and whatever characters Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis were playing.
Re-watching 1917, I realized that there is exactly 1 minority character with a speaking role in the movie: a Sikh soldier during the caravan scene. I rewatched the trench scenes, and there are no black characters. There are white guys covered in ash and dirt that might look black but are clearly white when viewed in 4k, and can be confirmed during the battlefield run scene. (1917 was attempting to be historically accurate; Sikh soldiers made up a larger portion of the British army than did black soldiers.)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadhttps://www.wesh.com/article/reedy-creek-firefighters-protes...
It's long-standing Disney policy, and has effected films from the Fox film archives as well. (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...)
Am I right in thinking this policy started under Eisner, or has it been going on longer?
Nobody else locks their old content up like Fort Knox, Disney.
Eisner was mostly responsible for changing vault releases to home media sales (like VHS or DVD) instead of theatrical releases.
Disney does not generally grant licenses to theaters to show its films second-run (meaning after their initial box-office run) except as part of re-release initiated by Disney. They make extremely limited exceptions to this policy; the Rocky Horror Picture Show is basically the only film in the Disney/Fox vault that they allow to show second-run.
In this case, the theater announced they were going to show Black Panther without actually bothering to get the license ahead of time, and Disney did not make an exception to their policy.
I know when I clicked on the headline, that's what I expected, and the article didn't actually say why Disney did what they did, but my impression continued to be that Disney was doing something shady. The top comment in the HN comments points out that this is just normal Disney policy, and is entirely a non-newsworthy, non-event.
If you had a different expectation, cool, but I think many people probably expected there to be shenanigans going on, when it's really just long-standing Disney policy.
(A policy I personally think is lame, but that's neither here nor there.)
(Seems like this post is now flagged, so I guess the HN hive mind agrees this is a weak article.)
No, theaters can't just use any copy of a film to show a movie; those copies are jealously guarded by the distributors and are subject to strict controls, especially by Disney (and Fox too, before the acquisition). Generally, each copy of a film reel must be acquired from the distribution company and returned to it after the theater's second-run showings have ended. (For digital projectors, they use an online check-in/check-out system.)
Disney never gave the theater the film (or file, depending on the theater's projection setup) in the first place. The theater could not have shown the movie without affirmative action on Disney's part.
Disney could have simply done nothing at all, and the theater would not have been able to show the film.
Ok, they do do that by policy, not by exception. But the title is correct.
A lot of people want to give Disney some money; Disney refuses. The title is an apt description of that, and not misleading. It's a bit hyperbolic, but only if you are interested on the Disney's side, for any other point of view it looks reasonable.
They simply never gave them permission to do so in the first place.
It's especially pertinent here since the purpose of screening the movie was to commemorate the life of Chadwick Boseman, the lead actor of that movie. Disney didn't even make an exception by unvaulting a popular movie on the occasion of the lead actor's death.
But when it comes to the pedantry…
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stop
… remember that "stop" used as a transitive verb means "to make impassable," or "to keep from carrying out a proposed action." There doesn't have to be an action in progress to stop it. The theatre proposed a course of action, Disney stopped that course of action by not giving access to the resources required to proceed.
There are eight senses of the word "stop" when used as a transitive verb, and your pedantic argument relies on choosing one sense of the word and ignoring the others.
If you are going to be pedantic, do it properly.
(edit: I'm probably wrong here, see gamblor956's comment. Leaving it here so others can learn from it)
A post describing the technical and design decisions behind gab.com would bring tons of comments about how racist the site is, and would probably be flagged.
I consider Black Panther to be racist, and I consider it important to bring that up(since nobody else does).
This wasn't some small movie trying to be historically accurate. This was a massive big-budget movie that made the conscious decision to hire an almost entirely black cast(edit: and crew) for political reasons.
Such racial discrimination needs to be pushed back against in my opinion, especially as the racial makeup of the country continues to change. Just as the cultural changes of the 70's echo through today, the cultural changes that we put in place now will have ramifications for decades. I don't want it to be a culture of racial discrimination.
I somewhat understand a majority black cast. The target demographic may be black, and people like to see people like themselves in movies.
On top of that, they may be trying to be accurate to historical or regional details.
But to have both cast and crew as almost entirely black? I don't see the utility in that other than to make a political statement.
While the director and screenwriter were black, the film's producers and editors were white, and the rest of the crew itself was made up of the usual assortment of Hollywood crew members, without regard to race. (I have several non-black friends who worked on the movie in the camera, prop, makeup, 2nd unit aka "stunt" unit, and VFX departments.)
If you're going to be racist, at least have the intelligence to look up the cast and crew and IMDB before you spout your Trumpian nonsense.
What I don't like is the personal attack. I got my information not from Fox News or something, but from mainstream media news sites going on and on about how progressive it was that their cast and crew was almost completely black(or at least that's how I remember it). I made the post I did because I wanted to push back against racism.
Again, thank you for the productive portion of your comment. I will learn from it.
Citations required. I read the mainstream media sources too, and I don't know of any that characterized the Black Panther crew as almost all black. The majority of the cast was black, simply because the majority of the characters of the underlying comic are black.
What's next? Are you going to complain if David Copperfield is played by an Indian guy?
Thank you for discussing this with me. It's easy to assume bad faith and ignore people, but your engagement taught me a lot.
1917 was completely white. Dunkirk had two minority characters, both in extra roles. Jojo Rabbit had no minorities, though Hitler was played by a New Zealander of 1/4th-Maori ancestry. Overlord had 1 black character in a supporting role. Midway's cast was 1/4th Asian, and only because 1/4th of the movie is told from the Japanese viewpoint.
Yeah, take your racism back to 4chan or whatever basement board you crawled out from.
He was complaining about a strawman that existed only in his head. There were multiple random white guys in the background in the city scenes (Wakanda and elsewhere), and multiple named and speaking white supporting characters in the foreground, including Bucky Barnes, and whatever characters Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis were playing.
Re-watching 1917, I realized that there is exactly 1 minority character with a speaking role in the movie: a Sikh soldier during the caravan scene. I rewatched the trench scenes, and there are no black characters. There are white guys covered in ash and dirt that might look black but are clearly white when viewed in 4k, and can be confirmed during the battlefield run scene. (1917 was attempting to be historically accurate; Sikh soldiers made up a larger portion of the British army than did black soldiers.)
Rest in peace.