Fresh off of one Hollywood “talent” kicking off a political firestorm that destroyed a tentpole movie, Disney is now facing a repeat of the same scenario, highlighting again the company’s hypocritical view of its stars engaging in political rants.
Actor Pedro Pascal decided to run headfirst into the transgender debate once again, calling Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling a heinous loser. Rowling’s thoughtcrime is that she thinks men cannot be women, and she celebrated the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruling that found that men cannot be legally considered women. According to Pascal, this is “Awful disgusting s***” and “heinous loser behavior.”
This comes three months ahead of the release of Disney’s big Marvel movie, The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Pascal is the film’s headliner, the latest major project he leads. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has struggled since wrapping up its natural story arc in 2019, with lazy scripts and excessive reshoots bogging down the franchise. The Fantastic Four has also been considered a failure every time it’s been brought to the big screen, meaning this film needs every bit of good luck it can get.
Disney is still reckoning with the damage Rachel Zegler did to its brand and its latest major film, Snow White. Zegler decided to drown the movie in liberal politics, from decrying the lack of feminism in the original to supporting terrorists in Gaza. Zegler is less of a star than Pascal, and the Fantastic Four is more anticipated than Disney’s lazy Snow White. But Pascal saying that anyone who doesn’t think men can be women (which is most people) is a “heinous loser,” no doubt has Disney seeing worrying parallels.
This is also a reminder that Disney executives are shameless hypocrites when it comes to politics. Disney fired Gina Carano from her role in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian after she compared the hatred being fostered in politics in this country to the demonization of Jews in Nazi Germany. As most of us recognized years ago, this was Disney’s excuse to mask the likely actual reason, which is that Carano did not adhere to delusional transgender ideology.
WHERE DOES DISNEY GO FROM HERE?
Around that time, though, Pascal compared U.S. treatment of illegal immigrants to Nazi treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. He was not fired then, and he isn’t going to be fired now that he is lashing out at people who understand how biology works while he shrieks and wails about how men can be women.
Pascal might be a big enough star to overcome being a whiny, insufferable liberal activist in a way that Zegler could not, but that doesn’t let Disney off the hook. The entertainment giant knew what it was signing up for with Pascal after dealing with Zegler’s antics for years, and it knows how hypocritical it is to have canned Carano while coddling Pascal’s infantile political views.