We say it every day on our channels and this website: The problem with box office disaster after disaster in the modern movie business is not hero fatigue, super hero fatigue, audience fatigue, audience prejudice, or any of the host of excuses and reasons we’re told by the captive showbiz media for this ongoing disaster that will definitely cost thousands of people their jobs and futures and, of course, the studio coffers their dwindling resources.
No, the problem (shocking to some, but clearly self-evident) is…bad movies. Bad storytelling. Characters we don’t care about. Relationships dictated by DEI and ESG and all those other alphabet-soup social theories and not. As my college screenwriting professor once described the key to a great movie, “Chasing your main character up a tree and throwing rocks at him.”
Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste OConnor) in Columbia Pictures MADAME WEB.
We see movies whose budgets are inflated by re-shoot after re-shoot because the script they started with and/or the cast or crew they employed to enact it weren’t ready for prime time. We hear of projects with their release dates pushed back further and further by such reshoot-rethink delays. We see stars of films dissing their predecessors in woke diatribes that turn audiences off and send the message that the film is less about entertainment and more about “the message.”
Film patriarch Samuel Goldwyn put it well way back when: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” But in today’s world, both telegrams and talented storytellers are defunct or at least very few and far between.
Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
SO it is worth asking the question, I think, as follows: EVEN putting aside the fact that these re-dos and do-overs will make actual financial break-even or profit impossible, IF they fix their mistakes before unleashing them on the dwindling moviegoing public…will it, at this point…matter?
Case in point #1: Snow White starring Rachel Zegler. It seems from the scuttlebutt that the reaction to her unwise words AND the sneaky preview shots of what WDW Pro has dubbed “The Seven Dirty Hippies” the film is being remade nearly 100%, now putting CGI dwarves into the mix to replace the aforementioned DEI barristas, and of course insanely bloating the budget to a point where profit is a virtual impossibility.
The question? IF it fixes it, will anyone learn the lesson? CAN the people “fixing” it even do so with their built-in prejudices and lack of storytelling-over-preaching points of view? And of course, the other bigger question even IF they manage to fix things and overcome their mindset handicaps, will people be so angry, dissed, and now disinterested that, well, to paraphrase the old expression: “What if they gave an unwoke movie and nobody came anyway?”
Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Snow White (2025), Walt Disney Studios
Case in point #2: Captain America part whatever. We have pretty good inside information that the script they shot at first was basically a political parable featuring an evil, dictatorial U.S. leader modeled very closely after Donald Trump because, well, had the original schedule been kept, it would have come out to put a superhero icing on what the Left and Woke hoped would be his ultimate political demise. Ooops. He’s winning, a majority of polls say he may just be the next President, and the attempts to derail his progress in other arenas have only stoked the fires of pro-Trump resistance and, well, we can’t have our superhero movie do that too, right? Right.
So…rewrites. Reshoots. Rethinks. And on the one hand we hope that it works for entertainment’s sake, but the question comes back again: Can the wokies who did the original shooting and writing and directing suddenly get, well, “religion” and take that stuff out and put back good-old-fashioned audience satisfaction entertainment? OR will it be a kind of joke along the lines of Monty Python’s famous sketch about a certain canned meat product. Will the film have woke, woke, woke, sausage, superpowers, woke, eggs, and woke—thus not MUCH woke in it? Is that, in fact, the best these people can do?
Falcon/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) in Marvel Studios’ THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER exclusively on Disney+. Photo by Eli Adé. ©Marvel Studios 2021. All Rights Reserved.
So you see what I’m saying—how can audiences trust the same people who ruined entertainment and enslaved it to a political, cultural, and sexual philosophy to figure out how to fix their mistakes? I’m not sure we can. Let me close with a lesson I learned decades ago from the Talmud, the commentaries on the Old Testament written by wise, insightful scholars and passed down from generation to generation.
The wise men were asked why, after delivering the Israelites from slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt, God then had them wander for forty years in the deserts of the Sinai before bringing them to their promised land and home. The answer, these learned men said, was this: God in his wisdom knew that even with the best of intentions, the most pious of faithfulness, and a leader like Moses to guide them, a people who had spent generations as slaves would never, ever have the complete mindset that would enable them to live as self-governing, positive, and free people, so literally He had to kill of an entire generation to make sure they wouldn’t bring their past attitudes with them and infect the new land of Israel with them.
Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956), Paramount Pictures
So that’s my answer as a nowhere-near-that-wise man of the 21st Century: The creativity can ONLY come back to Hollywood, the great storytelling can ONLY return to our entertainment, and the audience pleasing heroes and heroines battling adversity to reach a winning happy ending can only resume when the people who threw it out and screwed it up are gone–relegated to the desert sands of the past. They have made such an ingrained and personal commitment to their misguided beliefs that not only their politics and persuasions are locked into them, their personal sense of their own self-worth is dependent on them, too.
And the audiences and the millions of lost revenue and the collateral damage to theaters, shops, restaurants, and a million other businesses both directly and indirectly a part of the success or failure of our culture and entertainment? Well I’m sad to say that the beatings will continue until the product improves…and that will only happen when the cast both in front of and behind the cameras is utterly exchanged for people who understand what entertainment and pleasing audiences is all about.
Moses Views the Promised Land, engraving by Gerard Jollain from the 1670 “La Saincte Bible.” Photo Credit: Gerard Jollain, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
There is hope, folks. But it will take a lot of time and we will go through a lot of chaos in the meantime as we wander through the endless desert wastes in search not of Cannan or Jerusalem, but of that town with the big sign on the hill that once proudly shone out its name, Hollywood, to the nation and the world.
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