From 2014: "DreamWorks Lays Off Dozens of Employees As ‘Dragons 2’ Continues to Underperform"

Back in 2014 I had a Tumblr account. One day that summer, this post appeared umpteen times in my dashboard, “DreamWorks Lays Off Dozens of Employees As ‘Dragons 2’ Continues to Underperform” along with orders from the rebloggers that we “go see HTTYD2 immediately! Save DreamWorks blah blah blah!”

I posted the following observations to this in my own Tumblr blog (I doubt anyone read it):

Unfortunately, asking everyone to “go see this movie ASAP” is another case of “let’s treat the symptom but not the disease.” The reason people aren’t going to see this movie (and lots of other movies) is because THEY CAN’T AFFORD TO. You wanna know who goes to the movies? Members of the middle class. And, in case you haven’t been paying attention (that’s okay, nobody is), the middle class is dying. I myself have not been to a movie since December 2013 (my going to see the 2nd Hobbit movie would surely have been deemed “irresponsible” by the Faux News crowd). It doesn’t matter how great a movie is. When you’re broke, you’re broke. What myopic companies like DreamWorks don’t get is that the people they lay off are also the ones our economy needs to go to the movies. A smarter move would have been for the CEO to take “personal responsibility” for the bad decisions behind making/marketing this film and take a temporary cut in his ~$5Mil annual compensation. But we can’t ask for that to happen, because that would be evil and the end of ‘murrica as we know it! Remember my “Fuck You, Hasbro” post? They partner with DreamWorks to create a bunch of crap merchandise to sell to – guess who? – the middle class. Will any of those 500 “old fart” former employees be going to the movies this weekend? Don’t count on it (recall, “Unemployed? You May Never Work Again”).

Modified version of the Hasbro post can be found here.