DHacker615 🇺🇸

SGA is so bad for the league. Absolutely embarrassing

Ken Griffin at Milken: “What the mayor of New York has made clear to my partners, and principally my New York partners, is that we need to double down on our bet in Miami"

Thunder-Lakers fans discourse this entire series: OKC fans: "We're gonna kick your ass" Lakers fans: "Probably" OKC fans: "Doesn't that make you MAD?" Lakers fans: "Not really." OKC fans: "Y'all acting cool but you know we're gonna destroy you" Lakers fans: "Most likely yeah" OKC fans: "Lol so fucking triggered. We're the best."

Ken Griffin says he's scaling down in NYC: "What the mayor of New York has made clear to us, is that we need to double down on Miami."

@PaulChato @gothburz He is not a Disney exec. He is a random guy in Austin , TX writing Disney FanFic.

@gothburz You have just written chapter one of the entertainment industry's version of 1984. Your inversion theory is tactically oblique for all the key indices.

I am the Vice President of Franchise Lifecycle Management at Walt Disney Studios. I have held this position for seven years, which means I have overseen four theatrical releases, six streaming series, two theme park expansions, and the conversion of a 47-year-old space opera into a subscription retention engine with an annual yield that exceeds the GDP of Belize. I have a framed original 1977 Star Wars theatrical poster in my office on the third floor of the Frank G. Wells Building in Burbank. It is worth $14,200. I know this because Corporate Asset Management appraised it when we moved floors. It is classified as a Franchise Heritage Display under Internal Code FHD-1977-001. The insurance is paid quarterly. May the 4th is not a holiday. It is a revenue event. Internally we call it Franchise Activation Window Q2-Alpha. I designed the current activation model in 2021 after we noticed a 340 percent spike in Disney+ engagement during the first 72 hours of May. The spike correlated with subscriber re-enrollment. People who had cancelled came back. For Star Wars. They stayed for the bundle, for the parks, for the merchandise pipeline that activates the moment a subscriber re-enrolls and does not deactivate until the credit card expires or the account holder does. Fans invented May the 4th in 1979. We own it now. That's retention architecture. George Lucas sold us the franchise in 2012 for $4.05 billion. At the time, Wall Street called it expensive. The slide I presented at last year's board review was titled "Return on Mythology." The room did not laugh. The room does not laugh at returns like that. That's portfolio performance. I manage a team of forty-three people. Six of them manage the Character Lifecycle Pipeline. It tracks every named character across all Star Wars properties and assigns each a Monetization Readiness Score from 1 to 100. Baby Yoda scored 97 before his first episode aired. We call him Asset GG-01 internally. Never Grogu in planning documents. We knew. The ears were right. The eyes were right. The price point was right. The merchandise tooling began fourteen months before the first trailer. A plush Asset GG-01 generated nine figures in retail sales in its first fiscal year. I keep one on my bookshelf next to the poster. Visitors think it's charming. It is a case study. We do not retire characters. We sunset them into merchandise. That's creative development. Every planet in the Star Wars universe has a Theme Park Conversion Index. Tatooine scored 34. Too barren. Low ride density potential. Batuu scored 91. We invented Batuu. Galaxy's Edge cost $1 billion per installation. Two installations. We built a planet that never existed in any Star Wars film because the planets George Lucas created were not optimized for queue throughput and per-capita food-and-beverage spend. Batuu has fourteen points of sale. Tatooine has sand. That's experience design. I attend a quarterly review called the Franchise Health Assessment. Twelve people in a room with a 74-inch monitor showing engagement curves, merchandise velocity, subscriber acquisition cost, and something we call the Nostalgia Decay Index. Proprietary. It measures how quickly audience attachment to a character diminishes without new content. The original trilogy characters decay at 3.2 percent per quarter without activation. Vader has never dropped below 94. We activate him annually. Death improves the numbers. A character that stops generating content is a character that stops generating revenue. We do not let characters rest. We deploy them. The audience mourns the thing we killed. The audience pays to mourn it. The mourning is the product. That's franchise stewardship. At Star Wars Celebration last year a woman in the front row cried during the trailer reveal for the new series. Full tears. Hands over her mouth. My social media analyst was sitting three rows behind her. He sent me a Slack message during the standing ovation: "Organic engagement. Estimate 11-second dwell on reaction cam if we clip it." We clipped it. 2.3 million views on the official account. She does not know she is in our metrics deck. Slide 9. "Authentic Fan Response, Owned Channel Conversion." We did not ask permission. She was on our property. A man at the same event was dressed as a handmade Boba Fett. Full armor. Told our brand ambassador he spent eight months building it. We photographed him for the official gallery. The legal department classifies cosplay at our events as "voluntarily contributed brand-adjacent content." The eight months he spent is earned media we did not pay for. His labor is our asset. He thinks he is expressing love. He is performing marketing. That's community activation. The audience that hates the new content still watches it. We track this. There is a metric called Negative Sentiment Engagement. It counts. A hate-watch is a watch. A rage-tweet is a tweet. A cancellation-threat viewer who returns the following season is a re-enrolled subscriber with a documented conversion event. The Franchise Health Assessment does not distinguish between love and anger. Both are dwell time. That's audience retention. The original trilogy was released between 1977 and 1983. Six years. Three films. Since the acquisition we have released five