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We All Knew It Was Coming

It’s still a load of crap. I speak, naturally, of the fact that Disney has killed off the Fox-affiliated Blue Sky animation studio, which had previously had all of its approaching-release movies delayed, of which one remained and will now be shelved rather than seen:

Blue Sky’s final movie, a fantasy story about a young shapeshifter called Nimona, will be left unfinished and will not be released.

Originally announced as an animated film in 2015, pushed back from a 2020 release date to 2021 six months before the pandemic, narrowly escaping the axe that fell in the Fox purchase, but getting pushed back to 2022, Nimona is now scrapped because we live in a monoculture and Disney will not have anything exist that does not bow to its view of the world.

They could have let Blue Sky finish its last production. They could have allowed a very different kind of young heroine. They could have just dumped it to streaming and made money — which, considering they’d already bought the entire damn studio and the production, would essentially have been free money — which you would think is the actual purpose of a corporation. But, I suppose, they don’t have the ancillary rights to merch and staright-to-video sequels and a Nimona character in the parks, so fuck sharing and getting 94% of the benefit.

Disney has their Way, their Method , their Version of how things are meant to be, and everything they build must conform to them or be ground down and erased. It is all or nothing for them.

I mourn for those who would have found a vision of themselves in an animated version, for all the nascent culture that is snuffed out so that the very rich can become very, very rich as we pay them for the privilege of becoming so.

But Nimona is still on my bookshelf, and hopefully Noelle Stevenson had a good agent and lawyer that included a rights reversion, and we may yet see Nimona on the big screen.

And like I mentioned a while back around the Disney screwing Alan Dean Foster story, if you sign a contract of any sort, it seems you need to include a Disney buys out whoever I am contracting with clause that reverts control of your brainchild to you. They want all or nothing? Let them have nothing.

And, because we can’t have nice things, Meredith Gran has had her Twitter account jacked by by a complete dickhole, who keeps changing the account name to avoid reporting. He (of course it’s a dude) is, as of this writing, going by the name @dazeywtf, which you should report as a hacked account and also ping @twittersafety on the matter, please and thank you.


Spam of the day
No spam, but I will say that I was writing that last paragraph when my computer blue-screened with no warning, and I gotta hand it to WordPress for preserving all but about a half-sentence of what I wrote despite me not having explicitly saved anything yet. Well done, WordPress.

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