You're thinking at the wrong level of abstraction. There is no economic incentive for wokism at the corporate level. But look one level below. The question isn't what causes "corporations" to act in woke ways. The question is, what persuades employees of corporations to act in woke ways?
My hypothesis is that anti-discrimination legislation has, due to court precedents, developed an inverted burden of proof. If a corporation fires or disciplines someone who is non-white, female, disabled, or belongs to a number of other protected categories, it is now up to the corporation to prove that the firing or discipline was done for non-discriminatory reasons. This, combined with the ideological leanings of most people in HR departments, is sufficient to ensure that every corporation has, within it, the equivalent of an ideological cell, whose job it is solely to push the corporation to act in a more woke manner. This ideological cell has both public opinion and federal law on its side; well meaning individuals who push back end up like James Damore.
But unless this had profit appeal I would expect the market to just… eat pure but incomplete ideological capture after a while
The market is part of society. There was a similar argument made against anti-segregation legislation in the 1960s. After all, given that it's more profitable to sell to both black people and white people than it is to sell to white people only, wouldn't it be in business owners' rational self-interest to desegregate their properties?
The answer, in both instances, is the same: if there is a sufficiently high cultural barrier, then it will be more profitable to go with the culture than against it. Most reasonable people can at least nod along to the woke slogans. After all, it is quite reasonable to suggest that women ought to be treated equally to men, that blacks should be treated equally to whites, and people shouldn't be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. It's only when those reasonable propositions are taken to extremes that they result in wokism.
Because of this motte-and-bailey aspect to wokism, it's easy for wokism to permeate the culture, and for advocates of wokism to tar those who oppose them as racists and bigots.
But there’s a counter-push of “Lots of people don’t like being lectured about politics when they’re seeking entertainment” (for instance).
It’s not at all clear to me that the first effect is so utterly hugely enormously larger than the second that the profit incentive would cause so many companies to swing hard woke.
Lots of people also threatened to move to Canada if Trump was elected President. How many of them actually chose to do so? A Republican in the United States will shout vociferously about Coca Cola or Nike engaging in woke behavior, but will he or she choose Pepsi when he or she next shops for groceries? Will he or she buy some other brand of shoes? And if he or she does, will it make a difference? After all, Pepsi and Reebok are hardly less woke than Coca Cola and Nike.
You are making the mistake of assuming that because the median Chinese citizen is ideologically opposed to the American left in a technical sense, Disney's localizing movies for China means that Disney isn't a captured institution. But in fact the American left cares very little about the beliefs and attitudes of the average Chinese person, as they compete in an almost entirely distinct political arena. So major movie companies being willing to sell movies there is not much evidence of anything.
More telling than Disney's localizing for China at all is the ... (read more)
What's profitable for an independent filmmaker isn't necessarily a market opportunity worth pursuing for Disney. Disney, Paramount, and the other major studios operate on an entirely different scale than independent filmmakers. Given the amount of corporate overhead that they have, a film that returns less than several hundred million dollars in profit, mostly due to merchandising and theme park tie-ins, in some ways, just isn't worth it.
It's not just the Christian right who are being neglected by this reality. Pretty much every film genre other than action/adventure and superhero has suffered. When was the last time we saw a major studio fund a small-to-medium budget comedy? Or romance? Drama still gets funding because those films win awards, but it's unclear even how long that will last.