Forbes attributed the high critic score to the show being “very, very diverse” and noted “the critics gushing praise for this series sound out of touch with Star Wars and its fandom (and what makes it tick!) and really out of touch with good writing in general”:
The critics must be crazy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This time, it’s Star Wars: The Acolyte that has aroused the profoundly odd sensibilities of the professional media class…in which being a critic no longer requires you to be critical, but rather rewards you for simply liking the Right Things and disliking the Wrong Things.
I won’t belabour the point of recent trends in what passes for entertainment when South Park already summed it up perfectly:
As a result of audience alienation (13%!), Get Woke/Go Broke is becoming the industry standard for (formerly) popular, commercially successful IPs1, from Lord of the Rings to the MSheU to Indiana Jones to Ghostbusters to Toy Story to…..Watership Down. The latter was recently readapted for TV by the BBC, and the resulting reviews in the Spectator encapsulated the broader trends we’re seeing across the board in the entertainment industry:
“I’ve just watched the four-part animated series of Watership Down, shown on the BBC, with my daughter. She was slightly more aghast than me to discover that the aforementioned Bigwig was a bruv from the ’hood. And still more repelled by the elevation of a minor female rabbit character into a doughty campaigner for justice, the transgendering of a rabbit called Strawberry, and, most hilariously, the does calling each other ‘sister’ and keening a song of freedom in an orgy of #MeToo victimhood — their importance to the book she too had loved vastly exaggerated for fatuous political reasons.
None of this surprised me terribly, as I have become accustomed to the liberal, white, middle-class BBC bosses shoe-horning their absurd social justice twattery into every single drama production they commission.”
"The BBC trawls through the annals of popular historical fiction, of novels from more than 30 years ago, and ramrods into them its bien pensant obsessions. I would have been much less offended if the BBC had commissioned a writer to confect a story about a group of incredibly woke SJW rabbits, led consensually by a female called perhaps ‘Roz’, who not only liberate a fascistic warren but also open up their own warren to thousands of Iranian rabbit refugees who turn out to be kindly and agreeable and work together with the host population to combat global warming and eradicate poverty.
Nobody would watch such arrant crap, of course, but it would at least be true to itself. But this isn’t done for precisely the reason to which I alluded: nobody would watch it. Instead, the BBC piggybacks on the enormous success and popularity of novels such as Watership Down and warps them until they are unrecognisable."
This parasitic phenomenon of “Piggyback on Success and Warp Until Unrecognizable” concisely summarizes what progressives have done to most popular franchises and adaptations nowadays - the writing and casting becomes increasingly politicized over time and descends into moralizing self-parody until the franchises eventually go from cash cows to money-losers.
The reasons for this “Piggyback and Warp” pattern vary from structural to ideological, but can be broken down into a few major contributing factors:
#1 - Hollywood Conformism
Hollywood being a progressive echo chamber is not exactly breaking news. However, what was historically a discernible but restrained left-wing tilt has snowballed into a culture of fear that has essentially reinvented McCarthyism, as the Free Press wrote about in 2022:
We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers—all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. This was the case not just among the high command at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, but at every level of production.
How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said.
“Everyone has gone so underground with their true feelings about things,” said Mike White, the writer and director behind the hit HBO comedy-drama The White Lotus.
[Per one showrunner]: “Human Resources departments at the studios and streaming services are awash in complaints directed at white, male showrunners just for doing their job. It’s gotten to the point where I won’t give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.”
[Per another showrunner]: “You’re not allowed to pick your staff anymore, and studios won’t let you interview anybody who isn’t a person of color”…He added that the culture of documenting even the slightest of slights makes him anxious. “I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”
[Another] writer and producer said. “You’ve got to be insane not to have at the forefront of your mind all of these racial and gender and trans issues when you’re writing something. You have to worry about the impact that everything you do will have on your career. And that has an obvious chilling effect on creativity.”
