Hollywood’s Easter Meltdown
It was a glorious Easter Sunday to wake up to in America, for three reasons. Christ is risen, Navy Seals rescued a downed airman from behind enemy lines in Iran, and U.S. astronauts neared the Moon. But the people in one area, Hollywood, are not celebrating this Easter, also for three reasons. They hate Christians, who worship the first triumph. They despise Trump, who effected the other two. And they’ll probably soon be out of a job.
A Wall Street Journal story last week, See How Hollywood’s Job Market is Collapsing, qualified and quantified the Pompeii-level meltdown of screen industry employment in the past four years — a 30-percent drop since the already abysmal 2022. Nobody who has read my articles here for a while should be surprised by the disaster. I warned of it in my very first piece eight years ago, “The Hollywood Compliance Decree,” citing the decision makers’ suicidal displacement of heroic men and romantic women with feminist fantasy figures.
The corporate powers that control Hollywood didn’t run out of liberal dreams. They just ran out of money.
And that was before Hollywood went full Hollywoke on the road to oblivion. By the time of my article, Kathleen Kennedy and her sisterhood had only just begun to destroy Star Wars, debasing the masculine heroes who established the franchise, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, to present a sexless unreal heroine. “The Force is female!” was Kennedy’s slogan. Unfortunately for her, the audience wasn’t. And the men who turned out for the first film in the last trilogy, The Force Awakens, abandoned the sequels in droves.
The Kennedy coven wouldn’t take no for an answer. They doubled down. They not only went female on Star Wars, but gay, nonwhite, and ugly. Case in point, the recent TV woke bomb, The Acolyte, with plain black female leads and homely lesbian witches.
“They’re in a matriarchal society,” explained showrunner Leslye Headland. “As a gay woman, I knew it would read that their sexuality is queer, but there also aren’t any men in their community. So a closeness between the two of them would be natural.”
Just the kind of show promotion the overwhelmingly male sci-fi crowd wanted to hear or read. Feminists such as Headland and Kennedy couldn’t create a Star Wars if their lives depended on it. They can only ruin it as they’ve ruined so much of the culture. Yet thanks to beta men like George Lucas — who did create Star Wars by actually respecting traditional boys’ pulp fare like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers — they ended up with a $250-million project and gave Disney a seismic loss.
Naturally, yet somehow shockingly, Headland — and Kennedy — are now casualties of the Hollywood downscale. Neither woman has anything in development. Nor do any of the feminist deconstructors and destructors of the Marvel Comics Universe: Ann Boden (co-director/co-writer Captain Marvel), Nia DeCosta (director, The Marvels), Cate Shortland (director, Black Widow), Jac Schaeffer (head writer, WandaVision), Jessica Gao, head writer, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law). Nor does Barbara Broccoli, who turned her father’s version of Ian Fleming’s womanizing macho superspy James Bond into such a simpering lovestruck wimp, she killed him even before she killed him off — and made Q gay.
The irony is that these feminist propagandists — storytellers they’re not — repelled not only the hated male audience but normal women who actually like men. All they want is a nice love story of the kind that once made Julia Roberts into a star. But the Sisterhood couldn’t give then what they want and take their money. Women don’t need men, they insist. But they can beat them up.
And the liberal message men are faring no better. Take J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot Productions. I met with their Director of Development in 2008. They liked a script of mine, Paper Tigers, a semiautobiographical rom-com about two interns at The Washington Post; a conservative and radical feminist beauty; who learn chemistry trumps ideology. I’d done something leftist writers don’t do, to their detriment. I’d given the liberal girl wit and dignity, so the studio people didn’t know where I stood. Some thought I was on their side.
But at the time, Bad Robot was nervous about their in-progress project, Star Trek. When I told the exec I was a big Star Trek fan (of the original TV and film series only), he showed me production stills of the film, and asked me what I thought. I saw a young Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, a hot Lieutenant Uhura (Zoë Saldana), a hotter Winona Ryder as Spock’s mom, and Leonard Nimoy as the classic Spock, and I told the man it would be a big hit. And it was.
Producer Abrams followed it with an okay sequel, then a woke piece of crap, Star Trek Beyond — with a gay Mr. Sulu that outraged even gay George Takei. It ended the franchise. By that time, Abrams had already damaged Star Wars as director of The Force Awakens. Last week, he announced he was closing the Bad Robot LA facility and opening a smaller office in New York, part of a large trend.
The corporate powers that control Hollywood didn’t run out of liberal dreams. They just ran out of money. The trouble is they’ve chased away talented traditionalist artists such as Andrew Klavan, Walter Kirn, and me. For years, we’ve been calling for conservative investors to replace Hollywood in the arts, and serve a neglected, hungry audience. Well, Hollywood is now a wreck. But the free money is still on the table.
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