(Freedom First Network)—Disney’s money printing machine doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to. But I guess that’s what happens when you keep releasing movies your psychotically leftist employees want to make instead of what your audience actually wants to watch.
Those employees may want a black Little Mermaid, or an all-female Avengers alternative, or for Indiana Jones to be replaced by an anti-capitalist woman, but they are a very small, very whiny minority. The overwhelming majority of people, at best, couldn’t care less, or at worst, are really tired of ham-fisted woke messaging in their media. Particularly when it’s being added to beloved franchises.
Even the like-minded leftists on social media praising the added wokeness and lambasting those who speak against it don’t actually want it. It’s all for show and you can see that in the box office. Disney has been releasing flop after flop this year and it’s caused them to lose the top spot to Universal for the first time since 2015.
According to Variety:
Disney slid to second place in terms of market share as its 17 new films, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “The Little Mermaid” among them, raked in $4.827 billion globally. In a note to press, the studio partially attributed the $80 million difference to the fact that Disney released seven fewer movies than Universal in 2023. It also went on to stress that Disney had the most titles of any studio in the top 10 this year, with four of the highest-grossing global releases and three of the biggest domestic releases.
Although Disney may claim their smaller roster of movies in 2023 is the cause of their dethronement, none of the movies they did release even crossed the billion-dollar mark. Keep in mind, back in 2019, they had seven movies cross the billion-dollar mark. One of those movies, Avengers: Endgame, nearly crossed the three billion-dollar mark and became the highest-grossing film of all time.
No Disney film even made it into the top three highest-grossing movies of just 2023.
Independent Journalism Is Dying
Ever since President Trump’s miraculous victory, we’ve heard an incessant drumbeat about how legacy media is dying. This is true. The people have awakened to the reality that they’re being lied to by the self-proclaimed “Arbiters of Truth” for the sake of political expediency, corporate self-protection, and globalist ambitions.
But even as independent journalism rises to fill the void left by legacy media, there is still a huge challenge. Those at the top of independent media like Joe Rogan, Dan Bongino, and Tucker Carlson are thriving and rightly so. They have earned their audience and the financial rewards that come from it. They’ve taken risks and worked hard to get to where they are.
For “the rest of us,” legacy media and their proxies are making it exceptionally difficult to survive, let alone thrive. They still have a stranglehold over the “fact checkers” who have a dramatic impact on readership and viewership. YouTube, Facebook, and Google still stifle us. The freer speech platforms like Rumble and 𝕏 can only reward so many of their popular content creators. For independent journalists on the outside looking in, our only recourse is to rely on affiliates and sponsors.
But even as it seems nearly impossible to make a living, there are blessings that should not be disregarded. By highlighting strong sponsors who share our America First worldview, we have been able to make lifelong connections and even a bit of revenue to help us along. This is why we enjoy symbiotic relationships with companies like MyPillow, Jase Medical, and Promised Grounds. We help them with our recommendations and they reward us with money when our audience buys from them.
The same can be said about our preparedness sponsor, Prepper All-Naturals. Their long-term storage beef has a 25-year shelf life and is made with one ingredient: All-American Beef.
Even our faith-driven precious metals sponsor helps us tremendously while also helping Americans protect their life’s savings. We are blessed to work with them.
Independent media is the future. In many ways, that future is already here. While the phrase, “the more the merrier,” does not apply to this business because there are still some bad actors in the independent media field, there are many great ones that do not get nearly enough attention. We hope to change that one content creator at a time.
Thank you and God Bless,
JD Rucker
