Hollywood's Coffin Corner

At high altitudes where the air is cold and thin, it is possible for a pilot to find, quite suddenly and without warning, that his airplane has entered a condition where his aircraft’s stall speed and overspeed meet. A pilot in this situation will face a terrifying choice between an overspeed condition which exceeds his airframe tolerances and tears his plane apart, or a stall which, depending on the aircraft type and its trim condition, may not be recoverable.

In aviation, this condition is known as the “Coffin Corner” because when stall speed and overspeed are plotted on a graph, the point where they meet looks a little bit like a street corner… but also because any pilot who finds himself in this situation is very likely to wind up inside a coffin.

For all you Star Trek fans, the “Coffin Corner” is aviation’s ultimate no-win scenario…

Here on the ground, as I look around at the Hollywood landscape, it occurs to me that Hollywood has managed to fly itself into its very own version of the Coffin Corner. And I worry that this condition may not be recoverable… that in the end Hollywood will wind up buried in a coffin of its own making.

Hollywood’s freak out in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 election win was by no means its first. Progressive Hollywood has always reacted badly to the election of Republicans… recall, for example, the wave of high-profile anti-war box office flops that came out in the wake of W Bush’s twin invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan? Or, remember how theatrical versions of the Left’s most hated W Adminstration officials seemed to show up in every big studio blockbuster, by proxy if not by name?

(Above: Dennis Quaid meets Vice President Dick Cheney in DAY AFTER TOMORROW)

The difference this time, is that unlike all those that have come before, the (over)reaction to Trump has been the industry’s most all-encompasing and self-destructive freak out to date.

Progressive capture of our elite institutions, with a particular emphasis on the entertainment conglomerates, has been a multi-decade project for the American Left… and they have been remarkably successful in their efforts. But Trump’s unexpected arrival sent the project into overdrive and, perhaps, encouraged them to move faster and more agressively than was prudent.

The resulting wave of “woke” content combined with the death of the Hollywood star system and its replacement by one where actors wear their activism on their sleeves, along with highly destructive WGA/SAG strikes in 2023, the rise (and fall) of streaming and a wholly unnecessary pandemic lockdown, all have made this current cycle much more destructive than any that has come before. And while Hollywood was able to easily survive previous self-indulgent waves of woke, this newest cycle has pushed the industry periously close to the edge of collapse in a way we haven’t seen before.

Perhaps no single company has been affected by this colossal self-own more than Disney. A string of expensive franchise films which prioritized Progressivism’s newest and strangest catechisms over providing its audience with the kind of great characters and storytelling for which Disney has always been known, has resulted in unprecedented financial loses for the iconic American company. This includes a streak of failed major releases going back to LIGHTYEAR, which have combined for more than $900 million in losses.

But Disney is suffering from more than just box office woes. Urged on by (I’m really resisting the temptation to write the words “forced to do so by”, here) angry Disney creatives and employees, Disney wandered into the controversy over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill. Unfairly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by Progressives, the bill was the Florida government’s attempt to protect early grade school children from what it saw as damaging theories of race and gender, as well as graphic sexual instruction. There’s no doubt the bill was controversial, nor is there any doubt that the law was badly politicized by both sides. Unfortunately for Disney though, it also happened to be very popular among American parents… who are Disney’s core customer base.

All these things combined with aggressively off-putting public activism by many of Disney’s most high-profile creatives (Rachel Zegler come on down!), has created a feeling amongst roughly half the American population that after a good one hundred year run, Disney is no longer the place to go for quality family entertainment.

Even attendance at Disney theme parks and cruises, once thought to be the most bulletproof of entertainment vacation brands, has begun to soften as parents have turned their backs on the company that was once trusted to, effectively, babysit their children.

The question on everyone’s mind from Wall Street, to Hollywood Blvd, to Main Street has been…. will Disney CEO Bob Iger have the good sense to pull back on the woke messaging yoke and get Disney out of this nose dive before it’s too late?

And on the surface at least, the answer appeared to be yes. Towards the end of 2023 Iger gave an interview in which he said that “(our) creators lost sight of what their number one objective needed to be. We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”

“Huzzah!” cheered the relieved entertainment markets… “Bob Iger is going to prioritize storytelling over messaging, again! We’re saved!”

But are we, really?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Bob Iger is absolutely sincere when he says that he wants Disney to stop shoving political and social propaganda down its audience’s throats and commit to bringing them great characters and wonderful stories unmoored from tedious social justice messaging. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s serious about obeying movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn’s golden rule that we should leave the messaging to Western Union. Much like a pilot trying to manuever his plane out of the coffin corner, the first question we need to ask is… “how would he do it?” Because much like escaping the coffin corner, de-woke-ifying Disney is going to be much easier said than it is done.

