Phelim McAleer: Prioritising ideology over entertainment is backfiring on Hollywood and hitting it where it hurts
Phelim’s Letter from America:
The pattern is now unmistakable. Just look at the recent disasters and the one modest success that proves respecting your audience and their love of country might actually attract an audience.
Last year, Disney’s Snow White cast Hispanic actress Rachel Zegler as the “fairest of them all” amid allegations of ticking racial quotas. However, a lot of the audience would have just rolled their eyes and watched the movie if Zegler hadn’t then used every media appearance to attack the original Snow White story as oppressive to women and Prince Charming as a stalking sexual harasser.
She also wasted no time pivoting her press tour to progressive pro-Palestinian messaging - even while standing beside her proudly Israeli co-star Gal Gadot. The result was predictable: audiences stayed away in droves. What should have been a family-friendly cash cow became another expensive lesson in prioritising ideology over entertainment.
The same disease has just struck again with Supergirl. The film opened weakly and now has collapsed with a 74 per cent second-weekend drop in audiences, stalling at $58 million domestic box office against a budget already exceeding $275 million plus another $200 million in marketing. In other words, the movie is going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars - and destroy a possible franchise that in the right hands could have earned billions for the studio.
Lead actress Milly Alcock spent her promotional tour telling potential ticket-buyers that audiences had “weird ownership” of women’s bodies and that those who were the creepiest were generally “Christian dads of four”. She didn’t seem to care that she might need that Christian dad and his four children to come to her movie.
Compare Supergirl to Young Washington, a $20 million film that was produced and co-written by a couple of my friends, Diederik Hoogstraten and Kelly Merriman. The movie opened to a $21 million weekend - well on its way to profitability. Establishment critics were lukewarm, of course, yet word-of-mouth is strong because the movie delivers something mainstream audiences clearly want: a well-crafted story about character, resilience, and a love of America.
I interviewed Hoogstraten for my podcast recently and he explained his approach. It’s not complicated.
“We are in the business of mass entertainment,” he said. “We want to make really good movies… they have to be good movies first… traditional films.” And they start by respecting the audience that they are trying to attract. “This really is a movie for everyone… people hunger for shared experiences.”
Hoogstraten is an immigrant from Holland and so, of course, loves his country more than a lot of Americans and certainly more than almost all of Hollywood.
“I love this country. I’m a patriot through and through,” he said.
His movie respects but does not pander to the audience. It shows a young George Washington failing repeatedly - losing battles, resigning his commission, falling ill - then rising again. As Hoogstraten noted, the real test of a man is not that he fails but how he responds to that failure.
The lessons are clear. One production set out to give audiences a shared, unifying story rooted in American history. The others featured stars who treated large parts of the public as enemies to be lectured or provoked. The box-office numbers tell the rest of the story.
Hollywood is not being killed by streaming services, pandemics or changing viewer habits. It is slowly committing suicide. Studios keep greenlighting expensive, union-heavy projects filled with badly written progressive lectures disguised as storytelling. They promote actors and creatives who seem to waste no opportunity to signal contempt for America and the very audiences expected to pay for the privilege of being scolded.
The result is consistent: films that prioritise political signalling over craft, character and entertainment value flop, while modest, audience-respecting projects like Young Washington find success.
Hollywood has the power to choose which path it takes. So far, it keeps choosing the one that leads to self-destruction. America used to be known as the land of opportunity. Hollywood is creating that for filmmakers such as Hoogstraten.