How Hollywood Destroyed Itself

Houston, we have a problem.

Now that COVID is long gone, and studios are putting out blockbusters again, it almost seems like things are back to “normal.” Yet, movie after movie keeps underperforming, which is a polite way of saying Hollywood movies are bombing at the box office.

Why? Well, I don’t have to tell you why. You know why. Everyone knows why except the people tasked with covering Hollywood who are too afraid to say why. You can’t fix a problem you can’t name.

In a recent poll, 42% cite movies getting worse as the main reason they no longer pay to see them. Why have they gotten worse? Because Hollywood swapped great storytelling for franchise movies long ago, then they transformed those franchise movies into agenda-delivery devices.

The latest casualty is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which cost upwards of $300 million and flopped. As of this morning, it’s looking at a haul of just $120 million.

A film produced outside of Hollywood, Sound of Freedom, has now made around $40 million in one week, which ties it with the Jennifer Lawrence comedy, No Hard Feelings in its third week. People are willing to turn out to see movies if the story is good enough.

By now, audiences have become wary of spending their time and money only to get “woked.”

Getting “woked” means you trust the studios to deliver a good movie that meets expectations, not one that foists an ideology upon you that you may or may not go along with.

It’s a transgender character suddenly appearing in a film about Conservative Mennonite women escaping sexual assault (Women Talking), maybe it’s a movie that kills off a traditional male icon to replace him with a female (Star Wars, No Time to Die, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), or maybe formerly glamorous female icons like Charlie’s Angels have now been stripped of their sexuality, or maybe it’s all that lgbtqia ideology suddenly making an appearance in kids movies (Lightyear and Elemental).

And just like that, you’re taken out of the story. That is what is called getting “woked.” It’s one thing to know it’s there. It’s a whole different thing to have it sprung on you after you’ve invested around $100 for a family of four.

Those at the top don’t need movies like the rest of us do, especially now in troubled times. They don’t need unity only a universal story can provide. They don’t need movies to save their lives, as they did mine. What they need is absolution from their sins of wealth and privilege.

As long as they pay the piper, they can escape the wrath of the thought police. It’s your problem, they insist. The best thing they can offer you is an invitation to change.

Jennifer Lawrence’s No Hard Feelings should have set the box office aflame. At the moment, it has limped to a soggy $40 million.

The old Hollywood understood that the most important job of a movie star is to not alienate your audience. But Lawrence, like so many in Hollywood, broke that rule by becoming more politically Left, in an interview with Vogue:

“I just worked so hard in the last five years to forgive my dad and my family and try to understand: It’s different. The information they are getting is different. Their life is different.”

And she’s having this identity crisis because her Kentucky family voted for Trump and watched Fox News and as a good Puritan she is expected to shun them. Now that Lawrence’s sneer spread from one side of the country to the other, why would she assume anyone would want to pay to see her in a movie now?

Hollywood can’t make movies for an America they do not understand. They certainly can’t make movies for people they detest. It is unseemly to see so many of the richest people in the world position themselves as morally superior to the people who have been their bread and butter for decades.

Yet, that’s what happened when half of America betrayed them by voting for Trump. The entire industry, along with corporate America, took a side, and that side was to demonize half the country as racists.

We’ve slipped into a two-tiered society where half the country has been pushed out unless they’re willing to comply enthusiastically with the New Woke Order. Sporting events, concerts, even advertising all must be in strict compliance to signal their virtue or else.

The Top Gun Maverick Phenom

The first murmurings of the failing box office was when Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story opened during Oscar season and fell flat. How could this be happening, we all wondered? Even the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan ruminated on this slow-rolling catastrophe.

Top Gun Maverick soared to $800 million, blowing a hole through every excuse offered up by critics and journalists. Word of mouth revealed two things: it was good, and it wasn’t “woke.” Streaming hadn’t killed movies. Movies weren’t dead. Maybe the target demo for West Side Story was the kind of people who still wear masks outside but that’s what’s called building your house of straw and not bricks.

To quote Indiana Jones, they were digging in the wrong place.

Top Gun Maverick was a movie out of a bygone era, with a screenplay written in 2012, production resuming in 2017 after the death of its original director, Tony Scott, and slated for release in 2019. COVID delayed its release for a couple of years. That’s how the movie escaped the Great Awokening and why it was such a breath of fresh air for a weary world.

What does this film do right? Everything. It tells a good story where the hero saves the day and gets the girl. That’s not complicated. It’s filled with humor, excitement, and so much fun that you want to return and see it again. But most of all it met and surpassed all expectations because it gave the audience what they wanted, not what Hollywood thought they should want.

Critics of the film, and there weren’t many, wrote it off as state propaganda. Indeed, it could be argued that Top Gun, like so many pro-America movies throughout Hollywood history, does sell American exceptionalism, not to mention the military.

Whether you think that is good or not is up to you, but the bottom line was this: they asked audiences to trust them with their hard-earned money and their limited time, and they delivered on that promise.

Now we know for sure that if a movie is good enough, compelling enough, people will come, Ray.