Bob Iger’s biggest problem is that he can’t write movies… nor can he direct or act in them, and he’s way too busy being a corporate CEO to spend his days developing the next generation of Disney movies himself. So the first thing he would need to do is meet with his creative executives and tell them “hey guys, I want you to stop making message movies, and going forward I want our movies to be more broadly appealing to flyover America.”

But all of his creative executives graduated from elite American academies and were marinated in the same weird Progressive ideology which produced, enabled and defended Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth and Elizabeth McGill. They don’t know how to do that any better than Bob Iger does. If you don’t believe me, check out the leaked videos of Disney corporate meetings where executives bragged about inserting their “secret gay agenda” into Disney content whenever and wherever they could. Or go back and watch the insane videos of the employee walkout at Netflix after the company refused to pull Dave Chappelle’s comedy specials off their platform.

Nevertheless, let’s once again assume for the sake of a good faith discussion that tomorrow, every executive in Hollywood suddenly decides “screw it, let’s do what the boss says and make nothing but feel-good movies of the kind that flyover Americans can enjoy without constantly being annoyed by woke messaging.”

Could they actually do it?

I’m not sure they could, because the problem goes much deeper than a simple desire to do so. At the practical movie development level, studio executives may know how to take a given story and manage the process of turning that story into a greenlit movie, but it is the creatives, primarily the writers, who generate the “takes” that eventually become scripts. It is those creatives who ultimately decide how Disney stories are told. And since Hollywood is a big Progressive “cool kids” club, the writers, directors and actors whom executives most want to work with… the big name writers they all know, admire and love… all these men and women are ideological fellow travelers… all are products of the same cultural and institutional stew.

And therein lies the heart of the problem.

Those “triple A list” creatives who write and direct and act in the movies and TV shows the Hollywood studios makes are committed Progressives…. they are “The Resistance”, and they don’t want to hide their politics, nor do they want to tone them down. They want to continue to fight what they see as a growing fascist threat in America, and they want to do it with their art. For most creatives in Hollywood, political messaging is the juice that makes the squeeze worthwhile, and much like the marketing department at Bud Light, they have every intention of obeying Barack Obama’s exhortation to “be the change you want to see in the world” while using company money to do it.

(Above: Joe Rogan explains how ideological conformity is enforced in the acting business)

With very rare exceptions (every now and then we do get a 300 or a FURY ROAD or a MAVERICK) the vast majority of Hollywood creatives seem to have no interest at all in making movies for flyover America, unless it is to teach them a lesson, like an unrepentant child forced to eat his brussell sprouts. As a former executive once said to me “Hollywood is the only business in the world that actively hates half its potential audience.”

And indeed, the proof of the depth of Bob Iger’s problem came to light just after the new year, as the newly crowned director of the next movie in the STAR WARS franchise, “the first woman of color to direct a STAR WARS film” Disney was quick to remind us, but also a woman with a history of Progressive activism in which she has said things like “I like to make men uncomfortable”, announced in a CNN interview that “we’re in 2024 now, and it’s about time that we had a woman come foward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”

So much for “we have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”

Putting aside for the moment how insulting that comment is to women like Marcia Lucas, Leigh Bracken, Carrie Fisher (who “created” Princess Leia as much as George Lucas did) and the architect of the most recent arc of new Star Wars content (for whatever that’s worth) Kathleen Kennedy… think about how ignorant of pre-Year Zero Hollywood history that comment is.

This is the rhetoric of the Progressive activist, one who seeks to mimimize cultural progress by ignoring any good works that have come before in order to transform him or herself into the hero of the story… a Progressive warrior who stands alone athwart history, bravely fighting an endlessly backsliding culture that seeks to dominate and oppress women and people of color.

But more than that, it is an indication that whatever Iger may want to do about removing messaging from his company’s content, the creators upon whom he depends have absolutely no intention of going quietly into that good night.

Even now, in the wake of a billion dollars in losses, those creatives entrusted with exploiting these titles are still out there beating the same mouldering horse corpse that first went terminal all the way back on the day LIGHTYEAR was released, and they’re doing so entirely without career or personal consequences. Think about all the crazy things Hollywood creatives have said over the last four years… have any been fired? Has the business turned its back on even one of them? No, of course not…. they are all still out there gleefully making movies and TV shows, and none of them have learned a thing.

All of which means that even if Bob Iger were serious about making movies for flyover Americans, including (gasp!) Conservatives, that initiative would be immediately and publicly rejected by the same Hollywood creatives who hate those audiences in the first place.

And we’ve seen it happen over and over. We saw it in the controversy that resulted when Disney stepped into the middle of the debate over the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Whenever a cultural battle emerges and entertainment companies (and their CEOs) are forced to take a stand one way or the other, the choice very quickly becomes which side do I piss off… the audience who pays to watch the movies we make, or the creatives who make those movies in the first place?

Such is the nature of the Coffin Corner men like Iger have flown Hollywood into.

What’ll it be, Bob… a terminal stall or an in-flight break-up?

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