The Buzzmeter: The Great Claw-Back Begins

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As the Democratic Party goes, so goes Hollywood. The New York Times’ bombshell report showed the Democrats are in deep shit when it comes to not just losing voters but not registering them either.

“I don’t want to say, ‘The death cycle of the Democratic Party,’ but there seems to be no end to this,” said Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, an election-analysis site. “There is no silver lining or cavalry coming across the hill. This is month after month, year after year.”

The shifts also previewed Democratic weaknesses in 2024. The party saw some of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters, the Times analysis found — two constituencies that swung sharply toward Mr. Trump.

So, you might think, what does this have to do with Hollywood? Then, I point you to this tweet:

First off, it’s good writing and reporting by Matt Donnelly at Variety. 

Not touched upon in the piece is the potential loss to China for Worldwide box office champ for 2025. If Avatar: Fire and Ash doesn’t deliver, and top 1.8 billion, which it might, China will reign supreme with Ze Zha  II.

So what, commenters will say, who cares? Well, Disney cares. You bet they do. China only topped the Worldwide BO once, and that was in the COVID-wrecked year of 2020. But now, five years later, Disney should have recovered, and we all know why they haven’t. It’s not rocket science, folks. Do I have to explain it again?

If your target demo is 13+ males, your most reliable base, people who turn out again and again, who have built an entire ecosphere dedicated to your brand and other brands like it because 1) they were raised on brands, and 2) they were catered to by those brands. My daughter grew up watching ONLY movies about “one special boy,” a hero in the making. Movies centered around men — usually white men — for decades during their most profitable era.

Men are the default. Everyone likes them. Both women and men enjoy watching movies about men. The reverse is not true. Some men like watching movies about women – if they’re good movies — but most men prefer to see their heroes not sexless, androgynous girl-bosses. Most women, quite frankly, don’t either.

So, basically, what happened to Hollywood is that they took a thriving ocean of fish and decided they didn’t like the fact that the sharks were eating all the smaller fish. So, one day, they decided that the sharks had to eat vegetarian from now on. They were not allowed to eat any of the fish. The sharks left, and the ocean became overpopulated with smaller fish, who then destroyed their own habitat, rendering it toxic and lifeless.

For some stupid reason, Hollywood decided it would punish their most reliable audience: men. They would punish them by scolding them for wanting to see sexy women with great tits and ass. That’s objectification, they cried. You are BAD for wanting to see that in movies. Remember Megyn Fox in Transformers? VERY BAD!

Transformers, this scene especially, is seen as “exploitative” in the New Woke Order, but really, it’s just from a teenage boy’s point of view and why is that a crime again? And at what point does it stop being a crime to stare at sexy women?

I mean…come on, people, who doesn’t love this?

Let’s take it all away because you’re DIRTY FILTHY PERVERTS! Rapists EVERYWHERE!

If you’re worried about what young feminists will say, you’re doing movies wrong. And if you’re more worried about your own self-image or your status inside utopia you’re doing the film business wrong.

Then, if stripping all female characters of their sexuality and hotness wasn’t enough, they decided that male heroes had to be diminished and decentered. Because other people have to get a turn at the wheel. And sure, this is a great scene in Aliens:

But that’s one movie, not all movies. It worked for the film. It wasn’t performative. I dread Avatar, to tell you the truth, because Jim Cameron is in search of absolution. He wants to be seen as a “good person doing good things” for the world. Fine, that ain’t art — it can be but lately, it ain’t.

That’s not just a Disney problem. That’s a Hollywood problem. And all of this before we get to the performative activism of mix n’ match to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion in every movie because YOU AWFUL RACISTS OUT THERE MUST EAT YOUR VEGETABLES! So every time we see casting like that, we’re taking it out of the movie and we’re thinking about how fake it looks to us.

What movie didn’t do that, or did it in a very subtle way, was Weapons. They worked in a character who happened to be both Asian and gay. It works for the story. It doesn’t take us out of it. I only note it here because it ALWAYS HAS TO BE THERE. That qualifies it for the Oscars, although it should never have been subject to such a rule.  Hollywood will never return to the way it was, and that’s a good thing. But the way forward is to support and elevate more filmmakers of color and women to tell stories they want to tell, not force every movie to comply with rules that absolve the people at the top.

What should matter, especially now, is authenticity in storytelling.

The Democrats and Hollywood have the same problem; obviously, they’re losing men. If you scroll TikTok, Facebook, or (gasp) Blue Sky, you will see those screeching, awful, puritanical, intolerant women who have no sympathy or concern for this devolution, either culturally or politically. They have found their religion, and it’s the reversed hierarchy — most marginalized on top, least marginalized on bottom. But what is funny about that is that in imposing this structure upon culture (and politics), it has the opposite effect as intended. It makes the least marginalized into the most marginalized — by design.

In other words, shutting out your target audience will harm your business because you have marginalized your core audience.

