Disney Hypocrisy Is Coming In Hot, Almost Like It Never Left | Christian Toto
The Mouse House can’t draw a crowd for its movies, but the company has cornered the market on double speak.
Disney’s latest film, “Wish,” would be its biggest box office disappointment in recent memory (just $43 million in the U.S. over 15 days) if not for the stink bomb that was 2022’s “Strange World” ($37 million). It’s the latest body blow for a company that even its venerable CEO Bob Iger admits has hit a rough patch.
Bob Iger at the premiere of Wish, a movie that failed at the box office. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
That’s putting it mildly.
Yet Disney continues to excel in hypocrisy, and that quality just drew the attention of one of the world’s richest men.
Disney And Iger Tangle With X
Disney recently yanked advertising from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, due to owner Elon Musk’s alleged antisemitism.
The anti-Jewish charges were flimsy on ice, and certainly a far cry from the open Jew hatred seen on college campuses nationwide. Disney’s actions were more political than anything else. Musk has been leaning to the Right in recent months and fully embraces the First Amendment.
He put his money where his mouth is by buying Twitter and releasing the “Twitter Files” which revealed the rampant censorship happening under the company’s old regime. Disney apparently yawned over those revelations.
That explains why Disney, along with other Hollywood heavy hitters like Lionsgate, pulled their ads from X.
Free speech is no longer a cherished value with the modern Left. Team Disney began leaning hard to the progressive side of the aisle in recent years after decades of apolitical posturing.
Musk, never one to back down from a fight, called out Iger’s company for continuing to run ads on both Facebook and Instagram despite a damning new suit alleging the social media giants enable child sexual abuse.
Why no advertiser boycott, Bob Eiger ? You are endorsing this material!
And let’s not forget TikTok, a social media platform run by Communist China and teeming with anti-semitic posts. The latter has risen sharply in the weeks following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel which killed roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped hundreds more.
Including children.
Of course, that’s only the tip of Disney’s hypocritical iceberg.
Film Studios Also Part Of The Hypocrisy
We learned three years ago that the mega studio played footsie with China to create the live-action version of its animated “Mulan.” That effort played out in the film’s end credits. Where the film thanked the Communist nation for cooperating with its production team.
Disney's "Mulan" remake is facing fresh boycott calls after it emerged some of the blockbuster's scenes were filmed in China's Xinjiang region. (Photo by GREG BAKER / AFP) (Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images)
Turns out the film was shot near China’s Uighur concentration camps, a stain on the nation’s human rights record and an open secret few Hollywood activists dare bring up.
Like anyone associated with Team Disney.
Yet Disney pretends to care oh, so deeply about human rights. Going so far as to battle Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over several issues, including the erroneously labeled “Don’t Say Gay” legislation protecting young children from sexual content.
Disney, which oversees the flailing “Star Wars” franchise, also allowed one of the saga’s black actors, John Boyega, to be diminished in posters created for Chinese audiences in 2015. Other non-white actors in “The Force Awakens,” including Oscar Isaac, were removed entirely.
The ultimate hypocrisy may circle back to Iger himself.
The former and current CEO – he stepped down briefly when Bob Chapek took the reins – keeps promising to quiet the noise on the culture wars and tamp down the company’s message-heavy content.
Yet the X ad withdrawal happened after that promise. And there’s no sign Disney will be dropping ads on X users anytime soon.
The biggest question for Disney faithful remains unanswered. Will the company stop injecting sexual content into stories aimed at young TV watchers and movie goers?
If past is prologue, expect more Disney-grade hypocrisy coming in hot.