Why has Disney just gone pure "woke" (for lack of a better term) in such a short time?

The calculation is that it makes them more money. They believe that the cast should reflect the audience which is more and more diverse than ever before.

Mental Illness must be a job requirement.

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Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.
Leftists always lie.
Wokeness is Weakness.

Because in 1988, a mentally ill gay guy wrote all the songs for "The Little Mermaid," that movie was a big hit. Ever since, Disney has been filling the company with mentally ill LGBT Democrat party activists even though they are perverts and antithetical to family friendly entertainment.

We live in a world filled with diversity. Go back in your cave.

The Woke Era unofficially started in 2015, but it didn't start charging full steam ahead until 2016, when the culture wars heated up.

Disney (among other movie companies) also started making dealings with a major investment company called "Blackrock," who had started pushing the ESG scoring on them. The ESG scoring demanded that the products Disney and their fellow movie studios be as diverse and PC as possible (AKA, woke). The higher the ESG score, the more money Blackrock would pour into the studio. Considering how many activists Bob Ogre had hired to work within the walls of Disney, the majority of the higher-ups were happy to charge full steam ahead with their far-left agenda to get the highest ESG score possible, particularly after 2015 when gay marriage was made legal, and the gender revolution took off a year after that.

You can see it very clearly with what movies they were producing before and after 2016. It's like someone flipped a demonic switch at the Walt Disney Studios and changed it overnight.

Any movie studio who has a deal with Blackrock or Vanguard (another investment firm that pushes an ESG score) doesn't fear going broke because any deficit they get will be made up with money given to them from those companies, money which comes, strangely enough, in scrubbed and laundered form from the US govt. and taxpayer money.

It's why Disney keeps stupidly doubling down on their woke crap, because they want that investor money really bad and refuse to admit that in exchange for their deal with the devil (AKA Blackrock) they are actually harming their own brand badly and alienating the majority of their customers, ergo, the money and support from their customers is going away really fast.

Is the "problem" that they diversified the cast, or is noticing the diversification actually the problem? May just be me, but I don't think changing the race of a character whose race isn't integral to who the character is or significant in any way should be noticeable enough to warrant any kind of ire against Disney. I also think Disney movies are the perfect place to showcase acceptance, since kids haven't completely inherited their parents' hatred/distrust of others yet, so some of them won't even know the character is "supposed" to be a certain race.

Someone brought up on this site the other day that Morgan Freeman replaced an Irish character in The Shawshank Redemption, and that's not had a negative impact on the film overall or ruined the character. I don't know that many Irish people have complained about Irish erasure, given this is still a character written from an American's perspective anyway. And if anything, Freeman's gravitas elevated the film to become what it is now.

Part of why I mention Stephen King's film is because the most contentious part of this casting, as well as the casting for The Little Mermaid, is how we're still seeing studios relegate POC to the magical negro trope that King made so popular (The Stand, The Green Mile, Doctor Sleep) because they're not actually that comfortable with diversification. I don't think a non-white person playing a role in a film should still be a point of contention in 2023, but that's just me.

Disney has been woke for a long time, long before it was called that.