As readers of this site are aware, I’ve been warning about this for a long time. It’s funny how no one listened to me. I guess it’s not funny. It’s tragic. They didn’t just not listen to me, they turned me into an enemy with ongoing bullying, harassment, abuse, and eventually, the attempt to destroy my business — all for the crime of telling the truth. Telling the truth, mind you. A thought crime, no real crime, no bad behavior.

I’ve been trying to explain how we got here for a while now. It’s easy for me to see since I’ve been online for the last 30 years, half of my life. I know what things looked like before social media, before the iPhone, and before President Obama’s influence changed all culture, especially Hollywood.

The short version is that the Left colonized the internet. We built our “shining utopia online” with the help of Silicon Valley, which leaned Left. In the Obama years, civilization began to migrate online, and social media changed the game, allowing us to build tribes. I think of the play Hamilton as the example of our ideal society. I took my daughter to see it in New York with the original cast for her 18th birthday just before she went off to college.

Had Hillary Clinton won that year, the utopia would have simply gone on until the populist uprising simmering in the countryside among the peasants became too loud to ignore. Our utopia was, unfortunately, shaped by the upper class as wealth had shifted Leftward. It was an insulated, isolated aristocracy that left out most of this country. We barely noticed. Why should we? Our Oscar game was its own private island. Big Hollywood was making billions on franchise IPs.

And then Trump won, and it was the revolution. The Left was always the empire. They, we, were never the resistance. What the Left has been fighting for over the last ten years was to preserve utopia, to preserve what was, to cling to power. They were willing — we were all willing — to go to great lengths to do that, including going to war on the working-class half of the country.

I didn’t notice it, not as I stormed out of the Dolby Theater thinking the “racist” film La La Land would defeat Moonlight. When Moonlight won, it felt like we’d won a major battle against the evil forces that just took over our country. It was pure madness, mass hysteria, in fact. We began pointing fingers at each other, and then the purges began. Anyone could be accused at any time, and out of utopia they went.

Rather than take Trump’s first win as a sign that what we’d built did not include everyone, we decided instead to wall ourselves off in a bunker, which, over time, became a kind of Doomsday Cult. If you do not know what is really happening on the outside, your imagination takes over. These ideas begin to spread and everyone has no choice but to believe them. After all, how can they possibly ever learn any differently?

Right about mid-way through Trump’s first term, I began to notice something was very wrong with the Left. It wasn’t just the absurd ouster of Al Franken – pushed out by Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer — but it was how we were destroying ourselves. That is when I knew this whole thing was headed for collapse. It’s not sustainable if your only solution to survival is purging bad people from utopia.

Inside the Doomsday cult was the monoculture. All of American culture decided that half of this country was now enemies of the state — RACISTS — who had to either be re-programmed or, I don’t know, locked away or at the very least abandoned forever.

We never had any plans for how to live in a country with people who might not share our beliefs. By 2016, we’d almost completely speciated from the rest of the country. We almost spoke a different language by then, using careful, sanitized words to avoid offending anyone. By some miracle, Black Mirror captured this in the episode “Nosedive.” But that was before Trump won and before the insanity began and before we locked ourselves away in our bunker.

Black Mirror was destroyed, along with everything else, after we locked ourselves away because now, it wasn’t an “ask” anymore. All were mandated to comply with the rules at all times, and thus, art was swallowed whole by dogma.

Artists abandoned us just when we needed them most. But they were too afraid to speak the truth, even in art. Slowly, we’re seeing artists like Ari Aster begin to scratch at those thick layers of delusion to try to find some kind of truth about what we’ve just lived through.

But as long as the ideas remain, that those who voted for Trump or support his policies are “bad,” there will never be a fix to any of it. If Variety and other outlets like The Ankler are suggesting “fascism is here,” there is no way out for the Left or the Democrats.

These are just your fellow Americans who disagree with you on the world you made — the utopia we built — that didn’t include them in the equation.

Can Disney fix itself? Maybe. I don’t know. You see, the problem is that the same powerful, wealthy white people who control everything still control everything, but they must protect themselves, always. That is more important than even the bottom line. Getting bested by China might be the final humiliation, unless Avatar somehow pulls it through.

We all need culture. We need it because we need to share the same story. If the story is what they’re selling at the Academy Museum or at the Smithsonian that “whiteness” is a disease and we all must atone for our sins at all times — and there is no way out for young men — either white or Black — oppressor or oppressed, then what options do they have but to vacate?

I escaped the Doomsday Cult because I could not stand it anymore. I could not stand the unified hatred and demonization of everyone who didn’t follow the strident rules. There was no culture to escape into anyway because it served only the ideology. The Democrats are losing voters for the same reason Hollywood is losing its audience (but for a few movies here or there). Those kinds of rules are suffocating. They rob us of our natural human impulses. And all for what?

So, the Democrats and Hollywood have the same problem, and they also have the same solution. Come out of the bunker and try to be more tolerant, less hateful, less scolding. It can’t be that hard.