The One Weird Trick Hollywood Doesn't Want to Know About

“I would do anything for love… but I won’t do that.” - Meatloaf

A few weeks ago a little-noticed football-themed movie called 80 FOR BRADY rode Super Bowl mania to something like a $13 million opening weekend. Not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things, but then Hollywood is struggling these days, struggling so badly that even Marvel, DC and Star Wars movies seem to be underperforming. There is a panic settling into Studio commisaries throughout greater Los Angeles. Every smart person in Hollywood, and even some of the dumb ones, are trying to figure out how to get people back into movie theaters after what turns out to have been a wholly unnecessary shutdown over a virus of middling lethality. And so it should be no surprise that a $13 million opening made an enormous splash in executive hallways across Hollywood.

Such a splash did this little movie make that a week later I heard a colleague say that there is a new “mandate” across the industry to find more content for what Hollywood now sees as an “under-served market.” That’s right folks, the word has gone out… we need more movies for old white ladies. Now look, I’m not knocking that, everyone deserves to have a good movie to go see on Friday nights, even old white ladies. What I am knocking is the fact that Hollywood, once again, seems to be missing the forest for the trees.

There’s a meme construct out there that I quite enjoy… over a picture of a bunch of guys doing something stupid… lighting themselves on fire or water skiing behind a monster truck during a hurricane or shooting bottle rockets out of their assholes… someone will superimpose the text “Guys will literally do ‘X’ rather than go to therapy”, where ‘X’ = shooting bottle rockets out of their assholes. I think about this meme every time someone in Hollywood begins waxing poetic about “under-served” markets… except in my version it goes something like this: “Hollywood will literally do anything to make money except create content for Red State audiences.”

In an industry where imitation truly is the highest form of flattery, and where different studios sometimes make and release the same content at the same time to capitalize on an idea that’s popular in the zeitgeist (i.e. 18 AGAIN versus VICE VERSA or DEEP IMPACT vs ARMAGEDDON or GAME OF THRONES versus RINGS OF POWER versus WHEEL OF TIME), where stealing has becomes so de rigueur that it has its own euphemism… “homage”, there still remains one kind of success that Hollywood absolutely refuses to imitate…

Movies and TV shows that are popular with Conservatives.

Years ago I reconnected with an old friend who is a former Hollywood studio executive who left the business because he believed it was getting too crazy and was at the very beginning of a long and painful self-destruct sequence. He’s not a Conservative by any means, but he’s a reasonable guy and understands that entertainment is fundamentally a mass-market product. At some point between our second and third cocktails he said, “Hollywood is the only business in the world that actively hates half of its potential customer base.”

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since 80 FOR BRADY opened to a blistering $13 million (/sarcasm) because I think Hollywood’s response to that opening is proof positive that my friend was right.

Let me explain…

We all know that Hollywood is struggling with profitability right now, the news is all over the financial sections of every major news outlet, and the sudden conversation about finding more movies for the relatively small audience who rushed out to see 80 FOR BRADY indicates that the industry as a whole is hyper-sensitive to an opportunity, ANY opportunity, to make an extra buck.

Except for one very specific case where they obviously are not. They absolutely will not make a concerted effort to create content that appeals to Red State audiences in general or conservatives specifically.

By way of example, let’s consider the twin cases of Jon Stewart and Greg Gutfeld.

When The Daily Show became a runaway commercial and critical success twenty-five years ago it triggered Hollywood’s instinctive “monkey see-monkey do” response. Within a few years network, cable and later the streaming services, were swamped with knock-offs of Stewart’s show. On the networks you got Colbert, Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Fallon doing Stewart’s same brand of Progressive politics married to clown-nose-on/clown-nose-off commentary masquerading as comedy. Even David Letterman spent his last few years on Network TV jettisoning the broad comedic sensibility that had made him a late night staple in favor of an increasingly grating version of Stewart’s in-your-face progressive condescension. But even across the entire spectrum of free and paid TV you had a million other imitators who got their shot to do the same thing… from Samantha Bee and John Oliver to Bill Maher, Trevor Noah and now Jon Stewart again in a new incarnation on Apple TV. All of them trying to squeeze blood from an increasingly dry Progressive stone as they relentlessly carve up the same audience into smaller and smaller slices.

