ROB has put you in charge of Disney.

[Agent23]

Congratulations, mortal, all of your whining about that Space Wizard Plasma Sword TV series that the mouse ruined has made your friendly neighborhood ROB somewhat annoyed, mildly entertained and a bit curious.
So starting tomorrow you will be handed a controlling stake in the Walt Disney company and an emergency session of their board of Directors has decided that you, as a long-lost something or another of Walt himself must be the best possible leader to take the reigns of the company and guide it into a bright and shiny future.

In addition to the assets of the company, you also get a small 25 billion dollar slush fund for some extra oomph or in the case of emergencies.

ROB has also decided to give you another small, temporary gift.

You see, any miscreant that wants to discredit or #MeToo you by digging into your history shall be affected by your many wise posts on social media and written work will suffer the same fate as suffered by the hapless humans who had the honor of coming into contact with the Lovecraftian necronomicon and King in Yellow.

This effect will only last for about four years.

And now, we have the the conditions.

During the first two years, you must improve Disney's situation by adding original content only.
In production stuff can be put in indefinite hiatus or cancelled, but not directly messed with.
This is jsut the TV shows/comics/Movies and parks section, mind you, you can fuck as much as you want with the news channels and sports networks.

During the next two years, the gloves are off and you can do whatever you want.

So, can you make ROB happy and turn the company around, while getting it to produce quality stuff?

Or will you suffer the hetherto unknown punishment the mention of which fills you with a dark sense of foreboding?

 

[The Whispering Monk]

You see, any miscreant that wants to discredit or #MeToo you by digging into your history shall be affected by your many wise posts on social media and written work will suffer the same fate as suffered by the hapless humans who had the honor of coming into contact with the Lovecraftian necronomicon and King in Yellow.

This effect will only last for about four years.

<Rubs hands together and cackles!!!!!>

During the first two years, you must improve Disney's situation by adding original content only.
... you can fuck as much as you want with the news channels and sports networks.

Original content will be FAMILY oriented. Truth, justice, and the American way gal'darn'it! So all the woke directors, writers and idiots get canned, unless they can prove their technical worth. You're a great costumer, computer monkey, or plumber? You get to keep your job cuz you got skillz.

News/Sports channels: All the executives are canned...actually, everyone goes. Want a job? Reapply and we'll see if you actually have any value. If you do, you can have your job back.
NEWS subset: I bring in truthseekers and people with a pair of balls (lady-balls count too) to make sure they understand wth it takes to verify a story. No more of this bullshit, un-named source crap. You want to accuse someone of something without verifying the f'ing story through rigorous means. Can't do that? Your story doesn't get done.
SPORTS subset: rule 1-sports is about escaping the BS of politics and life. No politics, no wokeness. 2-IF an athlete does dispicable crap and it's proven...THEN talk about them and get their ass kicked out of the leagues. 3-Talk sports, that's all.

Happily create documentaries in cooperation with the real journalists out there...not the lamestream media. Let loose all the secrets if we have access to them.

I'll look for all those creators that have been destroyed and gunned for my the SJW & Woke mafia as my creators. They get to tell a story...no seasons required. Once the story ends...no more extra seasons just to get people to watch and milk their viewership...UNLESS the creator has more story to tell.

During the next two years, the gloves are off and you can do whatever you want.

Hire the authors that wrote some great novels to write scripts with the help of professional script writers (if necessary) while allowing the authors final creative say.

No movie adaptation of any novel may go woke. No altering shit in the books without a truly narrative reason.

I'll probably have Thrawn come into the new SW Universe and destroy the New Order before the rise of Ren & Stimpy Sith.

 

[Jormungandr]

That include staff firings, hirings, and policy-making? Because I'd basically gut most of the company from its woke rot from the ground up.

As for Kathleen Kenedy and her ilk... well...

 

[Bear Ribs]

How is ROB defining "Original Content?" There's a fairly wide gray area between "Live-Action Remake" and "You must learn this entire conlang just to understand the dialogue."

