The Doomsday Grift: A Grift About Grift
I saw The Mandalorian and Grogu a few days ago. I liked it! It wasn't a masterpiece. Not a disaster. Just a solid, fun, family-friendly Star Wars movie that probably would have landed even better at 90 minutes instead of pushing past the two hour mark. The movie cleared $100 million domestically over the long weekend, plus another $60 million internationally, putting it north of $160 million globally in just a few days. That is good. That is a hit. That is, by any reasonable measure of opening weekend success, a movie that is doing well. So naturally, a certain section of the internet has decided it is a failure. I have been seeing the same flavor of post all weekend. The doomsday narrative. The "Disney is panicking" takes. The "Mando is tanking" framing. The complete refusal to engage with the actual math of how studio films work. Because the actual math is not particularly exciting if you are trying to sell outrage. Mandalorian and Grogu cost around $165 million to make. The film has already cleared its production budget in four days! The audience scores are strong. Summer break is starting which is the perfect time for families to go out together and see this movie. By every reasonable indicator of a healthy theatrical run, this movie is fine. More than fine. It is doing what hit films do.
The Grifter Narrative
There is a whole class of online creator now, and I mean a whole class, whose entire business model is built around manufacturing outrage about the next big thing. Anything new. Anything mainstream. Anything with a studio marketing push behind it. The next Superman. Mandalorian and Grogu. The Odyssey. The new He-Man movie when it drops. Supergirl when she gets her solo film next month. Anything. They will jump on it, they will jump on it loudly, and they will jump on it before the credits have even finished rolling on opening night. That is the act. That is the brand. That is the content. And the cheapest, laziest, easiest tool in that toolkit is the box office number. The playbook goes like this: a movie they have decided to dislike opens. They cite the opening weekend gross. They compare it, always unfavorably, to some other movie they like better, usually from a director or franchise they have already pledged loyalty to. They frame the comparison in the most damning terms possible. "Disney is panicking." "The studio is in freefall." "Audiences have rejected this." Then they pivot to the next thing. Rinse. Repeat. Upload. Monetize.
It is grift. It is not film criticism. It is not analysis. It is not even good faith disagreement. It is content extraction dressed up as opinion, and it relies on a public that, increasingly, does not read past the headline. The product is not the take. The product is the outrage. The take is just the delivery vehicle. And the thing that bothers me most about it is not that these people exist, as insufferable as they can be. It is the reach. The algorithm feeds on outrage, on ragebait, on clickbait trash, and it shoves this content into every feed whether we asked for it or not. The truth is, people are going to grift. That is the nature of an internet built on engagement metrics. What bothers me is how easily the grift becomes the plot for so many. How readily the box office number, divorced from any of the context that would actually make it meaningful, gets weaponized into a verdict. How quickly "this movie did not gross as much as some other movie" becomes "this movie is a failure" becomes "this movie is bad" becomes "you are stupid for liking it/you are a woke/disconnected/not a person who matters."
The Superman drama last year is what really brought this type of discourse to my attention. I could not escape it online -- the algorithm decided that I would be spoon-fed this drivel whether I liked it or not. James Gunn's Superman opened, and within hours, the same crowd was out in force comparing its box office to Zack Snyder's 2012 Man of Steel film, and declaring the new film a disappointment. The framing was relentless. The clips were everywhere. "Look at how poorly the new Superman is doing." "Warner Brothers must be kicking themselves for replacing Snyder." "James Gunn has fumbled the bag." Gunn's 2025 Superman movie grossed $618 million! Let me say that again, this time I will spell it out in its entirety. Six hundred and eighteen million dollars! In what universe does $618 million in movie tickets translate to "people did not want to see this"? Because that was the literal framing. I am only focusing this much on the revenue because the revenue was the entire grift. That was the whole pitch. The new Superman cost more to produce than the 2012 Snyder Superman. It also made less at the box office than the 2012 Snyder Superman. Therefore, the grifters insisted, the new Superman was an expensive disaster that audiences had rejected. The implication was clear: nobody was watching, DC was in shambles, James Gunn had blown it, the whole thing was an unmitigated financial catastrophe. A deceptive lens so far removed from reality that it falls apart the second you put it under any actual scrutiny. The movie failed! Panic! DC in SHAMBLES! Uhg. You cannot generate $618 million in ticket sales without a massive number of people deciding, individually, on their own time, to put on pants and drive to a theater and pay actual money to watch your movie. That is literally the market screaming "yes, we want this!"
