They do know what their audience wants but like a lot of big corps, they want them to buy something else anyway because that what aligns with their internal goals, like Marvel's direction since they got pulled into the Hollywood hive mind of activisim. Another good example of this corporate hubris is Live Service games, on the whole people don't want them, flop after flop after flop but the AAA's are hellbent on making more and more of them.
They know people don't want the M-SHE-U - they have all the evidence to show that, but rather than admit their corpo strategy has failed and their financial goals haven't been met, they come up with coping strategies like attacking the fan base for not liking their products. The Sony head and various other execs elsewhere (inc Ubi) decided we were having NFT games whether we liked it or not despite the total apathy and outright opposition to them by gamers, but their coping strat was to say "You don't understand NFT's, it's your fault".
Predictable fail, they have given up on them, at least for now, it's different for Disney because their products have existed for decades, NFT's were never a thing to begin with. So they plough on. People think businesses always think rationally, because they almost always do because it has to be in the end all about $$$. But ego and activism in Disney's case have now usurped their bottom line thinking.
Until that priority changes back they're going to plough on with the M-SHE-U no-one wants, keep losing money, and keep on coping. I think initially Disney's line of thinking was "We don't want to do politics" but they made the fateful choice of bending the knee to activist pressure and are now trapped between the bottom line and their ego. So they keep kicking the can down the road. AAA gaming companies tend to whether backlashes to predatory practices and PTW, because it soon blows over really, and they're in a growth industry whereas Marvel are stuck in a dying one, that being traditional forms of entertainment delivered by traditonal means like cinema.
They'll quadruple down on this again with Phase 5, what a complete mess of their own making, they probably also thought they needed to attract new fans because of thing aging demographic of the older Marvel superfans who grew up on comics (another part of their business they have destroyed with terrible activism driven products) and wanted to appeal to a younger crowd, trouble is the younger crowd they needed to appeal too weren't freaks on twitter it was the younger people who flocked to see Phase 3.
M-SHE-U, multiverse BS, reboots, needing to do your homework to understand the latest movie, endless crap TV shows (milk the IP greed with constant "product") - none of this is appealing to the normie audience and that's who they have lost, the stans will watch anything. They thought they could set up a never-ending production line of sludge product and people would eat it down because it said Marvel on it, how wrong they were.
www.nytimes.com