There was a feeling, among those who didn’t hew to the new orthodoxy, that it was becoming harder not only for certain people to find work but for a certain kind of content—ballsier, more provocative—to get made. They were scared of what was happening.
The fear, one prominent director said in an email, is “the audience stops trusting us. They begin to see us as a community twisting ourselves into a pretzel to make every movie as woke as possible, every relationship mixed racially, every character sexually fluid, and they decide that we are telling stories set in a fantasyland instead of a world they know and live in. If that happens, and they decide to throw themselves instead into video games 24/7, we will lose them.”
Hollywood is not only enforcing its own political purity tests; the self-censorship problem is compounded by journalists/media/critics, who have developed a tendency to evaluate entertainment media on political rather than artistic merits, something that has been noted by everyone from Freddie De Boer to Quentin Tarantino. One of the more egregious examples I recall was the Daily Beast complaining that South Park didn’t have enough OrangeManBad content in their 2017-era episodes, in an article shamelessly asking “what is the show’s responsibility in the age of Trump?”
Not only does this political monoculture impose a form of narrative straitjacketing, but progressive sensibilities also often conflict with each other in a way that undermines the end product. For example, the feminist impulse to show Strong Women in action franchises doing everything a man can do (but BETTER!) conflicts with the safetyist impulse to not show something as triggering as violence against women. As a result, while Anakin and Luke Skywalker both went into fights underprepared and got their arms sliced off in the Prequel/Original trilogies respectively, the makers of the Sequel Trilogy could not bring themselves to show a girl undergoing a violent trauma such as getting her arm cut off by a man. Instead, Mary Rey Sue had to just breeze through all challenges without ever breaking a sweat, thus giving her no growth arc to speak of and making her a pretty dull character to watch (though there have been far worse).
Heavyhanded social justice messages have become both a mandatory “responsibility” and a substitute for quality: there are 2 ways to get a high critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and similar sites:
Make it good
Make it woke
Option #2 is always easier to pull off, and “woke but terrible” consistently results in better critic reviews than “good but not super diverse”, so we end up in a situation where moviemakers game the critical reception by scoring enough woke points to ensure "Critics are raving about [Product]!!!", even when [Product] just isn't very good2.
Based on both internal and external pressures, creatives today feel an extremely strong compulsion to put “The Message”3 front and center in everything they release.
However, the creatives aren’t the only bloc in Hollywood contributing to this trend.
Only a small fraction of what gets pitched to studios ever gets made, so looking at Hollywood output is always an exercise in survivorship bias. Generally speaking, studios want safe bets, so they are much more likely to greenlight projects that they know comes with a pre-established audience.
“Originals” here still includes adaptations from other mediums, e.g. the Barbie movie would count as an original despite being a derivative of childrens toys
This puts the rank-and-file creatives in a bind; they would rather work on projects that push social justice agitprop (i.e. TheMessage™), but the only gigs they can get are based on what the studios fund (i.e. reboots, sequels, etc.). As a result, viewers are treated to a match made in hell; endless rehashes of existing IP, now crammed full of social justice agitprop by people with no respect for/understanding of what made the IP popular in the first place. The writing team on The Witcher, for example, reportedly had open contempt for the source material they were hired to adapt.
The writers room probably WOULD prefer to be writing “a story about a group of incredibly woke SJW rabbits, led consensually by a female called perhaps ‘Roz’, who not only liberate a fascistic warren but also open up their own warren to thousands of Iranian rabbit refugees who turn out to be kindly and agreeable and work together with the host population to combat global warming and eradicate poverty.” Unfortunately for everyone concerned, they were hired to adapt Watership Down.
To use a non-showbiz analogy, suppose recent-grad car designers were collectively in favour of building nothing but the most energy-efficient vehicles they can possibly deliver. However, the car companies employing them are interested in rolling out updated models of tried-and-true sales hits like Mustangs and Camaros. A compromise ensues, and the customers/fans find themselves gazing in revulsion at a newly redesigned “Camaro” as a 95hp EV, and a newly redesigned “Mustang” as a 2-wheel motorized scooter.
