When are these fucking morons going to realize that having beloved series rebooted right into the fucking toilet by people who hate the original, and marketed to people who hate the original, are never, ever, in a million years, going to be financially successful?
Abused spouse syndrome.
You're going to have a core of fans who will watch it and buy your merch. So you to try to attract new fans, while continually shitting on your die-hard fans, because they keep crawling back. "Hey, they keep beating us while they pee on us, but they have stopped eating asparagus. Time to come back to the fandom guys, they're respecting fans again."
This has been going on for as long as there have been corporate focus groups, its just gotten more egregious now due to social media.
I blame SWTOR to be honest.
The guy hated Star Wars, but managed to produce something financially and socially praised.
Probably because he grew to respect the franchise as he went along and was actually pretty clever when subverting the lore, but that don't mean shit, do it?
Blame Social Media, MCU, BattleStar Reboot, and the SW prequels, really.
As much as the prequels were panned, and as much as they pissed off fans, they still made bank.
The Battlestar reboot was a very stark shift from the 70s, but ended up being a commerical and critical success.
MCU has been fucking with canon but makes bank.
Now, any sane person would see the difference between these examples and heinous gender-swapped reboots. Media execs are the farthest from sane you can get.
What you're seeing with STD though is a missapplication of social media datamining. Before Facebook, you used to have to actually work to collect data about what ever demographic you were targeting (commonly the 18-25 demo); that meant having people do research, observation, interviews. It was messy, time consuming, expensive, and needed to be collated & correctly properly for the analysis to be turned into anything meanful.
But, thanks to modern social media, you can easily see what people in your target audience are posting about in real time.
"Most people 18-25 are screeching about diversity and strong wimmins? We're going to need to give them diversity and strong wimmins to attract that new generation. So slap that shit on our most valuable property that doesn't have any current champion with political weight."
This of course ignores a few things.
1) While there are lots of people with social media accounts, the active percentage is very small, and is heavily biased; the numbers they are pulling aren't reflecting reality. Less than 1% of the population does 99% of the screeching.
There is also a....feed back loop. Where if I am an instagram whore, what I want is more followers so I can whore myself to better sponsors. So I'll look around, see what's popular, and put that in my instafeed to attract more people, regardless of whether or not that reflects my views. I'll see people are dogpiling on anyone who trash-talks ghostbusters, and retweeting anyone defending ghostbusters, and so I'll do both to get more followers, even if I never intend to see the fucking movie. Other wanna-bes will see what I'm doing, and follow suit, a true ouroboros of faggotry. But because I have so many followers, when you're doing your datamining, you're going to assume whatever I'm typing or sharing or w/e is more popular.
I guess what I'm saying is that the problem with basing your marketing research on "influencers" is that those influencers are aware of their status and actively working to maintain & improve it; they aren't representing the aggregate actions of a demographic, they are representing the actions of someone trying to monetize their popularity.
2) If you don't actually have good writers, writing good stories with good characters, it won't matter if you've optimally tuned the melanin content & genital ratios of your cast or not.
edit:
3) Changing a product to remove the stuff people are screeching about doesn't turn the people screeching into fans. Making Thor a Black Lesbian doesn't mean they'll buy Thor comic books, it just means they'll now screech about why Black Lesbian Thor is enforcing the gender binary.
They don't want to support these franchises (what with their history of toxic masculinity and all), they never intend to become fans, they just want to remove anything that disagrees with their world view.
4) It also assumes these NEETS who spend all day screeching on facebook have any money to spend.
tl;dr:
Media companies continue to base decisions on social media posts, despite it being almost two years after Trump was elected.
Didn't know about all that. I've stopped following trek happenings pretty much since the "