On the topic of Superman... Superman is my favorite superhero of all time. I discovered Superman when I was barely out of the toddler years. We are going so far back, these are some of my earliest memories here. When I was a kid, Christopher Reeve's Superman utterly captivated me, and I would sit in front of those movies absolutely mesmerized. The cape. The flight. The way he carried himself. The way he looked at people when they were scared. And that John Williams score. To this day, when I hear those opening notes, I get goosebumps. Actual physical goosebumps. It is one of the few pieces of music in my life that can deliver nostalgia, awe, and hope all at the same time. That feeling, that lift in my chest, is the entire reason Superman matters as a character. The score knew what the character was for. The performance knew what the character was for. The whole movie knew what the character was for. Because that is what Superman is. Superman is hope. Superman is bright, warm colors. Superman is kindness. Superman is the guy who lifts you up because he believes you are capable of more than you give yourself credit for. His greatest superpower is not the strength. It is not the flight. It is not the heat vision. It is his capacity for love. For forgiveness. For acceptance. For inspiring the people around him to be better, kinder, braver versions of themselves.
The Snyderverse was none of that. The Snyderverse was gloomy. It was dark. It was a Superman who was moody and sad and conflicted and, in one of the most baffling creative decisions in modern superhero filmmaking, was snapping necks. I still remember watching Superman in 2012 kill Zod at the end and think to myself, what!? And they literally applied a grading filter, a kind of desaturated sepia wash, that drained the color out of the entire film. The result was a Superman who looked perpetually depressed about being Superman, in a world that looked perpetually depressed about him being there. And listen, I get that taste is taste. Plenty of people loved those films. Plenty of people connected with that version. That is fine. I am not telling anyone they are not allowed to like the Snyder films. But for me, personally, they missed the plot entirely. They took the character whose entire reason for existing is to deliver hope, and they made him a brooding figure in a washed-out frame. That is not Superman.
And the Zack Snyder fans. The Snyder fans will not. Stop. Talking. About the Snyderverse. It has been years. The cut. The plan. The five-film arc that was never going to happen. The rosters of what should have been. They cannot let it go. They cannot move on. And the second James Gunn's Superman arrived in theaters, with actual color, with actual warmth, with a Superman who is kind and good and genuinely moved by the people around him, with a version of the character that I personally found so emotionally resonant that I actually got a little misty in the theater, the Snyder crowd lost their minds. The doomsday narrative started before opening weekend was over. The engagement bait posts started flying. "James Gunn failed." "DC is unhappy with him." "Audiences rejected the new Superman." I still see posts like this literally to this day, and it's been over a year since the movie came out. This is a film that pulled $618 million globally. It connected. It worked. People showed up. And a vocal contingent of one particular fandom spent the entire run of that movie trying to spin a $618 million worldwide gross into a failure narrative, because they could not emotionally accept that the version of Superman they loved was not the only version that could succeed.
If the movie did not make enough money against its budget, that is a budget conversation, not an audience conversation. If the model is structured so that $618 million is a loss, then the model is broken. Be more creative about how you build movies. Trim production. Streamline marketing. Rework the back-end deals. Cut the bloat. The audience showed up. They paid. They voted with the only currency Hollywood actually counts. Pretending otherwise is not analysis. It is gaslighting and it's bad faith and it's insufferable. And it is the same grift happening now with Mandalorian and Grogu. The film is on track to clear its budget. The audience scores are strong. Families are about to come out of school for the summer. All the ducks are lined up in a row. None of that matters to the grifter ecosystem, because none of that is what the narrative needs. The narrative needs a corpse. The narrative needs Disney panicking. The narrative needs an opening weekend number that, on its own, with no context, sounds disappointing if you read it the right way.
If the movie did not make enough money against its budget, that is a budget conversation, not an audience conversation. If the model is structured so that $618 million is a loss, then the model is broken. Be more creative about how you build movies. Trim production. Streamline marketing. Rework the back-end deals. Cut the bloat. The audience showed up. They paid. They voted with the only currency Hollywood actually counts. Pretending otherwise is not analysis. It is gaslighting and it's bad faith and it's insufferable. And it is the same grift happening now with Mandalorian and Grogu. The film is on track to clear its budget. The audience scores are strong. Families are about to come out of school for the summer. All the ducks are lined up in a row. None of that matters to the grifter ecosystem, because none of that is what the narrative needs. The narrative needs a corpse. The narrative needs Disney panicking. The narrative needs an opening weekend number that, on its own, with no context, sounds disappointing if you read it the right way.