If you don’t like this “New and Improved Ford Mustang” you’re a toxic racist
It takes a certain type of entitled narcissism to release a product, realize the customers don’t like it, and then blame the customers for having the ‘wrong’ preferences.
#3 - Audience Disconnect
Modern creatives don’t just disdain the source material, they also disdain the fanbase (aka the paying customers). The default assumption in Hollywood is that there exists a mythical “modern audience” that has all the same hard-left political sensibilities as the creatives themselves, while actual flesh-and-blood fans are written off as “toxic”. A major reason for this disconnect is that Laptop Class creatives spend as little time as possible intermingling with who they perceive as Physical Class barbarians, as I’ve written on before.
Not only do Hollywood progressives feel intense social pressure to be ostentatiously woker-than-woke, but they live in such a bubble that they’ve forgotten what it even feels like to interact with normal people who are NOT always trying to be woke as hell.
“The celebration of seeing arrogant, masculine, dominant female superheroes (Captain Marvel) or the aversion to having a heroine seek to capture the love of a male character (the modern versions of The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Snow White) are all values that were created by Critical Theory as tools to change the culture of the time.”
“Most progressives are wealthier than average, and the wealthiest ones (who tend to be the most progressive) are also the most completely isolated from working class people. These people don’t even understand how patronizing and out-of-touch they are… how could they?
One place we can see the results of this stark division is on Rotten Tomatoes. The disparate scores below were pulled by me, in two minutes, off the top of my head, and they are all due to the radically different political and cultural values of the respective groups of reviewers:
These aren’t aberrations or random fluctuations. They were predictable and predicted (by me and many others) before the programs were even reviewed.
For those who didn’t attend business school, Marketing 101 is essentially about understanding what your customer base wants, and then finding ways to provide it to them. (though this is a lesson that Marketing Experts™ at companies like Bud Light and Gillette seem eager to forget)
In the context of moviemaking, marketing due diligence means understanding that, for example, women4 enjoy romcoms while men5 enjoy action movies. Trying to entice audiences into buying tickets to a ‘romcom for men’ or an ‘action movie for women’ is to attempt to force a square peg into a round hole, much to the chagrin of social constructionists on the left.
There are of course individual exceptions to average preferences, but producing, marketing, and distributing a movie isn’t exactly cheap, so targeting an audience of exceptions makes it pretty tough to break even, let alone turn a profit. One of the most striking recent examples was ‘Bros”, a queer-theory lecture romcom centered around gay men rather than the standard romcom playbook of centering heterosexual women. In a development that should have surprised nobody, straight women didn’t want to watch a preachy sausage-fest romcom, while men didn’t want to watch a romcom at all, and so Bros was a movie without an audience; it absolutely bombed at the box office. Writer/director/star/theatre-queen-par-excellence Billy Eichner responded to the abysmal box office showing by insisting on Twitter that anyone who DIDN’T purchase a ticket for his movie was being a “homophobic weirdo”, as Spiked reported:
It is as if the filmgoers – made up mainly of those dreaded straights – are expected to go to the cinema in order to affirm their allegiance to an oppressed identity group. To ‘show up for Bros’, as Eichner puts it. Of course, very few people choose which films to watch on this basis. They are at the cinema to be entertained, not to demonstrate their support for an identity group.
For the likes of Eichner, and the rest of woke Hollywood, this just means the audience is wrong and is not to be trusted. When the filmmaking elites take such a dim view of filmgoers, perhaps it’s no wonder their films are flopping.
Rather than making a product the customers want, creatives today prefer to make a product THEY want, and if the customers don’t like it, they simply blame the customers for being “toxic”. Studios, for their part, were slow to acknowledge this audience disconnect because they were distracted by strong reviews from critics (as those critics see diversity as a substitute for quality), and because the studios were preoccupied with securing a beachhead in the nascent Streaming Wars.