 

[Jormungandr]

How is ROB defining "Original Content?" There's a fairly wide gray area between "Live-Action Remake" and "You must learn this entire conlang just to understand the dialogue."

An entire movie with spoken Mando'a, no subtitles. Kek.

 

[Agent23]

How is ROB defining "Original Content?" There's a fairly wide gray area between "Live-Action Remake" and "You must learn this entire conlang just to understand the dialogue."

You will not be using any of Disney's existing IPs.

 

[Bear Ribs]

You will not be using any of Disney's existing IPs.

Well, that's fairly reasonable. Lets me make sequels to my own IPs and pick up new IPs from novels as I want. Really sucks that I won't be able to bring Gargoyles back though. Maybe I can convince ROB to make an exception for that one alone.

As I can't possibly be making the IPs myself and have to be the guy making the decisions, I'd start by setting down my own laws set down as a framework:
1. Disney does not follow trends. Trends follow Disney.
2. Disney movies are for the family. Every movie should be aimed specifically at one demographic to specialize, but have enough elements for the others that nobody else in the family feels left out watching it.
3. Main characters are only as good as their support, the villain must be a worthy challenge and every side character is a potential spin-off so develop a rich cast of characters.
4. Every element has a purpose, trim everything that isn't building up the story directly and consistently.
5. Fun trumps all. The purpose of our media is for people to enjoy it, anything that gets in the way of the work being fun doesn't belong.
6. We learn from our mistakes. Doubling down is for people who enjoy collecting unemployment.

So general plans:

I'm going to make a return to the Disney Animated Feature format. This was successful for generations and there's still room for it. My animated feature department is going to do their best to emulate what I consider the pinnacle of those movies: Aladdin. Aladdin was especially successful among Disney movies of its age, getting multiple sequels and a beloved TV cartoon, because it had appealing characters in multiple demographics. Jasmine is perfectly capable of standing alongside the likes of Snow White or Cinderella for personality, agency, and popularity while on the male side Aladdin is dramatically superior to the wooden mannequin that is Prince Charming. The other highly successful Disney films similarly had capable and interesting* male Protagonists, such as Beauty and the Beast and Rapunzel. Aladdin also took things one step further with daring fanservicey costumes for the parents forced to bring their kids to the movies and a lot of genuinely funny wordplay to keep them engaged as well. There's still an enormous bulk of Folklore to draw upon, we could get several more films just from the One Thousand and One Nights. Tian Xian Pei is basically Chinese The Little Mermaid in Space and would hopefully get some Chinabux too because I'm not allergic to making money. The Shoemaker and the Elves has the potential to make a good story in that format, I would merge the first and second stories in that series so that the poor but hardworking Servant Girl who became the Human Godmother to a fairy is shipped with the poor but hardworking shoemaker in the first story, and her actions with the fairies also entertwine with the shoemaking elves and both contribute to the resolution of the plot. The fairies and elves involved can be significantly increased in personality and presence, and then be put into the Disney Fairies Franchise to give it some new blood.

Without going woke there's also plenty of room to draw on other cultures for stories, TVTropes has more pages devoted to My Little Pony than all of African Folklore and media combined. This means there's a good opportunity to pull stories that haven't already been done to death from there and produce some vastly more original stuff.

Away from the Animated Feature format Disney's experience with Marvel and Star Wars will let me open up a new major frontier for Disney: Sci-Fi epics. The Sci-Fi genre, in general, has been starving for new vibrant IPs for a really long time and most of the old IPs have gone woke and had terrible remakes that killed them in the eyes of fans. So basically there's a gaping hole in the psyche of sci-fi fans everywhere, and they will shell out mountains of money to have it filled. Disney's got the talent to fill that gap and just needs to be pointed in the right direction.