Now let’s compare the way Hollywood responded to The Daily Show’s success to the very different reaction to the similar runaway success of Greg Gutfeld’s late night Fox News show. Perhaps you’ve heard that Gutfeld now has the most popular show in late night? Fox even bought a very expensive 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time to promote it. He is a ratings monster on paid cable, dwarfing what his progressive competitors are doing on free over-the-air network TV. And do you know how many networks, cable channels and streamers are looking to replicate Gutfeld’s success with conservative news, comedy and variety shows of their own?

Exactly zero.

They’ll copy Stewart a hundred different ways with a hundred different hosts, but they won’t lift a finger to service the massive audience tuning in to watch Gutfeld every night. Why not? Simple, because Hollywood isn’t interested in making content for Conservatives.

I don’t know how much money Gutfeld generates for Fox, but I do know that The Daily Wire recently offered Conservative podcaster Steven Crowder $50 million to move his show to their site. Fifty million dollars! And on top of that, DW’s frontman Ben Shapiro recently announced that he’s pouring $100 milion into children’s programming.

Those are some big checks. I don’t have to see their balance sheets to know that between Fox News, Daily Wire, The Blaze, and Project Veritas and a bunch of other Conservative networks/sites I forgot to mention, there must be hundreds of millions of dollars up for grabs. And yet, except for Fox News, all of these outlets remain fringe internet-based sites. Not one of them is backed by a major brand name corporation. Not one of them appears on network or cable TV.

Which is so weird because a couple hundred million dollars seems like it would solve a lot of problems. Perhaps you’ve heard that the major entertainment companies are laying off thousands of employees and trying to cut billions out of their balance sheets? You would think that an industry that’s in those kinds of dire financial straits would be interested in the kind of money that’s being generated by the (so far) small number of companies who are willing to create content for Red State Audiences.

And yet they do not seem to be.

How can they ignore that kind of profit potential? Conservatives like to go to the mvoies, too. Aren’t these companies businesses first and virtue signalling platforms second? Well, yes and no. Yes the major studios and networks are (mostly) owned by corporations which must answer to their stockholders, but the day-to-day business of Hollywood doesn’t run on cash, it runs on social status. And there’s not an executive in town who would trade the “yas queens!!!” they get when they create critically acclaimed, award-winning and socially relevant content in exchange for the social silence that greets the release of any content perceived as being “conservative.” At the end of the day, being in the “‘right” meetings, getting invitations to the “right” parties, and getting glowing articles written about them in the trades will always be more important to individual Hollywood executives than the amount of money in their bank accounts. Because you can’t buy those things, no matter how much money you have.

Which is a shame. Imagine how much money Disney or Amazon or Netflix could make if they decided to create Red State content at scale…

Why… you might get something like TOP GUN: MAVERICK

But instead, Hollywood is focused on trying to make another $13 million off the 80 FOR BRADY crowd.

Like my friend said all those years ago, they actively hate half of their potential audience. And if that half wants to cross the road to consume Hollywood’s overwhelmingly progressive product, that’s just fine with them. But if you are a Conservative, it will be a cold day in hell before they will cross the street to meet you where you are.

Look, it’s not like I’m asking for dramas about Hillary Clinton running pedophile rings out of pizza parlors every damn night. Just maybe once in a while, how about a movie with some sword fights or maybe a couple guys kicking in doors and shouting “clear!” Is that really too much to ask?

I don’t want Hollywood to die, I love movies so much that I moved across the country to try and find a way to be involved with them, but as another famously large man with a lovely singing voice once said, it may be that…