Why They Need to Be Right
This is the part that I think is actually interesting, and the part that goes a little deeper than just "online people are mean about movies." These critics, these reactors, these YouTube faces yelling into a microphone in a ring light, are deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the idea that their opinion is just an opinion. They cannot sit with the basic adult reality that their take on a movie is one take among many, and that other people have an equal right to disagree. They need to be correct. Not just heard. Not just persuasive. Correct. Inarguably, objectively, mathematically correct. And here is the problem. Movie quality is not an objective thing. It cannot be. It is taste. It is feeling. It is the convergence of a person's mood, their history with a franchise, their relationship to the genre, their evening, their company, their snacks, and a thousand other variables nobody can chart. There is no equation. There is no proof. So when you need your opinion to be objectively correct, but the thing you are opinionating about resists objective measurement, you reach for something that does measure. You reach for a number. And the only number sitting there, ready to be cherry-picked, is the box office.
That is the move. That is the whole grift. They are not actually arguing about the movie. They are using the box office to dodge the basic vulnerability of having an opinion. "It is not just that I did not like it. It is that nobody liked it. It is that the numbers prove I was right." That framing protects them from the one thing they cannot tolerate, which is the possibility that they might just be a person with a take. That their hot take is not a fact, but a feeling. That the millions of people who disagreed with them are not wrong, they are just different. Being a real critic, being honest about your taste, requires accepting that your taste is your own. That the movie you loved might be a movie most people hated. That the movie you hated might be a movie that becomes a cultural touchstone for an entire generation. That none of that changes whether you were right to feel what you felt when you walked out of the theater.
What I Like Is What I Like
Let me walk the walk here and give my own takes about things. I love the Attitude Era of wrestling. Though some of it has aged in ways that make me outright cringe now as an adult. Some of the storytelling does not hold up. Some of the booking was, frankly, indefensible. None of that touches what those years meant to me as a kid getting home from school and turning on Monday Night Raw. The Stone Cold promos. The DX skits. The blood feuds. The chaos of it. That was all part of a cultural moment that contributed to my lifelong love of professional wrestling, and no retrospective video essay is going to tell me what I am allowed to feel about it. I love My Hero Academia. I know there is a vocal contingent that thinks the back half of the anime crashed out hard on the ending and final arc; I am not one of those people. I loved the ending. The discourse does not change a single sentence of what that story has meant to me. Seeing All Might smile and be the Superman of his universe as long as he physically can makes every scene he is in precious to me. If there was ever a love letter to the character of Superman, it's All Might. Just thinking about All Might makes me feel happy, feel safe, feel hopeful. And one of the greatest pains of that anime that makes it so compelling, is how All Might is on his last legs when the show starts. He is holding on by a thread, but he keeps moving forward until he can find someone to pass the torch to. Chef's kiss!
Image: All Might, from My Hero Academia, being All Might
I also think the Big Bang Theory is one of the worst things ever put on television. The fact that it was one of the most successful sitcoms of its era changes absolutely nothing about my opinion of it. Tens of millions of people loved that show. Good for them. I did not. I still do not. The Nielsen ratings do not impact my opinion on that. Same thing with Friends.
I cannot stand Star Trek: Discovery. And the reason I cannot stand it is not "it is new" or "that it is woke", which is the laziest version of this take. I'm sorry, but that is just so stupid. Star Trek has always been woke, that is literally the entire point of the franchise. If you loved old Star Trek and hate new Star Trek because it is "woke," I just... what show were you watching, my guy? Genuinely. Star Trek has ALWAYS been woke. That is the entire brand. Gene Roddenberry built the Federation as a post-capitalist, post-religious, post-war utopia where humanity had finally grown up and stopped clawing at each other for resources. The original series put a Black woman on the bridge of a starship in 1966, when actual Black women in actual America were being denied service at actual lunch counters. It aired the first scripted interracial kiss on American television in 1968. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) featured a same-sex kiss between two women in 1995, treated entirely matter-of-factly by the script, when most network shows would not touch the subject without framing it as a controversy or a cheap one-off to boost ratings. Captain Picard delivered multi-minute lectures about how grotesque wealth accumulation is. The Ferengi are a satire of unregulated capitalism so blunt it makes a Bernie Sanders rally look subtle. If THIS is the franchise you thought was apolitical, I just have to ask you, sincerely, with all the love in my heart: my friend. My dude. My guy. Please see an eye doctor. Or an ear doctor. Or both. The show you think you watched does not exist. You were watching the spaceships and missing every single word of dialogue between them.
