Woke Hollywood Sinks Into Irrelevance After Multiple Box Office Failures

The formula for box office success these days seems rather simple – Produce a solid story with relatable and likable characters, and tell that story in a setting that makes sense with as few distractions and tangents as possible.  In other words, make a normal movie without the intent to manipulate your audience with propaganda.  

Most movies that follow this basic formula will rake in the cash.  Any movie that insists on browbeating the audience will bomb; get woke, go broke.  The problem is that Hollywood elitists just can’t help themselves.  They think they’re smarter than the audience and smarter than the box office, and they would rather lose their entire business and fade into obscurity than admit the truth:  The market dictates the success or failure of popular media, the media does not dictate the market.  

To be fair, the media culture we live in today is far different from what it was even 10 years ago.  The entertainment industry is no longer interested in keeping he public happy or distracted, they’re only interested in “platforms.”  They see every movie and every popular franchise as a vehicle to deliver their gospel, the gospel of woke.  It is likely that they believe if they saturate the market long enough and thoroughly enough with their messaging that one day the public will just give up and accept woke as the new normal.

This isn’t happening.  There’s been a flurry of film flops in the past year which have made it obvious that Hollywood is imploding instead of gaining influence.

Disney is probably the best place to start as a window into woke failure, because the company strategically targets children with far-left concepts from feminism to gay and trans ideology.  The company was on a downward spiral well before they tried to go to war with the state of Florida, declaring that they would do everything in their power to overturn anti-child grooming laws.  But that little incident didn’t help, either.

Disney’s slate of failed films over the past year has included:

• Turning Red, a metaphorical animated film exploring female puberty and menstruation.  The movie lost  $168 million.  

• Lightyear, which featured a lesbian relationship and was released right after their fight with Florida.  Disney was also accused of removing Tim Allen as the voice actor for the popular Buzz Lightyear character because of his conservative leanings.  The movie lost at least $106 million.

• Strange World, another animated children’s film featuring thinly veiled climate change propaganda as well as a prominent LGBT relationship involving teen boys.  One of the biggest flops in Disney history with a loss of $197 million.

• Peter Pan And Wendy, a live action adaptation of the classic, was offloaded quickly to Disney’s streaming service and received dismal audience reviews.  The movie boasted a race swapped Peter Pan, race swapped Tinkerbell,  gender swapped “lost boys,” and a Mary Sue-like Wendy that battles 200 pound pirates with her sword fighting skills.

• The Little Mermaid, a live action adaptation, race swapped the classic Dutch fairy tale character and changed the message of the story from a mermaid seeking the love of a prince to “she don’t need no man to save her.”  The movie lost at least $20 million.

• Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, a film which attempts to undermine and deconstruct its title character and replace him with an anti-capitalist feminist activist, has been met with thumbs down from audiences along with general disdain.  It is expected to lose hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney due to its massive budget.  

• Elemental, a ham-fisted commentary about racism with Disney’s first animated “non-binary” character, is crashing at theaters and is expected to lose tens of millions of dollars.  The movie also had the 2nd worst box office debut in Pixar history, a company that was once seen as a sure thing.  

Disney isn’t the only leftist media company in the gutter these days, it’s merely the most notorious.  Multiple woke movie calamities have struck in the past year from the horrendous ‘Bros,’ to the vapid ‘Fauci’ documentary, to AOC’s climate change documentary which went down in flames, to Amazon’s attempt to hijack Lord of the Rings with their woke ‘Rings Of Power’ series.  The list goes on and on, with production losses in the billions for 2022-2023.           

What Hollywood doesn’t seem to realize is that audiences have options and nothing is going to force people to consume leftist ideology as a recreational product; they greatly overestimated their influence.  They might as well get rid of the box office altogether and come out of the closet as the defacto propaganda wing for governments and globalists.  Then they can abandon the facade and start making their own woke versions of ‘Triumph Of The Will.’

In the meantime, it appears that the game is over.  Western consumers are beginning to realize the scale of their boycotting power and they are using it aggressively this year.  And though woke companies are doubling down and insisting that social justice, feminism and trans cultism are the wave of the future, the reality is that (for now) propaganda cannot be made without profits.  The money is running out.