Disney

A war has taken over media coverage. No, not one of actual consequence. This war, however, is imminently affecting your national pastime and your wallet. This is a civil war within media. The combatants are the Walt Disney Company with it’s channels – including ABC and ESPN, plus the SEC and ACC networks – and Google, YouTube TV’s parent company. The two entities failed to meet a carrier agreement, and all Disney channels are blacked out on YouTube TV. That means that much of the nation will not have access to most of the weekend’s football content, as has been the case since the showdown a couple weeks ago.

Ever so often, a film project – especially one that never ended up happening – emerges into the public domain to a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. So it has proved with Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film, tentatively entitled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The picture was to have been a sequel to the little-loved The Rise of Skywalker and focused on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia who finds himself torn between the noble impulses of the Force and the more dastardly influence of the Dark Side. Given that Soderbergh is nobody’s idea of a conventional blockbuster director, the results would, at the very least, have been interesting.

The news that Pixar’s latest picture, the alien-contact family comedy Elio, has been an egregious flop at the American box office, grossing a mere $20.8 million on its opening weekend, has been greeted with both surprise and disappointment. Surprise, because Pixar has long been seen as the gold standard of contemporary animation, and disappointment, because its films are not supposed to flop. No fewer than 13 of their pictures are in the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time roster, and nine have won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, most recently 2020’s Soul. And if there had been rumors that the company was in trouble, these were apparently put to bed by the enormous, epochal success of Inside Out 2 last summer, which grossed $1.7 billion at the box office.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most annoying of them all? The answer, it seems, is Rachel Zegler, the new Snow White, who has managed to turn herself into an international hate figure because she can’t keep her progressive political views to herself. The upshot is that Disney’s $350 million remake of one of its most famous films is flopping at the box office. It generated $45 million in ticket sales in its opening weekend. That sounds a lot, yet it’s a lot less than other recent Disney adaptations brought in, even including other woke disasters such as 2023’s Peter Pan & Wendy. Reviews of the new Snow White have been overwhelmingly negative, too.

As Israelis around the world face cultural boycotts, it was uplifting to see Gal Gadot, an eighth-generation Israeli on one side and the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor on the other, honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday. “I think it’s going to take me time before I even realize that it’s real,” she told Variety. What won’t take time to realize – because by now we know the drill all too well – is that her ceremony was disrupted by pro-Palestinian activists wielding signs ranging from the pathetic to the downright chilling. “Heroes Fight Like Palestinians,” “Viva Viva Palestina,” “Up up with liberation, down down with occupation” and “Not another nickel, not another dime, no more money for Israel’s crime.

The fourteenth series of Doctor Who returns to international screens imminently — and this time there’s a twist. Thanks to the heavy financial investment of Disney+, who have become co-financiers with the BBC, the show now has a considerably higher budget than it has done before, of around $130 million per season. Little wonder that the BBC’s director-general Tim Davie commented, only slightly tongue in cheek, that “we’ve got to thank – a lot – our partners, Disney+, who came on board so that the Doctor can travel even more widely across the planet in a slightly flashier Tardis.