Offhand I think the Witches of Karres series would make a splendid new Space Opera Trilogy. It would need a handful of edits to be sure, especially Goth's attempts at romance when she's still a pre-teen regardless of the fact that her husband-to-be won't touch her at that age, still weird. However overall the storyline would go fantastic places and has just enough fantasy to be a great replacement for Star Wars. A brief combing of sci-fi writers would undoubtedly yield more potential movies than even Disney could ever make and sifting through them to find the best gems would be the real work.

On the TV show front, there's room for all sorts of documentaries with a Disney Twist to them for educational value. Depending on ROB's strictness about new IPs, we might do something like Histeria! but with Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Scrooge, and the rest of the gang exploring history and making comedic education about how things went. We're also going to generally sift out stories that just don't work for movie formats but would work better in a serial format for our shows. I believe Disney already did a Sinbad movie so that would be out, but as a concept the Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad the Landlubber series of stories would work much, much better as a TV show than as a movie. Our TV Block will heavily admix these kinds of programs with options for every age group.

There are also a vast number of fairy tales, folklore, and short stories that would make great 3-15 minute toons but aren't sufficient for a TV episode or movie. We can harvest these to turn into YouTube shorts, pre-movie bonuses, and extra stories added to box sets and the like. Upcoming potential artists and directors can be turned loose on these and if they fail, it's no great loss, only a short YouTube video, but a proven success there is a stepping stone to working on our big more expensive films as they've already got some proven work ethic and skills.

*And flawed but that's not a bad thing from a storytelling perspective.

 

[Agent23]

Since the Yen is cheap I will be buying up a few gacha game companies and Anime studios and paying them handsomely.
I will also buy up/getting a deal with hololive.
Basically I will throw a truckload of money at Japanese creators and tell them to wipe their twitter accounts, then use some of the VTubers as VAs for western localizations.
The new Asia-Pacific/Japan entertainment branch will be completely and totally ring-fenced from the rest of Disney, the new projects will be distributed over Disney's existing network, but all development, localization work and production will be confined to Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, with being a weeb capable of doing the work becoming the main hiring requirement for most positions.

 

[Atarlost]

Am I allowed to acquire licenses to adapt IPs that aren't original, but also aren't previously Disney? Because I would want to try to do deals for certain published novels and webcomics. Streaming services mean long modern novels can get miniseries adaptations that don't require ruinous compression.

I'd want to bring in culture critics to clean house. There are guys who review or at least used to review comics. I don't know comics so I hire some of them to clean Marvel. If there are any salvageable writers I hand them Victorian adventure stories to do comics of so they can prove they can do non-woke stuff before letting them do completely new stuff, or if the two years are up resuscitate classic Marvel IPs.

Same deal for Star Wars. I don't know it well enough so I bring in a counter-woke Star Wars geek and tell them to filter out anything that can be worked back into the real canon to keep, because throwing out Legends has turned out to be a disaster.

For Touchstone Pictures or whatever they call it now I want the the Maccabean Revolt overseen by an Orthodox Rabbi, the Abraham Lincoln story overseen by someone like Alfonzo Rachel, and a Baldwin IV story. Also, all of the American Revolution historicals come out of the vault.

For animation, I'm not really sure. It's probably too late to go back to cell animation, and Japanese sensibilities are different enough that Agent23's plan won't entirely fill this hole. Disney went through an awful lot of public domain stories and I don't trust the writers with blank slates. Probably find another culture expert to oversee things.

Pixar same as the main animation branch, but they can do original stories, or at least they could more recently.

 

[Agent23]

Am I allowed to acquire licenses to adapt IPs that aren't original, but also aren't previously Disney?

Yup, go ahead.

 

[Atarlost]

Yup, go ahead.

In that case I'd like try to get film rights for Schlock Mercenary, the Oceans Unmoving arcs of Sluggy Freelance, Honor Harrington, Bahzell Bahnakson, Lt. Leary, Retief (from Keith Laumer's estate), Heinlein's juvenile novels, and maybe some of Stephen R. Lawhead's stuff, though I think he may be too long to make good film adaptations but too short for HBO style miniseries.

