When Barack Obama gently took Joe Biden’s hand and led him offstage at a $30 million fundraiser in Los Angeles, it was hard not to see the whole thing as over. Like over over. Like the Fonz jumping the shark over.
Fonzie wasn’t the guy who jumped sharks. He was the King of Cool. There was nothing cool about jumping sharks, just as there was nothing cool about being on a stage with Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Jack Black, and Jimmy Kimmel.
It was all so yesterday. Oh sure, no one in the bubble of the Left would ever admit just how over it all was, but take it from me, someone who has been covering Hollywood for over 25 years. These celebrities can barely get people to watch their films because they no longer fill the necessary role of entertainers. They have elevated themselves to high positions of power and still think they can use their celebrity to influence voters. Maybe a long time ago, that was true. It isn’t true anymore.
In 2001, Julia Roberts and George Clooney paired up for Oceans Eleven, which made nearly $200 million at the box office. Last year they starred in a romantic comedy called Ticket to Paradise, which made only $68 million.
If the Democrats are counting on Hollywood to save them, they might be in for a shock. Hollywood is barely surviving. Everyone is terrified. No one is working. With layoffs, buyouts, and studios collapsing, the once-mighty empire has become a shell of its former self.
We’ve passed through some kind of gate of history where even celebrities don’t rank. No one watches them on awards shows, nightly talk shows, or SNL. Anyone can be a star on TikTok or YouTube, so it’s harder for celebrities to stand out.
Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks—all signal to half the country that they see themselves as superior, as part of the rarified air of the special people. Why would Americans want to pay to see them act in anything?
The fundraiser seemed to bring it all back home. Really? This again? After 15 years we’re all the way back here with Obama and Julia and George and the never-ending presidency that doesn’t understand it’s time to step aside and let history move on? Are we really going in for Obama’s fourth term?
To make matters worse, they were yet again upstaged by Trump, who was “the man in the arena,” this time in deep blue Detroit at a Black church.
Says Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal:
The Democratic Party’s celebrity dependency has been background noise for decades and not a problem . . . until now. This presidential election remains closely contested. With the cost of living the No. 1 issue, each swing-state vote deserves attention. In this high-stakes context, the spectacle of the incumbent president jetting from Europe to Hollywood is the kind of look Mr. Biden and his party don’t need. He’s Hollywood Joe.
Days after his $30 million fundraiser, Mr. Biden announced a whopping $50 million ad spend on a commercial depicting Mr. Trump as a “convicted criminal.” Those two words will define Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign. It might work. Polls have suggested some voters would step away from Mr. Trump following a conviction. If so, the much-maligned Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who delivered the felony conviction for the Democrats, will get the last laugh.
But notice that on the day Mr. Biden tapped the Hollywood ATM, Mr. Trump campaigned at a black church in Detroit. It is becoming hard to suppress the reality reported in polls that Mr. Trump, former host of “The Apprentice,” is peeling off layers of the traditional Democratic coalition—blacks, Hispanics, younger Americans and possibly even Jewish voters. The Democratic base once had something resembling a common identity, but not so much anymore. And it’s getting late to fix that.
It’s become more obvious than ever that Hollywood, like the legacy press, has become yet another propaganda delivery device for the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton was at the Tonys getting a standing ovation, as though anyone outside that tiny bubble actually cared.
The Obamas have an ongoing deal at Netflix, producing films and documentaries that carry the importance of the highest office in the land. The lines have been blurred, the boundaries erased. Hollywood has no choice but to do its duty as Good Soldiers of the Left. But it’s cost them nearly everything, and there’s no way out of the trap they’ve built for themselves.
They have taken a side in our ongoing cold Civil War and believe that side is the right side. But they’re wrong. For most of Hollywood’s history, writers and directors told stories about the lives of ordinary people. That is no longer true because they, like the Democrats, have become disconnected from that reality. They can’t tell those stories anymore.
And worse, so many of them now see it as their duty to be outspoken activists. Listen to them go on and on about Trump. Many years ago, that might have resonated, but they’ve had more than enough time to show America that they can run the country better than Trump. They failed.
So now what? We’re all supposed to care that they’re unhappy?
They’ve torched their own brand by giving themselves over to the woke ideology, which has infected and destroyed nearly every part of American culture. Their obsession with identity has them forever spinning the wheel of oppression.
Aligning with Obama meant that they, the ultra-rich, could borrow his status as a Black man, and as long as they pledged allegiance to the Woke, they could be forgiven their sins of wealth and privilege.
They seem to believe that living inside the bubble is sustainable. But this is still an economy based on free market Capitalism. The empire is crumbling because it lost us—its audience, fans, and profits.
Says Joel Kotkin:
Hollywood, too, is losing jobs and viewers. Typically, academics at places like UCLA trace this decline to a ‘lack of diversity’. But it seems fairly clear that imposing race and gender orthodoxy on audiences is not exactly a winning strategy. Already gender, race and other identitarian obsessions appear to have weakened once strong franchises like Star Wars, the Marvel cinematic universe and the Disney classics. One top Disney executive blamed a misogynist public for declining viewership figures. A lack of customer interest in these terrible, agenda-driven movies may be more to blame. ‘The audience’, as one film historian told the Los Angeles Times, ‘has moved on’.
Camelot
I was there at the beginning. I helped build and cultivate the Woketopia America would become under Obama. I sent my daughter to progressive public schools. I would spend my days covering the Oscars from the perspective of race and gender, shaming the Academy for only awarding white men decade after decade.
