The culture bore

Hollywood studios were already starting to cave to cultural pressures. It could get worse under Trump.

Henry Cavill as Superman in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League.” (Warner Bros./Max)

The Gist

• The cultural forces that led to Trump’s comeback didn’t come out of nowhere, and Hollywood has already started caving to them.

• While there might be concerns that entertainment could get more cynical and angry under Trump, it will likely just get more boring and risk-averse.

• Disney in particular has already been more careful to avoid conservative outrage.

Last summer, as Hollywood’s latest big-budget franchise installments crashed and burned at the box office, the right-wing “faith-based” thriller “Sound of Freedom” was cleaning their clocks.

The movie, from Angel Studios, earned $184 million in the US, more than the likes of “Fast X,” “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” “The Flash,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” and “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.” Franchises that had been part of the backbone of Hollywood for years, even decades, were suddenly losing the battle to a small-budget movie about child trafficking that catered to conservative audiences that rarely went to the movies. It featured few Hollywood stars, save for Jim Caviezel, one of the most prominent supporters of the far-right conspiracy QAnon.

Almost a year-and-a-half later, on Tuesday, Donald Trump won the presidency again. He not only won, but much of the country — including diverse demographics that do not typically vote Republican — shifted rightward in his favor.

Much as been made about how Republicans won the “culture war,” which up to this point has been a largely bad-faith battle over trivial nonsense. But it’s hard not to see Tuesday’s results as a rebuke of what voters considered to be the “established elites,” not just of the Democratic Party but of traditional media; Joe Rogan — and a larger, toxic conservative media ecosystem that suffocates the conversation, even for those outside of that bubble — likely had a not-insignificant impact.

Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom.” (Angel Studios)

It was also a rejection of the entertainment industry’s “establishment”; voters showed they had little interest in whether Taylor Swift or The Avengers endorsed Kamala Harris. It was all for nought, and it’s a phenomenon that has been an issue for Hollywood for quite some time. Whether they are going to the movies or going to the polls, the American public cares less and less about movie stars. Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise could not save last summer’s movie season, but “Sound of Freedom” and a three-hour biopic about one of the most important Americans in history could.

In reality, “Sound of Freedom” is far from the only conservative-leaning box-office hit in recent years. In 2022, “Top Gun: Maverick” earned almost $720 million in the US, the biggest domestic movie of that year. In 2014, Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” was also that year’s highest-grossing movie in the US with $350 million. Two years later, Trump won his first term.

I say all this not to oversimplify Trump’s win — there are a myriad of factors and this isn’t a political newsletter, thank God — but to point out that the cultural forces that led to this moment did not come out of nowhere. Hollywood studios had already started to cave to those pressures, and may continue to do so.

Because of that, it could be easy to fear that the conservative influencer movement might play an outsized role in entertainment over the next four years and beyond, and that pop culture will get more cynical and crude. In some corners, like podcasting and YouTube and even comedy, that might be true.

Or even that the same dudebro-like campaign that forced Warner Bros. to actually “Release the Snyder Cut” could turn from fringe to mainstream; while there are plenty of good-faith fans out there that legitimately wanted to see Snyder’s “Justice League” vision, the movement at large had a similar toxicity to the kinds of male-focused influences that helped get Trump elected. There’s a reason Trump had posted a meme of himself and Elon Musk as Snyder’s Justice League and not as The Avengers.

But no, studios are likely done taking risks like that. For mass-appeal, big-budget Hollywood IP, it will probably look more like what Disney has already been doing: “broad,” safe, incurious, non-controversial.

Sure, that’s been Disney’s brand for decades. But in recent years, it began taking minor swings that mostly missed. Pixar’s “Lightyear,” which sparked conservative uproar over a lesbian relationship in the movie (which barely gets mentioned or hardly any screen time), flopped with $118 million in the US. “Strange World,” which features a gay main character, fared even worse with $38 million.

Like Trump’s victory, there are more factors than just the “culture war” for why these movies failed. But it would also be wrong to say it didn’t have any impact on their box-office performance. At least, that’s what Bob Iger seems to think. Since he returned as Disney CEO, he has made comments that Disney should not be “agenda-driven” and that the company should “entertain, first and foremost” — not-so-subtle acknowledgements that he thinks the studio’s small efforts in representation have maybe hurt some movies’ financial prospects.

So now Disney is doubling down on the kind of remakes and sequels that are probably guaranteed success (the kind of stuff it released during Trump’s first term): “Moana 2” later this year, and next year will bring the likes of “Zootopia 2,” “Lilo and Stitch,” and “Freakier Friday.” Not a lot of room for outrage, whether real or fabricated, and that’s exactly the point.

There will still be room for genre-pushing studio films as long as people like Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler are still making movies. The good news is that they are all already working on their next projects. But when so much of the entertainment and tech world were already bending the knee to the President-elect even before the election (Warner CEO David Zaslav practically begged for a Trump win just so he can merge his flailing company with another), it does little to assuage the concern that Hollywood IP, for the most part, is about to get a lot more boring.

Beyond the Traverse

🚀 A “Mass Effect” TV series, based on the sci-fi role-playing game series, is in the works at Amazon.

⭐️ Simon Kinberg, the director of “Dark Phoenix,” is apparently writing and producing a new “Star Wars” trilogy. Yeah right.

• How does Kathleen Kennedy still have a job?

🪄 A “Hogwarts Legacy” game sequel is in the works, and the storytelling is being coordinated with that of HBO’s Harry Potter series.