I once worked at a smallcap public company that was burning through cash with no foreseeable path to profitability, and the CFO’s strategy for keeping the lights on was to periodically issue yet another round of shares. In order to find willing buyers for those stock offerings, the CFO reasoned the company needed a series of wildly overoptimistic press releases as “the stock market just needs a good growth story”.
Until inflation started forcing up interest rates in 2022, subjective measures of ‘growth’ and ‘futureproofing’ were far more important to investors than mundane concerns like profitable business models and solid economic fundamentals. Tech companies like Twitter and Uber prioritized growing their user base over ever actually making any profit, and investors kept buying up those stocks under the assumption that once market share was suitably captured, profits could be easily obtained via price hikes, as Walter/Heisenberg memorably summarized. “Corner the market, then raise the price. Simple economics”.
What this meant for the entertainment industry was a speculative mania to grow the number of users across a litany of streaming services; profits were seen as secondary to subscriber growth. Movie studios were still risk averse when choosing IPs to develop (they preferred to mine the past over gambling on anything new), yet at the same time they were willing to throw obscene amounts of cash at growing their various streaming platforms.
When the cats are away, the mice will play. Woke creatives who wanted to LARP as social justice revolutionaries found they had free rein to do so, as studio oversight was minimal to nonexistent.
A Perfect Storm of Enshittification
None of the above phenomena necessarily entail woke Hollywood elites deliberately shitting all over your favourite childhood memories. However, I’m a firm believer in The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. The current system of progressive-dominated entertainment media is ultimately a parasitic one, as commercial success of an IP and/or franchise leads inexorably to it being hijacked, politicized, and dragged through the mud.
Progressive creatives, whether they consciously intend to or not, have developed a tendency to gravitate towards whatever the masses find entertaining, shoehorn in their boutique political agendas, and then blame the fans for being “toxic” when their changes engender backlash.
MCU Phase 4: YassKween GirlBosses Slay the Patriarchy
The upcoming live-action Snow White and the YassKween GirlBoss Slayzz the Patriarchy (assuming it doesn’t get canceled like Batgirl did)
All of the above releases underperformed commercially, and with the exception of Furiosa, in their Rotten Tomatoes audience scores as well.
Flagship franchises are by no means the only ones affected; up-and-coming TV shows often get the same wokified treatment, especially in their later seasons and/or spinoffs. Off the top of my head I can think of:
Other examples abound - while TV shows jumping the shark was always a thing, now they have a tendency to get very hard-left political very fast, and the quality suffers as a direct result.
At the very least, wokeness is no longer the surefire career boost that it arguably used to be. Daisy Ridley has complained she couldn’t get work in the aftermath of the Star Wars GirlBoss trilogy, and Elizabeth Banks has done her damnedest to memory-hole her politicized marketing of Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle:
How it started:
“When we were casting the movie, I wanted really fresh faces. I wanted a diverse cast”
“One of the statements this movie makes is that you should probably believe women”
“if this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies”
How it’s going:
“There was a story around Charlie’s Angels that I was creating some feminist manifesto”
“There was not this gendered agenda from me”
Kathleen Kennedy has recently said women tend to “struggle” to win over Star Wars audiences “because of the fan base being so male dominated”. Of course, using identity politics as a shield from accountability is nothing new:
Ultimately, it remains an open question whether studios are able and/or willing to stop woke creative teams from hijacking popular IP to push their own bespoke political agendas. There have been numerousreports of austerityacross the industry as the volume of projects are scaled back, but as The Acolyte demonstrates, there’s no guarantee that fewer projects translates to better projects. Studios are now looking for every automation cost-saving they can find, but Hollywood unions are fighting backtooth and nail.
