This is another terrible weekend for Hollywood at the box office. They have shrunk their audience dramatically. They can’t fix the problem because they can’t even name it. As I look around at the trades, I still see the same thing:
On X, they think Hollywood is to blame for sending movies to streaming too quickly and for ticket prices being too high.
Nope. That’s not the reason. People will crawl across cut glass to see something they want to see. If you build it, they will come. Look at how expensive Disneyland is. Do you think their amusement parks aren’t selling tickets? No, people pay because they know the experience will be worth it. The problem is that Hollywood doesn’t want to build it. They want to build utopia, or woketopia, just like the Democrats, and therein lies their problem.
If the Democrats are less popular now than ever, that goes double for Hollywood. They are one and the same.
Hollywood, like our government, is no longer working for the people. At the very least, they should respond to the market. But that hasn’t been true for a very long time. No one really talks about the elephant in the room - how Hollywood lost its audience and why no one goes to the movies anymore, or at least not enough to keep the industry thriving. But every weekend, it’s more bad news.
Says Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro:
If Snow White pulls off a $50 million-plus opening, that’s a respectable bump for what is a barren desert of a business right now. Current estimates show that this weekend is in fact the lowest grossing at the domestic box office year-to-date with around $54.7M for all films, lower than Super Bowl Weekend ($55.8M). How is that possible during a spring break with kids off?
How is it possible? Hollywood doesn’t know how to tell stories for a country it no longer knows or understands. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that Hollywood, like the Democrats, despises the majority of the American people. How can they tell stories for people they can’t stand? And why would they expect those Americans even to want to see their movies?
They tell stories for themselves. They use Hollywood as yet another propaganda arm for their singular ideology. And to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege. The same people in power now have always been in power, and those are mostly white men. The only people who have paid a price for what Hollywood has become are all of us, the ticket buyers.
Hollywood has become creatively constipated. None of it seems to resonate broadly. They don’t tell universal stories because they have no idea what to say. It is a town crippled by fear and ruled by hysteria. Art can’t survive that. What we get is bland, boring, conflict-free movies that tell us the same thing over and over again.
You find conflict and unpredictability everywhere else but Hollywood. TikTok, X, YouTube, and even the Trump Show, not to mention podcasts, true crime, and real-life dramas, are all more interesting than this safe, boring, WOKE, predictable storytelling Hollywood feels compelled to foist upon us. Did they think we would not notice?
Back in the old days of Hollywood, someone would get fired if a $300 million dollar movie bombed. But not today. No one will lose their jobs because in Hollywood, to quote Bob Dylan, there is no success like failure, and failure is no success at all. They love to fail because it proves they are still the good people with good intentions, and it’s their audience that is bad, their audience who wants all of the wrong things. It’s not Hollywood’s fault.
Yes, it is. When a movie bombs, heads should roll. People should get fired. New people hired. Those with one goal in mind: putting butts in seats. If they can’t do it, out they go. The more exciting the movies, the more people will turn out. It isn’t complicated. Hollywood knows how to do this. They just can’t because they are buried under layers and layers of activism, corruption, and bloat.
Look at these movie stars who still command ridiculously high salaries, only for those movies to bomb because the public can’t stand the movie stars either, and why should they? Every time someone sticks a mic in their face, they start whining about fascism and Trump. SHUT UP.
They shouldn’t be hiring eager beaver-woke academics. They should hire people from all different walks of life who can give them a crash course in REALITY. There are so many great stories to tell. It would not be hard to fill seats. Make a satire of a “woke” movie. Audiences would turn out in droves. Tell the story of the Joe Biden coup. Make a movie about the fight for women to play in sports without having to compete against biological men.
Hollywood won’t tell the stories people are really interested in because they have to tell only one story, the story the Democrats want them to tell, their Woketopia origin story, and how mean old Trump knocked it all down. How many George Clooney movies do we have to sit through that beg us to pat them on the back and say GOOD JOB! YAWN. You’re putting your audience to sleep. NO ONE CARES.
Hollywood needs someone like Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to the place. Clean it out—fire everyone. Then, re-hire only those people who can do the job well. Hire the best directors, writers, and actors who prioritize audiences, not themselves. We don’t need directors who are wealthy and famous to tell us what good people they are. WE DON’T CARE. We don’t need Kathleen Kennedy and Disney to virtue-signal how good they are when they have become a corporate monopoly. WE AREN’T BUYING IT.
Take Snow White. It was a slow-rolling disaster for the studios because of the star, Rachel Zegler, who is quite outspoken online. Zegler’s criticisms of Snow White as being old-fashioned and “rapey” rubbed people the wrong way — you know, your ticket buyers? All of us who love Snow White and think it’s a perfect movie because it is the embodiment of beauty and love? Just because she has “skin as white as snow” doesn’t make that dirty or racist or wrong. It just is the story. So what?
Zegler was so outspoken and unfiltered, she became a favorite target of the YouTubers, Critical Drinker especially. And just look at how many people have viewed these videos:
2.1 million views:
3 million views:
1.9 million views:
3.6 million views:
Snow White might not bomb. It is for families and not YouTubers. But still, it is an agenda movie, and everyone knows it.
Here is Breitbart’s John Nolte telling it like it is:
Rachel Zegler herself isn’t the problem. The whole ecosystem is the problem. They just don’t care anymore about the people who made them all rich, those who work hard jobs every day, who are living on the margins, and who have practical problems, not existential dread. They need the escape and the fantasy movies used to provide until they turned into a scolding schoolmarm to punish all of us for what we actually want to see on screen.
We like the handsome prince. We like the princess. We like true love’s kiss. We like the magic of a movie that dares to tell the truth about female vanity. We don’t need Snow White to be empowered. Why would we need that? Why would we need MORE of that? Can we have something else, please?
We’ve had enough existential dread to last a lifetime. How about doing what all the greats used to do - Frank Capra, John Ford, Coppola, Scorsese, the Coens back in the day? Hollywood knows how to make good movies, even great movies. All they have to do is tell stories for everyone. Or at least try.
It shouldn’t be on the public to turn out to see Hollywood movies to save movie theaters. It should be on Hollywood to make better movies to save itself.
Bring in DOGE. Fire everyone. Start over. It can’t possibly get any worse.
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