I took my role as a good soldier seriously. I scouted Black filmmakers and celebrated women. I built them up on my website, giving them a prominent place in the Oscar race. If they didn’t earn nominations, I would write a scathing rebuke of Hollywood and the industry that could not and would not allow anyone who wasn’t white and male in the door.
Obama was the first social media president to make those already online feel part of a movement bigger than ourselves. No one was prepared for the effects of the algorithms as more people were online and connected than ever before at a time when more people were alive than ever before.
That meant there was something performative in our activism, especially us white women, the base of the Democratic Party. Our unending, near-pathological need to be liked has taken us to the place where women are prepared to defer to transgender men in sports, to allow their children to be mutilated and sterilized, all to serve a high purpose and to be liked.
Social media gave us a way to broadcast our goodness. For the first time in my lifetime, the Democrats believed themselves to be moral, pure, and model citizens. What wouldn’t we do for our fearless leader, whether it was Obama or Hillary Clinton or now, Joe Biden?
Hollywood and celebrities had a front-row seat to Obama’s Camelot. The closer they were to Obama, the higher their status. It wasn’t just yachting with Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen; it was all of the richest and most famous people in the world who remade this new America we were all a part of.
We had a distorted sense of our own importance. As we closed ourselves off to the rest of the country, we began to believe that our insular bubble was the only reality.
And then we lost our minds.
The Great Awokening
In 2020, Hollywood was hit with the one-two punch of COVID and The Great Awokening. The truth is that we were afflicted with mass hysteria long before then. Trump’s win meant we were terrified suddenly that there were racists and rapists everywhere.
We slipped into a kind of fantasy world where truth was no longer truth. We could simply invent our own reality and had an entire legacy press that would feed us the lies we needed.
After the dust settled in the summer of 2020 after Biden was put in power, and after the masks mostly came off, we all waited to see if audiences would return to the movies. In 2021, only one movie made the money Hollywood used to make before 2020. Spider-Man: No Way Home, which made $800 million stateside.
The following year, Peggy Noonan declared movies were over. Audiences weren’t returning because they failed to turn out for Steven Spielberg’s musical West Side Story. Inside the bubble, it seemed like such a big deal. How could it not make money? But it flopped. Hard. To date, it’s only made $38 million.
Top Gun Maverick, however, made $700 million. But that film, unlike West Side Story, was made before the Great Awokening.
West Side Story, by contrast, was made very much within the demands of the Woketopians - a real Latina playing Maria! Top Gun Maverick just told a good story and gave audiences a chance to escape without constantly being reminded of how nervous Hollywood was to make a mistake and upset activists.
The next year, 2023, we had the dynamic duo of Barbenheimer, which combined made over a billion. Right after that, the actors and writers went on strike for the first time since 1960, bringing whatever momentum gained from Barbenheimer back to rock bottom.
But one notable thing happened in 2023. The film Sound of Freedom, shunned by the industry and attacked by the mainstream press, landed in the top ten, beating Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Top Gun Maverick and Sound of Freedom showed that audiences would turn out if they thought a movie would be good and, most importantly, not “woke.”
They don’t seem to realize that this unprecedented alignment of power, this empire, this Woketopia, means that if one falls, they all fall. Hollywood falls. The Democrats fall. Legacy media falls, and the empire collapses.
This year, everyone hoped for a strong summer box office season. But every film that rolled out “opened soft.” Theaters were empty. The Fall Guy, If, Furiosa all lost money. Even if they weren’t “woke,” there seemed to be a trust issue and a branding problem.
Finally, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 showed signs of life, proving, as John Nolte points out, Hollywood’s failings can’t be blamed on COVID or streaming or the strike. Give them something they actually want to see, and they’ll turn out.
The Fall of Babylon
Things probably would have worked out fine for the Left if we’d simply shrugged and moved on when Trump won in 2016. It would have helped if the Obama coalition was ready to step aside and allow Trump to serve as the duly elected president. But they weren’t and we weren’t. We had all this power now. What were we going to do, give it up?
We slipped into the delusion that Trump’s rise had to do with race, and we shared our country with racists. How could we survive that? Trump became an easy way to deflect blame for our own failings, our unwatchable films, our toxic policies, our cult-like new language.
Dump it all on Trump, and that means we could write ourselves as the better people, the better choice. But we didn’t get it then, and we haven’t gotten it now. Instead, we have to watch the public breakdowns of the upper crust, still aghast that “democracy” happened to them.
Morgan Fairchild, once a semi-icon in the 1980s with her frosted locks and impossibly upturned nose, now spends her days on X, clinging to whatever relevance she still has, screaming about Trump.
Bette Midler, Ellen Barkin, John Cleese, Stephen King, and the worst offender of all, Barbra Streisand, all behave like they have some kind of leverage because they are in the Obama coalition’s Royal Court.
But really, they were only famous because we the people loved them for a time. Now, they’re offering themselves up conditionally. Love us only if you love the Democrats and agree that Trump is the monster we insist he is.
The ruling class seems to believe that they’re fighting a war with Trump and MAGA. But the truth is, they’re at war with reality itself. Utopias can’t last because they demand the people inside them depart from real life to chase an impossible dream. As as Milan Kundera once said:
Hollywood and the Democrats don’t have a way out of this mess they’ve made for themselves. If their only solution is to blame the people for their failings, then it’s all over but the shouting.
//end
Hollywood Can't Save itself, Let Alone Joe Biden