theatrical films, three animated series, seven live-action series, and assorted specials in twelve years. One of the analysts on my team calculated that we have produced more hours of Star Wars content in the last decade than existed in the franchise's entire history before we bought it. I approved that statistic for the investor deck. Proudly. George Lucas made Star Wars at the speed of art. We make it at the speed of subscriber retention. That's operational excellence. Kathleen Kennedy has been president of Lucasfilm since the acquisition. Thirteen years. She has been called the destroyer of Star Wars on every platform that exists. YouTube. Reddit. Twitter. Podcasts I have never heard of with audiences larger than some of our series. More online petitions than any executive in entertainment history. She is the best lightning rod money can buy. Every show that disappoints. Every director we fire mid-production. Every sequel that underperforms. Every series that divides the audience into camps that hate each other more than they hate us. The anger goes to her. Not to the quarterly targets that required the content velocity. Not to the subscriber retention model that dictated the release cadence. Not to the Franchise Health Assessment that mandated six series in three years because the Nostalgia Decay Index said we had to. Not to me. We fired Colin Trevorrow. Solo lost money. We fired Phil Lord and Chris Miller mid-shoot because they were making a film instead of a franchise installment, and the difference matters when your production pipeline has merchandise tooling deadlines that predate the final cut by nine months. We restructured three films during production. Each time, the internet burned her name. Not the system. Her. I have watched her absorb sustained online hatred while the stock price held and the content pipeline delivered on schedule. I included this in a presentation once. I did not call it a sacrifice. I called it Brand Sentiment Redistribution. The room understood. She is not a scapegoat. Scapegoats are temporary. She is a load-bearing wall. She bears the weight so the architecture remains invisible. We did not ruin Star Wars. We completed it. That's leadership. Toy sales declined 47 percent between 2016 and 2023. The merchandise team presented this at the quarterly review. Nobody used the word "decline." The slide was titled "Portfolio Diversification Across Experiential and Digital." Lightsaber sales were down. App revenue was up. The math balanced. We had converted physical play into digital engagement. A child who once held a plastic lightsaber in their backyard now taps a screen to unlock one. The screen charges monthly. The backyard was free. That's monetization evolution. My daughter is seven. She has a Grogu backpack, a Princess Leia Halloween costume from the Disney Store, and a lightsaber app on her iPad that charges $6.99 per month for the premium blade colors. She owns $430 of Star Wars merchandise by our internal retail tracking. She has never seen a Star Wars film. She asked me once if we could watch one together. I said after Q2. Q2 ended. She did not ask again. Fine. She does not need to see the films. The films are a delivery mechanism. The merchandise is the product. She is wearing the product. She is carrying the product. She is the product. That's family engagement. I watched the original Star Wars for the first time in 2018 as a competitive analysis exercise. Six years into my career managing the franchise. I took notes on pacing, demographic appeal, and merchandise integration points. I identified eleven moments with high emotional resonance that could anchor future content. My team calls these Emotional Equity Nodes. The scene where Luke stares at the twin suns is Node 7. We have activated Node 7 in four separate properties across three platforms in two fiscal years because nostalgia, when properly indexed and deployed against a subscriber base with documented emotional attachment, converts at rates that would make pharmaceutical direct-to-consumer advertisers weep. I did not cry. Noted the runtime. Two hours and one minute. Inefficient. A streaming series gives us six to eight hours of engagement per character arc. The math is better. That's content optimization. George Lucas visited the lot last spring. This happens occasionally. He has an office in the building though I am told he rarely uses it. My team was asked to present the Character Lifecycle Pipeline as part of a broader franchise update. We showed him the Monetization Readiness Scores. We showed him the Nostalgia Decay Index. We showed him the content velocity projections through 2030. He was quiet for a long time. He looked at the numbers the way a father looks at a child's bedroom that has been converted into a rental unit. My director leaned over afterward and said she thought it went well. I agreed. He did not interrupt once. He did not ask us to stop. He did not say this is not what I made. He did not say anything at all. He just looked at the screen. I interpreted his silence as respect. We did not fire the creator. We promoted the franchise past him. He built the prototype. We built the factory. That's legacy management. I keep the 1977 poster in my office because it reminds visitors what we are preserving. The poster is behind glass. The glass was installed by Facilities. The frame cost $600. The insurance premium is $340 per year. In the original film, the Empire believed it was bringing order to the galaxy. It built infrastructure. It created jobs. It maintained supply chains. It measured success in reach, efficiency, and control. It could not understand why anyone would choose a desert farm over a functioning battle station. I have a slide that says the same thing. Page 14 of the Q2 franchise review. The title is "Galactic-Scale Brand Architecture." I did not write the title as a joke. The Rebellion was never defeated. It was acquired. We converted rebellion into a loyalty program. The Resistance is a product line. Hope is a quarterly target. The poster is not a movie poster. It has not been a movie poster since 2012. May the Force be with you. The Force is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. All rights reserved.

