Must the Audience Share in the Responsibility?

I’ve loved movies since I was a kid. My parents tell me it started when I was five. I was a “hyperactive” child, what the experts called “ADHD” back in the 70’s, which is to say I was a pretty normal American boy. But in the context of the public education system, my particularly actue inability to sit still, be quiet and focus for long stretches of time was highly disruptive. So imagine the relief my parents must have felt when they discovered that if they put on a movie, not a TV show but a movie, that I would sit still and be quiet for two hours.

Fifteen years later, I bought a one-way ticket to Hollywood to do what I’d always known I would do… find a way to get into the business of making the kinds of movies that had once blown my mind and finally “turned off” the master switch of my hyperactivity (it was quite literally a one-way ticket, I took the Marco Ramius approach to my career in the movie business… “When they reached the new world, Cortez burned his ships… as a result, his men were well-motivated.”)

In the thirty years since, I’ve been a part of the theatrical movie business’ survival through a series of existential crises, including but not limited to the rise of Cable TV, the death of the video corridor, two-and-a-half labor strikes and the Dot-Com boom. All of these external crises were mostly weathered with aplomb… until a crisis came along that the industry was completely unprepared for because it was entirely self-inflicted. A crisis that has deeply wounded, perhaps mortally, the business I have loved since I was a boy.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, the entire movie business experienced a massive allergic reaction. This reaction produced a series of unintended consequences for the movie business, the worst of them being a seemingly unending stream of “resistance content” that has alienated audiences and brought the business to the brink of collapse.

I started this Substack four years ago, in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss because, the merits of the electoral result aside, I thought Trump’s exit stage right might create a window in which the woke fever could finally break and allow Hollywood to return to its roots… once again to create movies that Americans actually wanted to see. This Substack was my humble effort to add to the myriad voices trying to show Hollywood the way back to us… the way back to you.

Which is part of the reason why I had a very dispiriting day on Social Media last weekend.

On the Sunday before the election, my friend (and sometime GMF Washington collaborator) Kurt Schlichter tweeted the following:

“It just occured to me that I have zero idea what movies are playing in theaters. None. At all. I checked online. Not a single movie I am interested in. Not remotely. This would have been utterly inconceivable 20 years ago, even 10.”

And then he tagged me, and pressed “send”… like a psychopath.

My X account is a small one. For me, going viral means a couple thousand people see one of my tweets. This one was seen by over 125,000. My inbox was flooded with replies, hundreds and hundreds of them.

These replies broke down into two categories… category 1, which I’ll call the “Die in a Fire” crowd, was comprised of repsonses like “Hollyweird needs to die” and “Why would I pay for anything made by pedophiles” and “stop giving money to people who hate you.”

Category 2, I’ll call the “I wish movies were better” demographic. These responses read more like laments… “I used to love going to the movies” and “I haven’t been to the theater in years’” or “Hollywood is creatively bankrupt, they only make sequels and reboots.”

Category 1 makes me sad, because those customers are lost to us forever. I don’t know how you come back from “you’re all a bunch of pedophiles.” But I will say to those of you in that group, that there are many thousands of good people working in Hollywood, including your humble author. The vast majority of us don’t hate you and, it should go without saying, that Hollywood is not an industry built around the grooming of children for sexual exploitation… no matter how many Newsmax clips your boomer uncle sends you. Nevertheless, I know when I’m wasting my time, and this argument was lost long ago.

It’s those of you in Category 2 to whom I want to speak today, because I don’t think you appreciate the power you have to change the sad state of affairs that exists in America’s movie houses here in 2024. You have, in fact, already changed it. Your patronage of movies like “Unsung Hero”, “Sound of Freedom” and “Reagan” have not gone unnoticed out here in the 310 area code.

A few recent examples… Lionsgate recently signed a multi-platform “first look” deal with Kingdom, the company which produces faith-based content like “Unsung Hero” and “Jesus Revolution”, which means you’ll be getting more of those kinds of films from the studio that brought you “Hunger Games” and “Twilight.” Skydance Media, which now own Paramount, has made a deal with Nashville based country music icon Tim McGraw to make “film, TV, and digital media that focus on relatable stories that capture the essence and spirit of everyday Americans.”