And I'm willing, even eager, to let the (living) authors have creative oversight within reason. I'd want them to work with someone who knows film because the pacing is different, but I want to license the IPs because I like the author's creative vision and I don't want anyone pully a Kathleen Kennedy or even a J. J. Abrams on it.

 

[Bassoe]

You see, any miscreant that wants to discredit or #MeToo you by digging into your history shall be affected by your many wise posts on social media and written work will suffer the same fate as suffered by the hapless humans who had the honor of coming into contact with the Lovecraftian necronomicon and King in Yellow.

Can I copy my old posts to use them as weaponized infohazards?

 

[Agent23]

Can I copy my old posts to use them as weaponized infohazards?

They work that way only if the person seeing them wants to do you ill and has a degree of media/political/social power.
So, adversarial Blue Checkmark and above.

 

[Bassoe]

They work that way only if the person seeing them wants to do you ill and has a degree of media/political/social power.

What degree of exposure is necessary? They're only harmful to my enemies? Can I use them as background text in every single new movie made, thereby exposing everyone?

 

[The Whispering Monk]

Definitely want to steal The Wheel of Time from Amazon...that travesty has to go.

 

[Typhonis]

What about IP that Disney fucked up the release of?

Looks at Treasure Planet and John Carter of Mars along with the Black Hole.

 

[The Whispering Monk]

What about IP that Disney fucked up the release of?

Looks at Treasure Planet and John Carter of Mars along with the Black Hole.

I actually liked John Carter of Mars (movie). What did you feel was wrong with it? Or should that be it's own thread b/c you have so much to say?

 

[Typhonis]

The way they handled it's advertising. They never hinted at that JCOM came before Star Wars. Hell mention it came out the same time as Tarzan and by the same author.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I actually liked John Carter of Mars (movie). What did you feel was wrong with it? Or should that be it's own thread b/c you have so much to say?

Too high a budget for what they got, but most of it was marketing.

The choice of titles is perplexing. A Princess of Mars would have been a direct connection to first Barsoom book. John Carter of Mars or Barsoom would have referenced the entire series. But just John Carter by itself is way too generic a name, it's obscure and not attention-grabbing enough for people to readily make the connection to a book series that was written all the way back in 1948. This is especially puzzling since "Princess" is a power word there and Princess stories are Disney's bread and butter, so avoiding the word Princess is a decidedly odd choice. This could have been fixed by a proper advertising campaign, blitz and promote the books, doing a lot of webcasts, shorts, and other projects to drum up interest.

But they didn't do any of that. They apparently expected the movie to make big bucks on name recognition after changing the name away from what people would recognize.

I have no proof but somewhat suspect it was intentional sabotage. I've said before, Disney's corporate structure is really prone to faction fights and power grabs between various executives, and when you see them making really obvious, really stupid mistakes that sink a project, especially when the rest of the project seems good, my first suspicion is Executive A is making a power play to screw over Executive B's project.

 

[Jormungandr]

[...]

I have no proof but somewhat suspect it was intentional sabotage. I've said before, Disney's corporate structure is really prone to faction fights and power grabs between various executives, and when you see them making really obvious, really stupid mistakes that sink a project, especially when the rest of the project seems good, my first suspicion is Executive A is making a power play to screw over Executive B's project.

We're seeing this with Star Wars right now.

If rumours are to be believed, outside of her NPC clique, KK is pretty much detested inside of Lucasfilm and Disney as a whole. It's gotten so bad that a lot of board members are doing everything they can to give her and her drones the boot before they do even more damage.

They actively helped make Disney a hated brand, and they fucked up what should have been a money-printing franchise.

Though, hilariously they also don't recognise that Disney's other actions, like supporting China, sheer greed, supporting trans-trenders and actual kiddie-fuckers, et cetera, are just as damaging to their brand and reputation, too.