Hollywood is going through a woke meltdown. The loss of revenue and jobs has utterly devastated the movie-making industry, and ironically, they only have themselves to blame. We are going to see precisely where Hollywood’s demise began and why it looks like the days of Tinseltown are indeed coming to an end!
– Hollywood has seen a 50% decline in theater audiences over the last four years, with a 40% drop in ticket sales in 2022.
– The decline cannot solely be attributed to streaming services like Netflix, as even Netflix experienced a significant loss in market value and subscribers.
– Many attribute the decline in quality to Hollywood’s shift towards left-wing politics, particularly evident in its portrayal of the War on Terror and subsequent domination by DEI themes.
Hollywood is hemorrhaging theater audiences that have shrunk by 50% over the last 4 years. In 2022 alone, Hollywood saw a staggering 40% decline in ticket sales. Hollywood saw its worst ticket sales decline ever a year after theaters were reopened. This cannot be blamed on streaming services like Netflix because Netflix has seen its market value cratering nearly 30%, losing $42 billion in value after the company announced that its subscribers shrank for the first time since 2011. As if things couldn’t get worse, the writers and actors strikes over the last year further devastated Hollywood.
Nearly 20% of Hollywood jobs evaporated over the course of those strikes, basically gutting what’s left of the industry. Even the documentary film industry is crumbling. Variety Magazine reported on a recent panel discussion of documentary film insiders, all of whom admitted that what they called the whole ecosystem for documentary filmmaking is in the midst of total collapse. A poll that just came out from Rasmussen found that movie-goers, by a margin of 2 to 1, think that movies have gotten considerably worse in the past 20 years.
The poll found that 54% of those surveyed believe that the motion picture industry has deteriorated in the last two decades, just 27% thought that movies were getting better. The answer as to why audiences have increasingly turned their backs on Hollywood is because they think their movies are bad.
Screenwriter Lou Aguilar tracks the quality decline of movies in Hollywood’s coordinated attack on Bush and the War on Terror at the beginning of the 21st century. He notes that far from producing patriotic, pro-nationalist films, Hollywood produced a whole swath of highly critical antiwar movies depicting American troops as either clueless ignorant pawns or murderous psychopaths. These are movies like ‘American Soldiers,’ ’Redacted,’ ‘The Mark of Cain,’ ‘Home of the Brave,’ ‘Green Zone,’ and a number of others.
While all of these movies lost money at the box office, it didn’t seem to matter. As long as each production company had a big blockbuster to offset all these leftwing failures, they just kept making them. They were subsidized by the blockbusters. Regardless of anyone’s view of the War on Terror, this in many respects seems to have been the beginning of the end for Hollywood. From the 2010s onward, DEI ended up dominating the screen.
We have seen identity politics take over and destroy what a previous generation had built. We see this with Disney, the Star Wars franchise, and the Marvel Comics Universe. Whatever got inherited by this new generation of woke ideologues got squandered. Rush Limbaugh long ago recognized that art awakens our highest aspirations and human flourishing. Wokeness is completely bereft of this ability to evoke, it can only provoke! As a result, theater audiences have rebelled and they have rebelled overwhelmingly.
They are not just rebelling by turning their backs on Hollywood, they are rebelling by actually seeing movies that Hollywood has rejected, like The Sound of Freedom, which has grossed over a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide. The fact is that Hollywood is imploding, not only because most people find woke values odious, but also because woke values have had the inadvertent effect of reawakening and reinvigorating traditional moral values and commitments. That’s why Hollywood is collapsing all the same time the Sound of Freedom topped the box office charts. We are seeing both a collapse in woke values and a resurgence of traditional values. Amazing trends are happening all over the world, and there’s simply nothing the woke left can do to stop it!
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