Disney is about to delete five years of canon because Rey doesn't move toys. The sequel trilogy did $4.47B at the box office. Force Awakens $2.07B, Last Jedi $1.33B, Rise of Skywalker $1.07B. The merchandise tells a different story. Star Wars merchandise peaked at $700M in 2015 when Force Awakens launched. By 2019, the year Rise of Skywalker shipped with a billion-dollar marketing push as the supposed finale of the Skywalker Saga, Hasbro's Star Wars line was doing roughly $150M. A 70%+ collapse during the trilogy's own theatrical run. Then 2020 happened. No new movies. A streaming show legally unavailable in most international markets. Hasbro's Star Wars revenue grew 70% year-over-year. One character named Grogu outsold three years of sequel-trilogy merchandise. The sequel cast specifically can't move inventory at any price point. Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, Holdo: Walmart clearance for years. Diamond Select's president said sales on TFA and TLJ products "were not too strong." Hasbro silently stopped producing Rise of Skywalker figures mid-line. There is no mass-market action figure for Poe, Finn, Lando, unmasked Kylo, Palpatine, or Leia from that movie. The licensees gave up before the trilogy finished releasing. The Lucasfilm acquisition was a $4.05B bet on the merchandise flywheel that built modern Hollywood toy licensing. Kenner's best year selling Original Trilogy toys, adjusted for inflation, outperformed the entire Disney era combined. That's the asset Disney bought. Galaxy's Edge runs the same play. Over $1B per park to build a Star Wars land set on a sequel-era planet nobody cared about. Both parks underperformed projections. The Mandalorian-themed expansion now under construction is the admission. If the rumor lands, this is the most expensive retcon in entertainment history. Five years of IP development written off because the licensees voted with their order books. Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Boba, Mando, Grogu, Ahsoka generate revenue. The sequel cast generates returns.

We truly live in an era of incompetent narcissists who break things that the could never build and live beyond any reasonable accountability.

I also think the people who decided that Fetterman vs Lamb was a high-stakes factional battle featuring a working class progressive champion against an establishment shill should try to engage in at least a little reflection about their own heuristics.

Somehow not a "dime" turned into $1 billion…

Trump in March: “This [ballroom is] no charge to the taxpayer whatsoever. This was all donations made by friends of mine… Not one penny of tax will be donated to this.”

Trump tore down nearly half the White House, without approval, then told you this ballroom would not cost any taxpayer money. Now, Republicans are requesting $1 Billion of your money for security features related to it. #ballroominflation

🚨BREAKING: Trump’s ballroom will now cost $1 billion dollars and be fully taxpayer funded.

Michael Jackson fans furiously dispute the pedophilia charges, but they also dispute that he changed his whole appearance through endless cosmetic surgeries to appear white. They also think he biologically fathered (white) children. In other words, they are deluded.

Page Six reports that Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni spent a combined $60 million to sue and countersue one another, which is more than twice the budget of "This Ends With Us."

@bonchieredstate @ConceptualJames As a rule, Republicans should be more open to voting Democratic on a national level and Democrats should be more open to voting Republican on a local level.

I understand partisanship. But how do you live in LA and then say, “Yeah, what we really need is a communist in charge. That’ll fix things.”

I'm a little bit worried this whole thing is just... like, made up? Like certain wrong ideas about why groceries are expensive caught on and are now influencing public policy? And the whole thing isn't thought through? And saying so is conservative-coded so it'll proceed?

If Republicans in California had a clue (and people like Hilton and Pratt weren’t running purely for publicity), we would get behind Mahan, a Democrat would isn’t insane, who would beat Becerra in a general election. But instead, we will have an incompetent/woke progressive win.

Breaking News: James Murdoch’s company is said to be in talks to acquire most of Vox Media, including New York magazine. nyti.ms/42PgIIc

It should probably be a bigger story that Donald Trump offered John Fetterman a significant “financial windfall” if he switches parties and becomes a Republican. I know nobody bats an eye at the corruption oozing out of this White House anymore, but that’s fucking insane, and we shouldn’t ignore it.

“They were A SEVEN SEED you SICK BASTARD”