It’s been a rough stretch for Hollywood recently. The shift toward woke content and away from actual comedy has been disastrous at the box office, and the constant barrage of superhero movies appears to be wearing thin. Outside of Tom Cruise and anomalies like Barbie and Oppenheimer, there hasn’t been much good news coming from Hollywood.
Studios can usually count on the holiday season to draw viewers in with holiday content, and Hollywood had a lot at stake for the Thanksgiving week offerings. Considering the struggles of Disney and the Marvel Universe much was riding on the latest offerings from Apple and Disney.
There are various reasons for the struggles post-pandemic. Lack of fresh ideas, superhero fatigue, and the lengthy SAG-AFTRA strike are major reasons, and the continued insistence on producing woke, pandering content is also to blame.
Ultimately, no one is to blame but the studios, and despite the holiday’s big budget offerings, viewers don’t appear to be ready to fully embrace what they are selling. The latest big budget releases pulled paltry numbers during the early portion of the week, and projections for the full week aren’t good.
The latest offering from woke Disney limped into the weekend, barely treading water. “Wish” had an absurd budget of $200 million, yet only scored $8.3 on Wednesday. The film is expected to garner around $37 million over the five-day period.
The Apple production, “Napoleon,” cost a massive $200 million, yet earned $7.7 on Wednesday. Despite starring Hollywood heavyweight Joaquin Phoenix, the biopic holds a mere 62% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 61% score with audiences.
In the case of “Wish,” some of the issues could perhaps be the message being delivered. In usual Disney fashion, the film offers an “empowered female character” who has to swoop in to save the day. The central idea is a metaphor for God being bad until the female character steps in.
Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire describes the plot thusly: “It seems that the plot is, essentially, about how God is bad. So, what it is is a king [who] grants people’s wishes, but he has an apprentice … and this apprentice finds out that the king is only selectively granting people’s wishes, and is picking and choosing.”
While it is standard practice for Disney to pander and virtue signal, perhaps moviegoers are tired of the constant barrage of woke themes and ideology. Shapiro continued: “This is a terrible, terrible thing — she will grant everyone’s wishes! Which, you don’t have to go far afield to understand that what that kind of is is, ‘God is bad because he said no to you sometimes.’ So it would be better if there were an empowered female character to get up and make sure that all wishes be granted across the board.”
Whether the “Daily Wire” founder is off base or not matters little. The fact is, Hollywood is collapsing under the weight of bad content, woke ideology, and stale ideas. This Thanksgiving’s bleak returns for two movies that were supposed to propel the studios into the holiday season speak volumes, and consumers simply aren’t interested.