Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s recent comments about her upcoming female-led Star Wars film have kicked off a firestorm among reactionary fans, and none other than billionaire Elon Musk is in support of shareholders taking legal action against Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney.
It is not exactly a surprise that the first-ever female director (and notably, also a person of color) to be given a Star Wars feature film would cause some havoc in the fandom. After all, the decision to center the Disney-produced sequel trilogy around Rey (Daisy Ridley) sparked years of heated rhetoric, almost entirely based on the idea that the franchise was turning “woke” for having a main female protagonist. The controversy is currently rocking the Star Wars fanbase.
It didn’t help that an interview in which the director said that she enjoyed making men uncomfortable as a way to engage in progressive dialogue recently went viral. Obaid-Chinoy is quoted as saying:
“I like to make men uncomfortable…I enjoy making men uncomfortable. It is important to be able to look into the eyes of a man and say, ‘I am here and recognize that, recognize that I am working here to bring something that makes you uncomfortable, and it should make you uncomfortable because you need to change your attitude… it’s only when you’re uncomfortable… when you have to have difficult conversations, that you will perhaps look at yourself in the mirror and not like the reflection. And then say maybe there is something wrong with the way I think, or maybe there’s something wrong with the way that I am addressing this issue.”
The backlash is getting even louder after Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy told CNN that she was “very thrilled about the project because I feel what we’re about to create is something very special, and we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about that time we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”
Conservative commentators have already decried the statement as further proof of Star Wars and Disney’s “woke” ideology and correlating it to the House of Mouse’s year of box office flops. While very famous voices like Ian Miles Cheong and Matt Walsh have weighed in, it was a comment by Twitter user @EuropaActual that made the owner of the social media service, Elon Musk, take notice and agree.
@EuropaActual posted in response to a comment of Cheong’s: “At some point, Disney shareholders need to file a class action lawsuit for breach of its fiduciary duty. After several years of repeating these same failures I think it’s reasonable to argue that Disney has officially decided to put its ideology ahead of its shareholders.”
Elon Musk quickly chimed in that he agreed that a class-action lawsuit against Disney seemed appropriate, lending his colossal support to legal action against one of the world’s largest media companies.
It should be noted that Elon Musk has pre-existing issues with Disney that are likely to have made him supportive of the idea of shareholders taking legal action because a woman was hired to direct a movie. In an instantly notorious interview, Musk blamed advertisers like Disney for distancing themselves from his company for its enormous drop in value, publicly cursing out CEO Bob Iger and later calling for his firing.
Regardless of whether Elon Musk thinks Disney shareholders should file a lawsuit because of its “woke” ideology for hiring a female POC as a Star Wars director, or simply as part of a vendetta, his support amplifies the notion to an extreme degree. Disney already has a lot of lawsuits to deal with, so it probably isn’t looking for one more.
