Why Fantastic Four Is Flopping

 

Pable Pascal as Mr. Fantastic

The new Fantastic Four movie is dying at the box office. It is a bit of a mystery.

Some say it is because of “superhero fatigue.” People have had enough of superhero movies; the excitement has worn off.

But this does not tally: the first weekend, the Fantastic Four receipts were good. People wanted to see a superhero movie. There must have been some problem with this particular superhero movie, which turned those initial audiences off.

According to most critics, the movie was a decent production: good acting, good plot. If we can trust them, the problem was not quality.

That leaves wokeness. Although the movie was not aggressively woke, Pablo Pascal did not look like the Reed Richards of the comic book. He was presumably cast because he was Latino: current Oscar rules require DEI casting to qualify for an award. And they sex-changed the Silver Surfer.

I think the cultural climate has changed fast enough that the audiences are no longer willing to sit down for this nonsense even on a moderate level.

Why would they? The appeal of watching a live-action superhero movie is in seeing the familiar comic book characters come to life. You want them to be as close as possible to those you cherish in your memory. This was a big problem with the earlier Fantastic Four films—they could not get The Thing looking right. This one succeeds, then throws it all away by getting Reed Richards and the Silver Surfer wrong. 

The same thing, of course, applies to race-swapping and sex-swapping in live-action remakes of the classic fairy tales. The principle is so simple, and so simple to understand, and yet they keep deliberately getting it wrong. This shows contempt for the original creation, like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. By extension, it shows contempt for the audience, the fan base. 

What did they think would happen?

Bubble Life

 

I attended a coffee and conversation recently in which one participant bravely brought up his political doubts, in an oblique way.

“Whatever you think about Trump, didn’t the media let us down? Didn’t they tell us Trump couldn’t win? Didn’t they tell us nobody would vote for Trump? Seventy-five million people did. How is this possible? They’re not giving us the whole story.”

Cognitive dissonance. Other participants first responded by suggesting other news sources he might prefer-- all either “mainstream” or explicitly on the left. No right-wing sources like Daily Wire or Instapundit or even X. Of course they would not mention X except to condemn it; but BlueSky was recommended.

A non sequitur, of course. All were media that said Trump was evil and Harris would win. Still within the bubble.

The disconnect being too obvious, one participant at last piped up:  IQ has been dropping in the US for a couple of generations.

Mutters of agreement. This seemed to satisfy everyone, and ended the conversation. They moved on to another topic.

Of course this explanation was nonsensical. There is no reason to suppose that people with a low IQ will automatically vote en masse for an obviously bad candidate. At most, you would expect their votes to be a bit more random.

I appreciated the bravery of the man who raised the question, if timidly. He was braver than I. I kept my peace. It was not worth it to speak up. I suspect there were others in the meeting who also did not believe Trump was an obviously better choice than Harris. But who wants to be first to say so? We have all learned that it does not pay to disagree with a leftist. They will become hysterical. 

This is what it looks and feels like when people are delusional. 

I think wokism and wokery will now collapse quickly. The bubble has begun to pop. It has popped, and many are wandering around, confused.

Why Canada Is So Woke

 

Canada has a reputation as the wokest country in the Anglosphere; perhaps in the developed world. What is it about Canada that makes it so susceptible to this?

I say it is the legendary Canadian “niceness,” the love of social harmony. “Peace, order, and good government.” This, I think, traces back to the UE Loyalists: English Canada was founded on the fundamental principle of deference to authority. This means not just government authority—and Canada is surely the only country in the world where the police force is such a beloved national symbol—but also social authority generally, the dictates of good manners and polite discourse.

This means that Canadians are peculiarly vulnerable to being bullied. Anyone who shouts loudly will have their demands met, for the sake of social peace, and anyone who speaks as an authority will be accepted as such. 

This is what the modern woke left really is: a selection of bullies making demands. A set of special interest groups, overall a minority. Like any bully, they will not desist until and unless firmly challenged; their demands will only grow and grow. And against this trend, Canada is uniquely defenseless.

Women are a similar case. Feminism was the vanguard of the woke trend; women continue to be more “woke” then men. Yet women are the chief victims of wokery. Feminism, in rejecting the traditional feminine role, subverted all their interests. This was more obvious in the early days, when “consciousness-raising sessions” were the main feminist activity. Women had to be bullied or socially shamed into the new doctrine. But now studies show that women are less happy than they were pre-1960, and women in developed nations are less happy than those in the Third Word, where traditional roles are still more common. And they are losing their advantage in life expectancy over men. 

This has happened because women are like Canadians. Women are naturally inclined—naturally inclined, note—to be nice, to defer to authority, to be flexible and go along. This, like Canadian niceness, is usually an admirable trait, but leaves one vulnerable to bullying and abuse. 

And the bully’s demands grow and grow. Now being nice requires accepting men in women’s washrooms, rapists in women’s prisons, men taking the trophies in women’s sports. 

This also perhaps explains the commonly noted phenomenon of “flying monkeys”: how bullies and narcissists always find willing accomplices. “We are three times the slaves of the owner of the Golden Cap, whosoever he may be.”

How far can it all go before the enslaved monkeys rebel? Perhaps we are about to see.

Peace at Any Price

 

The current fate of the left reminds me of the fable of the Boy Who Cried “Wolf.” They have gotten themselves into this situation, of nobody any longer taking them seriously, either because they were never taught this wisdom growing up, out of hubris, or out of desperation. They have repeatedly stirred up imaginary crises and called everyone to the barricades: the “climate crisis”; the Covid lockdowns and the urgency of vaccination; describing January 6 as an insurrection; pulling the cord on the Emergency Act over the truckers’ protest; declaring a sudden assault on and urgent need to protect aboriginal rights, gay rights, trans rights; warning of a white supremacist or a Nazi under every bed; and so on and on seemingly ad infinitem. The latest being the charge that Trump, if not elected, will somehow launch a “bloodbath.”

It worked so well for them, they kept doing it. Now I feel the general public is fed up. The general public wants peace and quiet. When appeasing the left’s concerns looked like the easiest path, they appeased. But they are never appeased; appeasement has not worked. There is always a new, and more extreme, demand. 

Right about now, the general public is deciding that the only way to restore social peace is to turn decisively away from the left and refuse any more demands.

They should have stopped at the Sudetenland.