Don’t let the mirage of The Odyssey’s wild success fool you. The industry is as unhealthy this year as it was the last time a Christopher Nolan movie was heralded as saving Hollywood. That was 2023 with the Barbenheimer phenom. We were all so excited to see everyone excited to line up and see both movies because they kind of had to. Even my nieces and my daughter wanted to buckle in for a movie about the guy who helped win WWII by inventing the A-Bomb.
The same sort of cultural phenom has been birthed with The Odyssey, with the Right’s unfortunate flail that it would be a “go woke, go broke” bomb. Instead, it became a must-see movie that has now surpassed Oppenheimer at the domestic box office as it heads towards perhaps becoming Christopher Nolan’s highest-grossing film ever.
Hats off to Nolan for making two blockbusters about relatively nerdy subjects and bringing them to a broader culture of young people who might never have thought much about Oppenheimer, the war, the bomb or Homer. In tapping into the cultural zeitgeist as he has here with his casting choices – Elliot Page, for example – and bringing in Travis Scott, Nolan has invited generations of social media users to participate in high culture without them even realizing it.
So that’s cool. But the whole industry can’t rest on the mighty shoulders of Christopher Nolan. The foundation remains weak, and the fact that Hollywood voters and critics will turn The Odyssey’s success into yet another battle won against the Trump Right is the tragedy of it all. Despite many loud voices hating on The Odyssey online, quite a few Conservatives love the movie. It is a movie with broad appeal, as it turns out, as is Project Hail Mary. And, it should be said, Steven Spielberg’s underrated film, Disclosure Day.
We’re living through a major transformational period; there is no doubt about it. AI is about to wipe out 3/4 of the entertainment industry, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. While actors might be spared because AI can’t do actors well yet, everything else will, at some point in the near future, be replaced by cheaper, faster, and more compliant artificial intelligence. It’s only a matter of time. Not if, but when.
We lost our shared culture right around 2009, when the Obama administration merged with Hollywood and gradually, Hollywood split in two – with massive superhero IPs making the studios richer than their wildest dreams, and the niche market of the Oscars for the sophisticates where politics and ideology began shaping films and streaming.
Maybe things would have worked out if these two Hollywoods had remained separate, but right around 2020, the Great Awokening, these two Hollywoods had no choice but to merge because the mob was banging on the door and everyone had to “go woke” fast or else.
The attempts to “block the merger” in an attempt to stop Paramount Skydance from buying Warner Bros. Discovery show that the “resistance” is alive and well and still believes that all culture, all government, all society belongs only to them. Nothing has hurt Hollywood more than taking a side against the other half of the country, the working-class half. Whatever lies they want to tell themselves that this is not the case – and in many ways the content churn has something for everybody – there is no doubt that Hollywood still believes itself to be at war with Trump ten years later.
The war on Trump has to do with power, of course. No one gives it up willingly and everyone wants it. It has to do with Barack Obama and the utopia we all built way back when in 2008 with the rise of the iPhone and social media. We didn’t realize it back then but that’s when everything changed.
If the Americana utopia in post-World War II America was a way to put things back together again after one of the most violent periods in all of history, but especially American history. 70-80 million people died during World War II. The horrors that would emerge from that era, our last “Fourth Turning,” were the kind of thing that can send an entire country into a numb fugue state where all they wanted to do was “get back to normal.”
The threat was Communism as one war ended and another began. But really, what threatened society in the 1950s was the counterculture simmering beneath the surface. As America attempted to become stable after the war, marginalized groups would rise up and fight for their rights to be included – Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay and Lesbian Rights (as it was called then) all would mobilize and take to the streets, and eventually, the anti-war movement would create a revolution in the streets.
Think of the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s. I think we’re living through something similar now. I think it was 9/11 just at the turn of the millennium, and as civilization was beginning to migrate online, we experienced, for the first time as a society, what it was like to feel collective fear. Eventually, after two failed wars in the Middle East, Barack Obama would rise up and begin to reshape America as Eisenhower had done after World War II.
We built a new kind of American utopia, this time rooted in identity – to purge the Islamaphobes, transphobes, homophobes, racists, sexists, misogynists. We were trying to “fix” the country as we’d all “fixed” ourselves back in the 1990s amid the self-help revolution.
