By Monica Showalter
If something is falling apart but wants to stay afloat, it’s usually a pretty right time for making some changes.
Which brings us to Hollywood, where Power Line attorney and writer John Hinderaker has found some good observations:
Like most of corporate America, Hollywood has fallen prey to the “DEI” delusion in recent years. Far from being a good thing, corporate “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” measures generally represent a poisonous brew of racism, leftism and anti-Americanism. The sooner this fad fades from the scene, the better.
In the Telegraph, U.S. Editor Nick Allen sees signs that the entertainment industry is moving back toward sanity:
Hollywood is suffering “diversity fatigue”, insiders have said, after four leading inclusion executives left high-profile roles in the space of 10 days.
The departures came at three major studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Commentators in Hollywood suggested it showed “diversity fatigue” and it led to complaints that the entertainment industry was not fully committed to implementing inclusivity policies.
We can only hope.
That’s a pretty dramatic development, and Hinderaker notes that it coincides with Hollywood losing profitability in the wake of its wokester products produced as a result. Disney, for one, lost something like $900 million dollars on its films since it got on the woke train, Hinderaker noted.
Bottom line here is that money talks in Hollywood, and if they are getting rid of these profit-killing virtue-signaling mechanism, they obviously intend to end the loss of profits.
That calls to mind other things going on in Hollywood. It’s not just that the bloated wokester DEI companies are losing money — it’s that upstarts are gaining it — millions and millions of it, with none of it for them.
Anybody see what Angel Studios is doing these days in the wake of its runaway hit series The Chosen? That’s right, a new hit, this one on human trafficking, and they are hitting box office gold on that one, too.
According to the National Catholic Register:
Sound of Freedom, an anti-human-trafficking film made by Catholic filmmakers Eduardo Verastegui and Alejandro Monteverde, had a massively successful opening day in which it reached number one at the box office, beating out Disney’s fifth Indiana Jones installment, and raking in $14.24 million.
Sound of Freedom had an overall production budget of $14.5 million and only played at 2,600 theaters on its July 4 opening day. Meanwhile, Disney’s Indiana Jones had a budget of $295 million, played at many more theaters, and brought in $11.69 million on July 4.
That’s a stunning haulaway, breaking even on costs at the starting line (they will make more later), not only because they blew Disney’s tired sequel gone woke out of the water on earnings, but because the serious and unhappy topic would be considered box office poison by Hollywood. It wasn’t. Like the Bud Light drinkers, who replaced Bud Light with high-quality Modelo Especial, the alienated moviegoers were interested in serious and quality replacement fare for the products they were leaving behind, too. Hollywood had treated them like morons and they got tired of it and moved on to serious adult topic issues in their filmgoing.
That has to howl like a gale wind to Hollywood, when they see how much money is coming in, and none of it is going to them. You can bet they are going to be taking lessons from that too — which would require them to dump the woke DEI and focus on quality, too.
Here’s a third trend that leaps out at me: President Trump went to an event in Las Vegas over the weekend — and met up with Hollywood A-list celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg. That’s no small fry in the Hollywood pond — Wahlberg is a walking blockbuster and Hollywood knows it. They don’t mess with him, at least, not so far. So it was no mean thing that Wahlberg did what he wanted and instead of issue wokesterly statements like most of them, went to see what Trump was like and talk to him himself. Other celebss were there, too. What does that say? That they don’t fear the Hollywood mafia anymore and have enough power to do what works for them. The moneymakers in Hollywood like him are moving away from ‘woke’ and they don’t care who knows it.
That’s a trend away from woke, too.
They all add up to a Hollywood that has seen the light on the oppressive death-grip of wokecraft. This can only be a good thing, particularly when we see more of it.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/is_wokester_hollywood_starting_to_shrivel.html