Hollywood is About to Move Right
When Innovating Becomes Unprofitable, Just Play the Hits
It’s been a rough decade to be in movies. There’s issues at every potential point of failure in the tried and true model which has delivered films to viewers since the genesis of the motion picture production business as a mode of popular entertainment. The theater distribution model was badly wounded by the pandemic, which accelerated the movement towards home streaming and cut into already slim margins. Consumers are less willing to gamble on a night at the cinema as they feel the squeeze from inflation, worsening an already dire outlook for brick and mortar theaters competing with a corporate coalition of content delivery systems. Cinema owners are faced with a variety of options to try and maintain healthy revenues, all of which seem to have more cons than pros. Labor unrest has rocked Hollywood and jammed up the distribution pipeline, deepening divides between the creative and executive classes at a key moment when emergent generative AI is growing to exploit the gap in the lines. Despite the ostensible demise of “peak TV,” prestige series seem to have permanently replaced feature films as the medium of choice for the cosmopolitan class. Though perhaps this can be forgiven. Modern studio films have sunk ever deeper into a creative ouroboros of remakes, reboots, and idolatrous IP worship. The numbers do seem to speak for themselves, original ideas just don’t seem to put butts in seats the way even mediocre to bad IP driven films do. The studios are growing risk averse as they place bigger and bigger bets on ideas that seem to get worse and worse.
There’s a kind of passive, unspoken assumption that the big studios are on the way out. How could they not be? Their pockets are deep but not bottomless. The intellectual property they hoard is dependable but not foolproof. The allure of Hollywood is seductive, but not irresistible. It’s harder and harder to argue against the headwinds faced by the biggest names in blockbuster film production. Their rapport with a mass market audience seems to be almost nonexistent. Their ability to identify and promote new talent is questionable at best. Their contempt for both their dragon’s hoard of IP and the fans that cherish it is palpable (looking at you, Warner Bros, you and your bizarre grudge against the Looney Tunes).
I understand that we all enjoy watching an evil empire crumble under the weight of its accumulated sins. Watching the incompetent fail upwards can drive you crazy and America loves public mockery of the privileged. But I think we’re over-eager here. Don’t write that obituary just yet. Hollywood is sick, but far from dead. It won’t disappear, just reinvent. Hollywood, desperate, wounded, and running out of options, is going to strike a Faustian Bargain with MAGA-land. I think the American entertainment industry is returning to the center-right stance which served it so well in the past century. I think Hollywood will be leading the rightwards procession.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
I’ve been nursing this theory for a while. Specifically, I’ve been turning it over in my head since I saw Top Gun: Maverick. Released in 2022, the soft-reboot sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 totally-heterosexual classic was notable for many reasons. First, it was legitimately quite good, an earnest, straightforward blockbuster with an engaged ensemble cast, weighty practical effects, and a solid military melodrama plot. Secondly, and more importantly for Hollywood, it made liquid vats of cash. Top Gun: Maverick was the second highest grossing film of 2022 at the worldwide box office and took the number one spot in the US domestic charts. It’s worth pointing out that Maverick out-drew a veritable murderers row of juggernaut IP driven productions to win its laurels, out-earning no less than four Marvel Cinematic Universe productions as well as Avatar: The Way of Water and Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Third, it’s pretty unapologetically a right wing film.
Now obviously there are several qualifiers we must apply to this label of “right wing film.” The politics it traffics in are not the nerd speechifying of a Dinesh D’Souza joint, the mean spirited Twitter brain filmmaking of a Daily Wire production, or even the folksy snob-bashing of a Taylor Sheridan. Maverick’s politics, unstated, unconfrontational, in the margins and inbetween the lines, are politics of broad feelings and nostalgist signifiers. A politics of sunsets and vistas, of motorcycles and leather jackets, of brotherhood and valor. It’s hawkish to an almost cartoonish degree, disguising its saber rattling towards Iran with the thinnest possible veneer, but that veneer does exist and therefore gives the audience permission to disengage, to cease interrogation, to “turn their brains off and have a good time.” It is a politics, in a nutshell, of implication. A politics that is seen and not heard.
My theory was that Maverick’s runaway success would create space for films in its general mode, after all, the big studios love to copy each other’s homework. Mass market entertainment is nothing if not derivative. 2023 was too soon for this nascent trend to bear fruit1, but a true successor to Maverick’s uncomplicated Americana fetishism arrived in summer 2024, with Twisters.
Twisters was a somewhat modest success in comparison to Maverick, charting 8th on the yearly domestic box office rankings and doing so in a year of releases adversely affected by the aforementioned labor unrest throughout the entertainment industry. But its content represented a significant evolution for this now-nascent school of New Right filmmaking. Twisters was a full-throated endorsement of middle American aesthetics, a film of wide open great plains, small town crossroads, and big, beautiful pickup trucks. Carhartt jacket cinema. Blue jean kino. It is also a film about extreme weather events and their apparent increasing frequency in which the phrase “climate change” is never spoken once. Once again, we are confronted with a politics of implication. Unstated, but omnipresent. Now listen to That One Luke Combs Song. Bow bow bow bow Okla-ho-maaaaaaaa.