Two weeks ago I had lunch with an executive who once invited me to a fundraiser at his house for a very Progressive Presidential candidate (I did not go), who told me he noticed how well “Reagan” did, and he wants in on that business model. A few days later, I was in the office of a senior TV executive who told me that having been surprised by the box office returns on “Twisters”, he wants to be making more content for people who live beyond Los Angeles and New York because, “no matter how the election turns out, half the country doesn’t feel seen by Hollywood.” And then, just this past Tuesday, election day as it happens, I had lunch with a diverse female executive (in the parlance of our times), her “I voted” sticker prominently displayed on her lapel. She told me she cried during “Top Gun: Maverick” and wants to find ways to deliver that same emotional experience to her audience.

You’re winning and you don’t even know it.

But man cannot live by faith-based or Conservative movies alone. I know it’s tempting to stick to these movies because it’s the only time you can be sure some bizarre leftist message isn’t going to be shoved down your throat. But we regular Americans deserve a broad spectrum of great movies, action, comedy, sci-fi, horror, and romantic comedy… all of it. And we can get it, but it’s going to take some work, and we’re going to have to take some risks.

To quote one of the more successful franchises of the last 20 years, “Spiderman”, “with great power comes great responsibility.”

If you agree with the folks who responded to me that they are fed up with the lack of creativity in Hollywood… if you’re tired of an endless series of sequels and reboots, then I have a simple question for you… did you pay to see “Argyle”, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”, “Tarot”, “Boy Kills World”, “The Fall Guy”, “Horizon”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, “Trap”, or “Harold and the Purple Crayon” this year? I ask because these were all original studio movies (yes, Fall Guy was based on a forgotten TV show from the 80’s but almost no one knew that), they all featured movie stars and/or well-known directors, and they all bombed harder than the Trinity Test.

Nobody went to see them.

On the other hand, take a look at the list of the most popular (read: profitable) movies of 2024:

Inside out 2

Deadpool 3 and Wolverine 8

Despicable Me 4

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2)

Dune 2

Twisters (2)

Godzilla Versus Kong (6?)

Kung Fu Panda 4

Bad Boys 4

Planet of the Apes 4

Are you beginning to see the problem?

On the one hand we complain that Hollywood is offering up nothing new, nothing original, and on the other hand we the audience send the exact opposite market signal with the hard dollars we actually spend at the theater.

What is Hollywood to make of this paradox?

I’ll tell you the answer… we are absolutely freaking paralyzed. No one knows what to make and no one has any idea what will succeed at the box office. I know it’s fashionable to say that Hollywood hates America and wants to punish us with an endless series of message movies, hell I’ve made that claim myself right here in these pages. But the truth is much more complicated… it’s not so black-and-white. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what Hollywood thinks about you or your politics because this is a business. The people who run it want to make money, and the people who make the movies want to get paid handsomely to do so. And that can’t happen without a regular stream of box office success.

Somewhere in there, lies an incentive structure… one we can use to our advantage.

So how do we start? Well, we already missed one golden opportunity this year. Not enough of us went to see “The Fall Guy” which was a great summer action movie. It was fun, the romance was endearing, the action was great and it wasn’t woke. If we’d all gone out and paid to see it, Hollywood would have greenlit ten more action movies just like it on the first Monday after its release. But alas, that’s not how it turned out.

So I have a challenege for you… for us. Let’s get back into the theaters. Find something, anything original, that is the kind of movie you’d like to see more of and pay to see it. It may not turn out to be a great movie, but like tracers in a heavy machine gun, we have to learn to re-direct Hollywood’s fire… use your spending power to push them towards a better product.

I propose that we start with “Gladiator 2” on November 22nd… yes I realize it’s a sequel, my first clue was the “2” in the title, but I think we can all agree that we’d like to see more movies like “Gladiator”, “Troy, “The Mummy”, “Braveheart”, “The 300” and “Clash of the Titans” in theaters, and the only way that’s going to happen is if we send an unequivocal market signal by blowing “Gladiator 2” out into a massive box office hit.

I’m telling you, this can work… just last week we got Warner Bros to expand the number of theaters showing “Juror #2”, what will likely be Clint Eastwood’s final film, simply by paying to see it a bunch of times.

We have the power… all we have to do now, is use it.

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