Throughout the Obama era, almost no institution, corporation, or industry could survive without being online. And that meant the Left had complete control of almost everything. Almost. Donald Trump led the counterculture revolution with his “basket of deplorables” in 2016, and the rest is history. Agonizing, painful, soul-crushing history, and now, because of this pointless ten-year war, there is almost nothing left of the once-mighty Left.
This has hurt the Democratic Party hard, as they now have to battle with actual Communists, not just Socialists, ready to tear it all down and remove even the presidency as they seek to build something that should terrify every American. But Hollywood was hit hard, too. The red line they drew that said you’re with us or you’re against us has all but killed the business. It has pushed the Oscars into being even more niche than they were before.
I understand that it comes down to basic beliefs, and two sides of the country are at odds with those beliefs. Now, however, we have major figures in public life so consumed by Donald Trump – the guy who used to host Celebrity Apprentice — that it has come to define their entire personalities and careers, like Bruce Springsteen, Javier Bardem, John Cusack, Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro, and Jane Fonda. I guess they think that’s the right move, but where does all of it end?
What do they hope happens if they somehow manage to “destroy” or even assassinate Trump? What about the millions of people who voted for him, their fellow Americans? Throw them in gulags? Shoot them? Shun them? Exile them? Then who will watch the shows and buy tickets to the movies? Yes, Christopher Nolan is just special enough to bridge the gap, but how many others can?
The reason the ten-year war on Trump has been a failure is that it’s never really been about Trump but rather preserving utopia, or “Woketopia.” In real life, majority rules. That would ordinarily mean box office and ratings matter. But they don’t, not really, unless it’s to make a point, as so many now have with The Odyssey, to say “see, we can go woke and not go broke.” In general, most who cover Hollywood don’t care about success or failure in terms of the numbers. Those people out there just don’t count.
Trump, believe or not, represents the “real world” more so than any Democrat now, even the new leader, Zohran Mamdani. He might lead the utopian version of America, and if he doesn’t now, he soon will, but Donald Trump, by default, has taken up the cause of the ordinary man and woman in the country who no longer have any representation in culture, certainly not in any of the award shows.
Ending the war doesn’t mean seeing Trump as a good guy or likable, but it is to understand that America is one country and we have to find a way to tolerate each other. Voting for Trump should not mean the end to anyone’s career. There should not be one side that sees itself as better or morally superior to the other. This is especially true in an industry like Hollywood that is supposed to serve the people. Yes, all the people. Even those you detest, sneer at, and would like to see dead.
I don’t know for sure that the Paramount Skydance purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery will lead to a big bang of better movies and TV shows. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that what has happened to Hollywood in the last ten years, as they shut out those who refused to go along with their totalitarian impulses to force everyone into compliance and believe what they believe, has been a disaster for an industry that still relies on ticket sales and eyeballs.
In other words, it can’t possibly get any worse.
Keep in mind that most objecting to the merger are doing so only to protest Donald Trump because what else is new? They are happy to see their entire industry collapse if it means sticking it to the Right. This is not sustainable for Hollywood, and the sooner they abandon this pointless war, the better. Let it be fought at the ballot box, in politics where it belongs, not in the arts.
I’m not a fan of monopolies. But most of Hollywood is already sucked into one. The biggest monopoly is the Democratic Party’s near-total control of Hollywood. That has meant they can’t tell stories criticizing themselves. They can’t even tell the story of George Clooney’s op-ed, the Biden coup, and the installation of Kamala Harris, who then loses to Trump. They can’t tell the story burning up the internet right now about biological males playing against biological females in sports. It’s all off limits.
This monopoly has made movies and television shows, not to mention late-night comedy, boring. They need to get over it, and to do so, they have to realize that Barack Obama is no longer the leader and it’s time to move on, to evolve, to realize that this is a big country with lots of different kinds of people in it and we all have to learn to tolerate each other.
I have heard the Paramount merger is never going to happen and that it’s just a matter of time before they drop it. Then, the Left will take a victory lap and feel good as one more battle against the Devil is won. But all that means to me is nothing will change because there is no competition inside a monopoly.
