The Walt Disney Company has cut a transgender storyline out of an upcoming animated series called "Win or Lose." Fox News reported that move last week, quoting a Disney spokesman who said:
"When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline."
The move comes after years of backlash against Disney for its products involving "woke" content.
AFN spoke with Dr. Ted Baehr, chairman of Good News Communications and Movieguide and publisher of Movieguide. He explains that Hollywood has numerous influences.
"To put it in context of Hollywood, in the last year – if you follow Variety and The Hollywood Reporter and the inside information which we get all the time – every studio has closed down or stopped paying attention to its diversity divisions. In fact, a lot of the diversity people have been fired," he adds.
Baehr says Coca-Cola, about 20 LGBTQ groups, and Planned Parenthood all lobby Hollywood, adding that the abortion giant spends about $100 million a year lobbying Tinseltown. The fact that there are many Christians in Hollywood, both actors and behind-the-scenes workers, may finally be having an impact on movie companies.
"Disney decided to take out an LGBTQ character out of one of their new Pixar series," Baehr points out. "[The producer of] their last Pixar movie ["Inside Out 2"] has come to the Movieguide Awards the last several times [and recently told me] 'We're Christians, and we believe in Movieguide, and we've come to the Movieguide Awards*, and we were interested.'"
According to Baehr, some studio heads in the movie industry are finally acknowledging the Christian audience is the largest audience. "They also reach other audiences," he adds, "but the good news is they're paying attention to the Christian audience."
And they're discovering that family-themed movies do better at the box office, he says. He cites as an example a movie two years ago in which Planned Parenthood invested $100 million.
"And it bombed at the box office," he reports. "But they keep putting money into movies to [push] the pro-abortion agenda – but nobody wants to see a movie where at the end of the movie, the baby dies. So, it's just not an attractive storyline."
* The Movieguide Awards is an annual awards gala for faith-based entertainment.