These two films served as a kind of mass market breakthrough for an aesthetic mode which had long been gestating in other, easier to ignore spheres of media. Indeed, when the history books are written, we may see the aforementioned Taylor Sheridan as the true originator of the style. Maverick and Twisters can perhaps be best understood as a successful transplantation of the formula which made Yellowstone an entertainment empire among America’s Dads and Dad-brains from the streaming services to the silver screen. The union of Hollywood marketing muscle and technical wizardry with the aesthetics and cultural politics of TV shows your parents like has produced a new paradigm, one which will only grow as Hollywood casts off progressive narratives and diverse voices like so much ballast.
It’s The Wokeness, Stupid (It’s the Stupid Wokeness)
These implied but unstated politics represented a departure from the perception of the blockbuster mode which has been dominant in Hollywood for the past decade. This perception has predictably been split along culture war lines and recycled into clickbait content by bitter nerds with axes to grind. This perception uses its bandwidth to reinforce and reproduce itself. Whether it’s ever been as true, as intentional, as obvious as its human signal boosters would have you believe is a whole other discussion. But if you watch movies, follow the media apparatus around them, understand the ways people relate to them, then you know the narrative I’m describing. Sing along if you know the words.
Middle-American audiences feel lectured by modern Hollywood. They feel judged, stigmatized, they can’t tolerate the wokeness (to use a regrettably-mainstreamed term). I mean, what ever happened to the good guy getting the girl and saving the day, huh? Why are there all these girlbosses in my movies? Why are there all these black people in my movies? Why are there all these gays in my movies? Why are there all these politics in my movies? Why can’t I just have fun? I just wanted a good time! But instead you turned my beloved Ghostbusters into women and shot your wokeness everywhere and RUINED Star Wars and now even though I REFUSE to watch your WOKE movies I’m gonna spend 9 straight hours watching video essays about them and then watch every piece of WOKESLOP you deposit on your WOKE streaming platform (for which I pay $19.99 per month) so I can post about it on X: The Everything App.
Hollywood’s seeming retreat from progressive causes de jour of the 2010s along with the rest of Cosmopolitan America has been championed as a great victory by the professionally-mad-at-Star-Wars. “Get Woke, Go Broke!” They chant. But this doesn’t stand up to even a cursory examination. The highest grossing movie of 2023 was Barbie, and that movie was basically 100 minutes2 of candy-coated pop feminism. In that same year Disney’s “live action” remake of The Little Mermaid was predicted to bomb by the anti-woke crowd for casting a black woman in the titular role. It made almost $300 million in the US alone and finished 6th in the year’s domestic box office rankings. Was 2023 some great outlier? An inflection point of “peak woke” before sanity could return? Well, if we go back to 2022, Maverick’s distinguished runner-up on the charts was Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a minority-driven blockbuster in the truest sense of the term.
There’s no point debating these people. They want to believe what they want to believe. Belief requires no justification. I’m not interested in belief of this fashion, it’s just another opiate. I want an opinion that cuts, not one that numbs. Here’s mine: the box office malaise of Hollywood isn’t due to an oversaturation of “woke” movies but an oversaturation of bad pandering. Hollywood does not make movies out of the goodness of their hearts. Studios are not interested in telling the stories of the marginalized. Not interested in centering any particular voice. Executives are interested in repackaging aesthetics and selling them back to a predominantly white audience. The macroeconomic bet which drove a more progressive worldview onto our screens was that they could shift gears and pander to less-engaged nontraditional audiences while the core white audience would be numbed out of any significant reaction to more diverse products by the presence of recognizable brands. Turns out pandering to young, queer, diverse, urban America is more difficult than they thought.
Don't believe me? Think I'm being cynical? Hollywood’s history is littered with minority populations exploited and discarded. Look at John Singleton, or Hype Williams3, or even Spike Lee! When they weren't interested in rehashing the same old black inner city narratives that brought them to renown they were discarded. Because the suits already had the checklist of clichés to draw the rubes in by that point. Once they have that they don't need any human element. Authenticity is an inconvenience. Once the representation checklist stops working (because of the absence of that identifiable human heart) they'll just tear it up and start pandering to the next audience. They don't regard “woke” as anything more than a trend. Trends are inherently disposable.
Liberal Hollywood and Other Cherished American Myths
The idea of Hollywood as this great signal booster of liberal social values has always demanded some deeper examination in my view. True, “movie stars” in the modern mold are an overwhelmingly cosmopolitan liberal class, but I would ask you to consider that before the modern movie star is a person, they are a brand. English academic and film critic Richard Dyer’s book Stars4 finds the modern celebrity at “the point of intersection of public demand (the star as a phenomenon of consumption) and the producer initiative (the star as a phenomenon of production).”
