June 1st, 2024 | Grant Johnson

Is Hollywood Done Being Woke?

A couple recent blockbusters have bucked the trend.

Is wokeness starting to die? It’s an interesting question. One early indication of wokeness in decline is current-day Hollywood.

Hollywood was an early adopter of Woke. It both pushed wokeness and was pushed by it. Arguably around the time of #MeToo and Trump’s election win, wokeness was ascendant in Hollywood, if not completely hegemonic. It ruined one box office franchise after another, starting most notably with Ghostbusters: Answer the Call in 2016. It carried on through Star Wars and Marvel and Pixar, while original films from Bros. to Strange World pushed the envelope of wokeness.

From the inside, Hollywood has suffered the wrath of Woke as articles like this one from last year attest to. The industry is experiencing dysfunction and decline. Box office receipts are falling. The money is drying up. Go Woke, Go Broke is a real thing.

But things are changing.

The broad landscape of Woke is receiving enormous pushback. The U.S. and Europe are leading the charge, with countries like Canada (as usual) two steps behind the curve. Hollywood being a cultural vanguard is a good pulse check on the state of wokeness, and it looks like we might be reaching critical conditions.

The biggest box office hit of 2024 was Dune: Part Two. This is a nuanced movie that can be read from a few different perspectives, but I would argue that it is hard not to see this movie overall as incredibly based. The movie review website Worth it or Woke? gave this film a 77% based rating and it’s easy to see why. I won’t do a lengthy review as that can wait for another day, but elements about colonialism, race, and the use of political power come to mind. Also, the movie is so wildly pro-life that it features scenes of a pregnant mother having back-and-forth interactions with her unborn baby.

I think in the case of Dune 2, the source material and the beautiful aesthetics overwhelm any possible Woke intent the movie may explicitly hope for. In other words, it falls into one of those unintentionally conservative films in which the intention of the filmmakers completely backfires. It’s wildly based by accident. But nevertheless, it’s based and it’s this year’s biggest box office hit.

Another successful non-Woke example that comes to mind is the recent Ghostbusters sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Many people remember the female Ghostbusters reboot back in 2016 as the beginning of woke Hollywood. The controversy from Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter regarding that movie, and the backlash that ensued was epic. Ghostbusters: Answer the Call crashed hard at the box office, losing $70 million for the studio.

Hollywood being Hollywood, they couldn’t let an intellectual property die, so in 2021 they launched a proper Ghostbusters sequel. This one was helmed by Jason Reitman and he approached the material with reverence. Most notable, however, was that the movie was specifically non-Woke. It wasn’t so much that it was based…(although it’s there if you look), but the fact that it was specifically non-Woke.

Frozen Empire follows in the same footsteps. Whether it’s Paul Rudd’s character manning up to become a father figure, or the multiracial cast that never bothers to notice race, or the on-the-nose threat of “cold weather” attached to the film’s villain in the era of climate hysterics… hell, even the introduction of Patton Oswald to the cast doesn’t bring anything particularly Woke. The big controversy, however, was reserved for the main character, Phoebe Spengler.

In the film, Phoebe is banned from Ghostbusting after taking the blame for an enormous amount of city damage in the catching of a recent “dragon” ghost. She is alienated from her family and friends and finds solace in the arrival of a ghost girl named Melody. They develop a friendship that leads to (spoiler alert) Phoebe making a horrible mistake resulting in the release of the primary villain of the movie.

The LGBTQ+ crowd latched onto this “relationship” and decided that it represented a lesbian attraction between the teens. The filmmakers never presented the situation like this and to their credit, they didn’t back down.

“With Phoebe and Melody, I think the entire dynamic is set up and shaded in the light that Phoebe is kind of at her most vulnerable,” Grace added. “Obviously, there is a bit of a twist in that relationship and there is a bit of Phoebe feeling taken advantage of by that friendship. I think that there is, at the core of it, a friendship, relationship, that Phoebe has never experienced before. She kind of met Melody at a time where she was completely isolated. She felt like her family had turned on her, she was no longer allowed to be a Ghostbuster, she didn’t really have anything. So that was somebody that she felt like saw her – that got her as a person. And she was also very fascinated with the ghost element of it all, so I think it was just a close relationship that Phoebe had never had before, and she felt seen in a moment of vulnerability. So to me… it was just a friendship…” – Comicbook.com

Dune 2 and Frozen Empire are two recent examples of post-Woke Hollywood and it looks like many more examples will follow. One of the biggest fundamental reasons for this may not be the right-wing culture warriors fighting the good fight over the years, or even recent box office troubles, but the recent awareness that Woke is a Frankenstein’s monster of ideology that is coming for some of the Jewish elite.

The attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023 sent a shockwave around the world. The second shockwave was the unbridled support for Hamas and the Palestinian cause against Israel. Jews everywhere were shocked to their core to discover that the sympathies of the mainstream in the West were leaning toward (sometimes celebrating) Palestine.

In short, Liberal Jews in the West, many of whom embraced and championed (if not created) wokeness in order to create a multicultural society that would allow them camouflage as Jews to exist in peace, suddenly realized that the ideology they supported did not support them. The majority of the woke just view Jews as successful White people. The same anti-White hatred that many Jews thought would shield them from persecution has now been revealed as their greatest threat. This is basically a version of what happened to the Bolsheviks when the Soviet Union outgrew them.

Jews have now awakened to the reality of Woke and their disproportionate influence in Hollywood will be a vanguard for alternative ideologies. Maybe this will lead to super-based movies in the coming years championing tradition, honour, duty, and a glorification of history. Maybe not. But one thing is for sure: Woke isn’t going to last and the dynamism of Hollywood will lead the way.