But I digress, the reason I cannot stand Star Trek: Discovery is that the show is not interested in the philosophical work that has always been Trek's best argument for itself. It is wall to wall trauma dumping. The characters, who are supposedly Starfleet officers, spend most of their screen time emotionally dysregulating like children, performing their feelings at each other in search of constant validation. It takes me completely out of the world. There are a thousand ways to honor a diverse cast and real human anxiety in a Star Trek show without the whole thing collapsing into millennial and zoomer "omg this is so cool" or "I am so nervous" emoting. The franchise has done that work, beautifully, for decades. Look at how TNG handled mental health through Reginald Barclay, a man whose social anxiety and avoidance were treated with patience and dignity instead of melodrama. Look at "The Outcast," where Riker falls in love with Soren, a member of an androgynous species, who privately identifies as female in a culture that does not permit it, an episode that functions as one of the quietest, most devastating arguments for trans rights that mainstream television has ever made. Look at how DS9 handled trauma, loss, occupation, war, religion, and moral compromise across an entire serialized arc that respected the weight of every one of those words. Look at how Voyager handled isolation and hope, the slow grind of holding a crew together a very long way from home.
Modern Star Trek too often just shows us the worst of humanity and calls it depth. The franchise at its best showed us the best of humanity, and how we cope with the things that actually resonate today. That is the show I want. Discovery is not that show. Plenty of Trek fans love it and I am happy they have something that resonates with them. But for me, Discovery is not that.
Video: Soren's speech on choosing to be female in the TNG Episode "The Outcast" (1992)
I love things other people hate. I hate things other people love. I do not finish books my friends swear by. That is what taste looks like when it is yours. It is not a Venn diagram with the popular opinion. It is just yours. That is the whole posture. You do not need anyone to back you up. You do not need a number to validate you. You do not need to scroll to the bottom of an IMDb page before you are allowed to know what you think. You do not need to watch a YouTuber to get permission to watch something. You walked into the theater. You watched the movie. You felt something or you did not. That is the data point that matters. That is literally the only data point that matters.
The Bigger Picture
Almost every cultural discourse online right now is structured the same way. There is a thing. People have opinions about the thing. Some people figure out that the angriest take on the thing performs better than the thoughtful take on the thing. The angry take gets monetized. The monetization rewards more anger. The anger compounds. The discourse stops being about the thing and starts being about the performance of having opinions about the thing. The original object, the movie, the show, the album, the book, the wrestling match, the video game, becomes almost incidental. It is just the prop that the outrage gets staged in front of. The thing that used to be a public conversation about art has been gradually retooled into a content pipeline that runs on resentment. The incentives no longer reward the careful take, the nuanced take, the personal take, the contradictory take. The incentives reward the certain take. The take that delivers a verdict, fast, with a number attached. The take that makes the viewer feel smart for agreeing and stupid for disagreeing.
And the cost of this is not just bad film discourse. The cost is that an entire generation of viewers is being trained to look at art the way a stock trader looks at a portfolio. Numbers up, good. Numbers down, bad. Did this movie beat this other movie. Did this album move the needle on Spotify. Did this show get renewed for a second season. The metrics become the meaning. The actual experience of sitting in a theater, or reading a novel, or finishing a video game gets pushed off to the side. Whether you felt something becomes the least interesting question in the room. Whether the thing performed becomes everything. That is not a healthy way to engage with culture. That is barely engagement at all. Uhg.
Like what you like. Don't like what you don't like. Have the courage to stand behind that, and the intelligence to articulate why you feel that way. And maybe most importantly, have the maturity to accept that no matter how well you defend your opinion, there will always be other people who see it differently. That is the whole point of art. Art is the place where we are allowed to disagree, openly, in good faith, without needing one side to be objectively defeated by box office receipts. You do not have to agree with people who disagree with you. You do not even have to respect their reasoning. But you have to respect that they have a right to a different view, and that their view is no more or less valid than yours. That is the deal of being an adult who participates in culture. That is the deal of caring about art enough to talk about it. The box office number does not change that. The Rotten Tomatoes percentage does not change that. The Letterboxd average does not change that. Some YouTube guy yelling about how Disney is panicking does not change that.
If a movie made you happy, let it have made you happy. If a movie did not work for you, let it not work for you. You do not need the numbers to bless you. You do not need permission from a comments section. You do not need to wait until the second weekend drop is published before you decide whether you had a good time at the movies. Mandalorian and Grogu was a fun, simple, family-friendly Star Wars movie. James Gunn's Superman pulled $618 million dollars and lit up audiences worldwide. Whatevs, grifters gonna grift. The rest of us are going to the movies.