Image maintenance is a 24/7/365 endeavor now more than ever before. When you hear stars speak, ask yourself; “what percentage of this is marketing?” That percentage will inevitably vary from person to person. Not every movie star is a secret reactionary but in pure, brutal statistical terms, at least some of them are. True, Tinseltown gave us Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando, but it also produced Charlton Heston and Clint Eastwood. The future Mel Gibson’s of the world don’t just appear from the ether. They hide within this ostensibly liberal institution until their personal politics break containment.
Hollywood is very good at presenting itself as a liberal institution, good at paying lip service and showing reverence to the right sacred cows, but again we must ask how much of this is marketing? Belief is very easy when your beliefs ask nothing of you beyond a few quotable lines of dialog you can slap on $30 tote bags. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a fantastic example of this. After almost two decades spent raiding The House of Ideas for IP and making liquid gobs of cash, the MCU has stripped it down to the copper pipes and the truth is harder and harder to deny. The MCU has always been a pretty unabashedly reactionary project hiding behind a veneer of social liberalism which has grown nonexistent after all the years of wear and tear5. The MCU’s rise to the zenith of American pop culture saw it praised for a nominally progressive worldview. This may have been true in comparison to the frattish conservatism of the Michael Bay Transformers movies and War on Terror shoot’n’cry epics which preceded it on the throne. However, as its gone on, it’s become harder and harder to ignore the MCU’s seeming demand for social stasis. A kind of universal hostility to any forces advocating for change, even if it’s the right kind. The world can only change in so much as it benefits the bottom line of Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Company.
This is the inherent long-term problem with American blockbuster filmmaking which seeks to portray a “progressive” worldview. Hollywood maintains a close relationship with the US Department of Defense, which allows them access to military hardware for entertainment purposes. If the DoD does not approve of the script, the production gets no access to those shiny toys. The studios certainly will not pay those costs out of pocket. Ergo, even a “liberal” blockbuster can only ever project a thin, sarcastic veneer of liberalism over American imperial ambition. The MCU’s greatest hits and Top Gun: Maverick may be very different in terms of content but they’re alike in that they exist by the good graces of the US military industrial complex.
Hollywood’s seeming retreat from a socially progressive worldview can be seen as logical combination of these two factors. The current message across the popular entertainment sector seems to be that the institutional players are ready to let the straight white men come home after years in the wilderness. This should not be seen as a victory for this particular demographic, but more as a strategic move. Hollywood thinks they’ll be easy to pander to for a few years. Hogs with less refined palates, unable to taste the taint in their slop. Furthermore, the existing paradigm has worn thin, and with shaky economic horizons industry-wide, a back to basics approach would seem to make sense from a risk-management standpoint. Nobody wins or loses a culture war because none of us actually control our culture. Capital does that. Hollywood is merely an organ through which institutional capital exerts that control.
The Hamdan Ballal Affair and the Future of American Cinema
The vibe shift does not mean essays and merch, it means art, art with messages and opinions which you have a responsibility to meet at the point of attack and parse according to your own belief system and conscience. Modern circumstances have made it clear that the cause of social liberalism is by no means a united front within the American entertainment industrial complex. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the recent beating, abduction, and extrajudicial detention of recent Academy Award winner Hamdan Ballal. It lays bare a simple, brutal truth about all mass market entertainment. The people who fund it are at best cowards and at worst totally amoral. A man who received the highest honor possible in his discipline may have been lying dead in a ditch and the archons of American cinema couldn’t even decide if that was something worthy of condemnation. I am not here to apply labels, to debate the semantics of mass murder and state oppression. I am merely here to suggest that, as the moviegoing public, we must not be silent when the people whose labor produces our entertainment come under such brazen assault by the forces of repression and fear.
If we can clear even this low bar, we are already morally superior to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Eagle-eyed readers may note (correctly) that 2023 saw a right wing cinematic project crack the box office top 10. While The Sound of Freedom is a culture war insanity rune whose success bears some deeper examination, I would consider it distinct from the artistic movement we are attempting to isolate here. Moreover, its box office success, much like other grievance mongering films with a distinct relgious character, can be chalked up to block booking practices. Maverick and Twisters found organic success.
Oh Greta you treat me so well with these reasonably-brief films.
Thanks are due to friend of the blog and scholar of American cinema
for his insightful and illuminating edits to this essay as well as his suggestion that Dyer’s work could be cited here.Of course, we could just say this about super heroes writ large, where my Alan Moore-heads at?
Also of note is an often cited fact about the rise of Ronald Reagan I discovered in THE JAKARTA METHOD. One of the ways Reagan raised his cache with republicans in California prior to being governor was by being a vehement enforcer of anti-communism. While he was president of SAG, he made all new actors sign a pledge against communism, an imperative for their membership. Hollywood IS liberal, in the sense that all conservatives are as well, because capitalism is a guarantee of liberal democracy. That isn’t at all a criticism of your cogent and engaging piece, as much as it is a facet of these conversations that are totally lost on democratic voters and their inability to see their tacit approval of the war machine, I.e. as you said, watching top gun maverick.
“Evil Empire,” what