I hate to break this to you…

Disney’s fiscal 2025 ended in September with $12.4 billion in net income. That’s the year of Snow White, Elio, Tron and Captain America Brave New World. This is why I think get woke go broke needs to be reanalyzed.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. Projects have failed. People have benefited from the hyper awareness around film, TV and games, and I’m one of them. My company benefited from it, because people went looking for alternatives. But we have to be fair. Entire communities and entire economies formed around pointing this stuff out, and it’s 2026 and we’re having the same conversation we had ten years ago.

The problem is that people look at this micro instead of macro. If the goal is to punish these companies economically, you cannot do it project by project. One bomb does not send the signal you think it sends, because the umbrella makes its money elsewhere. That’s why the same names keep resurfacing. A project underperforms, the deck gets shuffled, and three months later those people are developing something else with the same views they had before. Studios close and the people get reabsorbed, or they turn up at the competition doing the same job. It’s a trade, not a consequence.

And I had to humble myself on this, because I look at it financially now instead of just as a fan, since I own a business.

The other hard part is the normies. They don’t move the way we move. Even when they know something strange happened behind the scenes, it doesn’t stop them from engaging with whatever’s in front of them. That’s why I keep saying this has to be sustained across several years and several projects before any of it registers on a bottom line. If it doesn’t hit them economically, what incentive do they have to change? None.

So let’s talk about expectations, because that’s where this starts and where you avoid egg on your face. People called Odyssey a flop before it opened. It did $1.75 billion and became Universal’s biggest film ever. You could see that coming if you weren’t locked into the micro.

I’m not telling you to go consume this stuff. I don’t. What I’m telling you is that several years in, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result isn’t a strategy. Disengaging is. And most people aren’t interested in that, because they treat the conversation itself like a protest.

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#GetWokeGoBroke #Disney #Hollywood #BoxOffice