As for us lowly consumers/fans, the only good news is nobody6 can force us to support the shitty woke lecturing being passed off as entertainment. The best advice I can give is to keep your standards high, and Say No To FOMO.Don’t watch garbage just because your friends are watching it, or because you want to have something to tweet about. By the same token; don’t reward garbage by hatewatching it; the opposite of fandom is not antifandom, it’s indifference.
Personally, I more or less personify the fears of that aforementioned studio exec who worried about the day when “the audience stops trusting”; it’s been years since I gave any tentpole franchises the benefit of the doubt (and by extension my time/money). I haven’t watched a Marvel offering since Endgame, I’ve long since written Star Wars off as unwatchable, and in general I’m at a point where buying tickets to movies in theatres has become the exception, not the norm. Ditto for taking time to watch a TV series; I pride myself on not paying for a single streaming service at this point in my life (though I do piggyback on other people’s subscriptions in the rare event I feel like streaming anything). It’s also been well over a year since I last fired up my Xbox.
All that time I could have sunk into getting politically berated for my toxic white-maleness by overpriced movies/shows/videogames has been far better spent at the gym, the driving range (I’ve learned to not completely suck at golf!), and taking a stab at launching a Substack. Even gardening is a better use of time for young men than watching PaleStaleMale Harrison Ford be the butt of every joke in the latest Indiana Jones movie.
In the spirit of paying forward mentorship, I’m open to suggestions on the best way to encourage young men to get off their asses, stop engaging with movies/shows/games that bombard them with woke grandstanding, and go do something more productive.
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Boycotting mass media entertainment and cultivating other hobbies is a win-win. Maybe the studios will one day develop a healthy fear of bankruptcy, get their shit together, and stop biting the hand that used to feed them, in which case movies might get better again. Or maybe once you’ve detoxed from Pixel Valhalla you’ll wonder why you ever wasted so much precious time on it to begin with.
Modern entertainment media has other issues besides pervasive wokeness, but it’s this use of wokeness as a smokescreen to obscure other creative shortfalls that makes it worth dissecting in its own right
Unless you count spouses; I know a millennial guy who is forced to follow all things Marvel/Disney by his wife, which should tell you a lot about how little intrinsic appeal those products have in what used to be their target demographic
Young men should buy a gun. You can get one cheaper than an Xbox. Its fun as hell going to the range especially with friends but even if you don't have any friends, the guys at the range are very helpful and happy to see a newbie getting into the hobby. There are outdoor ranges for some sun and fresh air and indoor ranges when its raining. It never gets stale. If you get bored of shooting a handgun, then you can buy a shotgun. Next you can move up to a rifle. There are lots of accessories for every gun. You can choose from hundreds of scopes, you can add a light, you can change out parts to make it look cool. You can paint it. When you get really good you can build one to be exactly what you want.
Besides being a fun hobby, its also practical. You can conceal carry to defend yourself and your girlfriend when out in public. You can use it to defend your home and family. And, when the SHTF, you can shoot commies all day long. What's not to love?
Great stuff. I remembering living in SoCal when the entertainment industry was exciting, where creative asymmetry could suddenly break into wildly expansionist dynamisms. But, no longer.
Young men should buy a gun. You can get one cheaper than an Xbox. Its fun as hell going to the range especially with friends but even if you don't have any friends, the guys at the range are very helpful and happy to see a newbie getting into the hobby. There are outdoor ranges for some sun and fresh air and indoor ranges when its raining. It never gets stale. If you get bored of shooting a handgun, then you can buy a shotgun. Next you can move up to a rifle. There are lots of accessories for every gun. You can choose from hundreds of scopes, you can add a light, you can change out parts to make it look cool. You can paint it. When you get really good you can build one to be exactly what you want.
Besides being a fun hobby, its also practical. You can conceal carry to defend yourself and your girlfriend when out in public. You can use it to defend your home and family. And, when the SHTF, you can shoot commies all day long. What's not to love?
Great stuff. I remembering living in SoCal when the entertainment industry was exciting, where creative asymmetry could suddenly break into wildly expansionist dynamisms. But, no longer.