AMAC Exclusive
At a time when parents are waking up to the threat of critical race theory in schools, Hollywood is doubling down on it.
In fact, they’re eating their own. Just read the primary criticism of the latest work of Lin-Manuel Miranda—a man who literally cast black and Hispanic actors as America’s founding fathers in Hamilton: the actors playing Dominican characters aren’t dark enough.
After catering to a smaller and smaller group of coastal elites, La-La Land is finally collapsing into itself under the weight of the political left’s own contradictions.
It’s not enough for the left to set the agenda. They also have to rewrite the past—even some of the finest work Hollywood has ever produced.
Gone with the Wind? Removed from streaming services for its depiction of slavery.
Peter Pan, Dumbo, The Aristocats, and Swiss Family Robinson? Disney blocked them for users younger than seven years old.
Leftist activists have even asked John Wayne Airport to change its name.
Of course, when an industry caters to a smaller and smaller group of political radicals, they lose most of their customers.
Even before the pandemic, box office revenues were declining. Take away the handful of superhero sequels, remakes, and reboots that studios release and it gets ugly fast.
Hollywood’s premier event, the Academy Awards, used to be a night on which studios, stars, and the rest of us shared a common cultural moment.
But it has morphed into an unwatchable, self-congratulatory, virtual-signaling, leftist rally in which critics and corporations alike fall all over each other to win “Wokest of the Year” awards.
After drawing over 20 million Americans last year, fewer than 10 million Americans watched it this year.
It’s no mystery why. Hollywood has seceded from mainstream America. As John Nolte, Breitbart’s hugely popular culture critic, has pointed out, the recent history of Best Picture winners reveals a sharp downtown in films with any broad public appeal. Consider the last seven movies to win the Academy Award for Best Picture: Birdman, Spotlight, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, Green Book, Parasite, and Nomadland.
Maybe you’ve heard of a few of them. Did you actually see any of them? One? Maybe two?
Compare that to the winners between 1994 and 2004: Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love, American Beauty, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, and Chicago.
Don’t hold your breath for the Golden Globes to seize the mainstream either. The 2022 Golden Globes were cancelled after a former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association called Black Lives Matter a “hate movement.”
Hollywood’s long love affair with the left has gotten so extreme that it now carries water for some of America’s adversaries like China.
While the United States navigated a pandemic born in China, Hollywood studios enforced the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship for them, scrubbing scripts of anything that might offend the Chinese government.
Even Hollywood’s so-called “tough guys” have folded faster than Superman on laundry day.
Actor John Cena, who had the audacity to call Taiwan a country—a big no-no in China’s Orwellian double-speak—issued a video apology. Cena, a former professional wrestler who never wore a shirt he didn’t want to rip off, couldn’t have looked any weaker.
“I must say right now, it’s very, very, very, very, very, very important,” Cena said in Chinese. “I love and respect China and Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry for my mistake.”
And, in the upcoming Top Gun sequel, Tom Cruise—ironically playing a character named “Maverick”—has had the flags of Japan and Taiwan stripped from his flight jacket after they appeared in the 1986 original.
With bottom lines plunging, an American public losing interest in their product, and California seemingly doing everything it can to drive successful people and businesses out of the state, it’s decision time for studios and actors.
For actors, with California’s state income tax, the highest in the country, how much longer will they stay in Hollywood? After all, huge number of professional athletes make their home in Florida for tax purposes. Why can’t actors?
And if big companies like Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Charles Schwab can move their headquarters out of California, why can’t Universal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers?
But the real question for studios might be: will they go to Texas? Or China?