Oh no, perish the thought. We can’t possibly lose our current action movie landscape in which painfully diverse casts including 5’2 girl bosses defeat entire armies using the power of special effects while delivering quips originating from a now MeToo’d writer who wrote them for a teenage girl show before infecting Marvel with his brand of dialogue.
They’re so popular that movie theaters are standing empty.
So you can see why Semafor’s story about Trump impacting the culture is set to strike terror into the hearts of wokes everywhere.
But now Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s most prominent financial supporters, owns a second-tier studio, Paramount, and is on the cusp of taking control of the great Warner legacy, with the giant library and sprawling production that come with it.
The film producer Dallas Sonnier predicts “a wave of classically male-driven movies with mentally tough, traditional, courageous, confident heroes. Maybe even a tad cocky, but dedicated to honor and duty. Plus, of course, a few explosions, gun battles, helicopters, fistfights, and car chases!”
Classically male-driven movies with mentally tough, traditional, courageous, confident heroes. Who wants to see that?
In the real world though, it takes a lot to turn a culture around, and Hollywood has been overrun with people pushing wokeness as second nature. That’s not just going to away no matter who owns a studio because personnel is policy. And even if Ellison controls both Paramount and Warners (there’s still a big ‘If’ there), those are grand classical names with some compelling IP, but they have a fraction of the money to throw at productions that Netflix and Amazon do. And Netflix and Amazon want wokeness. That means the old studios will deliver it if they want that streaming market. At best there may be some more ‘classical male-driven movies’ getting made.
David Ellison produced Top Gun: Maverick. He wants to make a third one. His Skydance is behind the Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher movies with Tom Cruise. But anything involving existing IPs that didn’t star Tom Cruise, like the Terminator and Star Trek reboots, were woke garbage. We’ll see what the future holds.
We could use some courageous and confident heroes.