(From Field of Dreams):

The Gender Swap

For an industry whose bread and butter were mostly men - young men, old men, white men, non-white men, Hollywood decided it was smart to go to war on all of them. And they wonder why movies are bombing at the box office.

This satirical video by the “Woke Critic” pretends to be praising Kathleen Kennedy, who took control of the Star Wars franchise and put a girl in the lead, a place that used to belong to the Luke Skywalker character. No one thought much of it at the time, or if they did they said nothing. Hollywood was meeting the growing cries for change. But over time, it led to a dilution of the many brands Disney now controls - Marvel, Fox Studios, and Star Wars.

The phenomenon of the gender swap is what the Critical Drinker calls the STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER:

Is it any wonder that we have an ongoing crisis of not just men but masculinity?

I was an early “woke” blogger who constantly criticized the film industry and the Oscars for being so white and so male for so long. I know I am as responsible for the house that Woke built, just as I am partly responsible for an America at the hands of a cult. But you have to start somewhere. Dissent isn’t easy, but if you love movies, like I do, you can’t stay silent and watch it all disappear.

In a Barbie World

The upcoming Barbie movie might just be the crowning achievement of the decade-long quest to transform Hollywood from a white male patriarchy to a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive utopia. Barbie has it all, so they can get away with centering a whole new franchise on a pretty, thin, white blonde.

A transgender female, a plus-sized female, women of color — is this heaven?

You are Barbie, I am Barbie, we are all Barbie!

They dare you to object so then they can call you a bigot. They’re hoping for controversy to erupt, like China banning the film because of its transgender and gay representation. Then Barbie can also be an IMPORTANT movie too. Now, Barbie is changing the world.

But is it really? Is it representation that matters, or is it selling toys? Isn’t this just another way to inject or indoctrinate the young into their way of defining this country’s ideals? Identity matters more than anything else? But especially as a way to sell stuff and not feel guilty about it?

It’s a mash of identity and narcissism, euphoria and commercialism, fame, and inclusivity, a kinda wow kinda now pink cloud of cotton candy Kardashian empire building. You can have it all as long as you pay the piper.

There’s a word for it: Propaganda.

State Propaganda Disguised as Entertainment

Something miraculous happened in China in 2020. One of their films overtook the global box office for the first time. It was pure propaganda but also profitable. Over the past decade, China has fortified its empire by building a film industry that directly competes with ours.

When American theaters emptied out in 2020, Chinese movies dominated - The Eight Hundred, along with My People, My Homeland, A Little Red Flower and The Legend of Deification all topping the chart:

By 2021, as the audience Hollywood mostly cared about remained too afraid to return to the theaters, China again dominated in ways it never had before, with The Battle of Lake Changjin, Hi Mom, and Detective Chinatown:

China’s box office began to dip in 2022 when COVID came roaring back, yet they still managed to launch a film into the top of the global charts, Water Gate Bridge:

Our American press has no problem calling out propaganda in China. Rather, it’s one of the few ways they can criticize China without being accused of Xenophobia.

But it’s worth putting it all together and measuring the two countries against each other. Chinese propaganda movies strengthen the whole country, where woke propaganda weakens ours. Chinese movies unite the country in common purpose, woke movies divide us into categories, conditioning us to hate our history, our traditional role models, our communities, and the nuclear family.

American movies now are the realization of the very thing Joseph McCarthy worried about during the Red Scare - ideology that, bit by bit, pretends to be art while chipping away at the foundations that define this country and make us a strong nation. Meanwhile, over in China their overt propaganda isn’t even pretending to be art.

The last great year for cinema was 2019 on the eve of the collapse. So many great movies were on offer that year and were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars — Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker, 1917, The Irishman, and yet, even amid those successes the Academy gave their Best Picture prize to a movie from South Korea called Parasite.

It’s a great movie but not awarding a homegrown product in a year like that one shows how little regard Hollywood had for itself before the hammer came down. It’s no wonder they were so willing to throw it all away. And that is partly how Hollywood destroyed itself. They stopped believing in their audiences, in their country, and in themselves.

I grew up a movie kid and knowing that Mission Impossible 7 and Oppenheimer are coming out this Summer, not to mention other movies down the line, like David Fincher’s The Killer and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, and Michael Mann’s Ferarri makes me feel like baby, we’re back.

I haven’t seen any of these movies yet but I have to hope, like Red at the end of the one of the greatest films of all time, the Shawshank Redemption:”

I grew up going to the movies. My mom would stuff us into her VW bug and motor us down the mountain to the Van Nuys drive-in. On the hottest of summer nights we would lay out a blanket on the asphalt and watch whatever was playing under the stars. Even the worst movies back then were better than almost everything they make now.

All through my life I lived in movies and in movie theaters. The minute you walk inside, consumed by darkness, you are transported to stories worked out well in advance. They knew where they were going and they were inviting you along for the ride.

Great movies can’t survive from inside a suffocating utopia. If Hollywood doesn’t know its audience anymore it’s time to start getting to know them. For their survival and for ours. Or as Red would say, get busy living or get busy dying.