Hollywood has been sliding into a financial abyss that the town may never recover from, so one might expect film industry moguls to back away from the woke cancer that put them on the bad side of the American public. The problem is, many production companies have projects that began principle filming before the 2024 election when the political left still naively believed that they were the national majority.
Now, those companies are stuck with these movies even when they know box office failure is guaranteed. One such movie is the latest from director Paul Thomas Anderson and lead star Leonardo DiCaprio, called “One Battle After Another”.
The movie is being hailed by the woke media as a “celebration of modern day Antifa revolutionaries”. Hollywood In Toto says the film “casts an Antifa-style group as its heroes,” while The San Francisco Chronicle described the film, referring to the protagonists as “an allegory that involves antifa-like left wing extremists, a well-funded right wing militia group, and immigrants avoiding ICE.” The Daily Beast called it a “gonzo Antifa rallying cry.”
The timing for such a project could not be worse. Woke films with leftist political messaging are already guaranteed to fail in theaters the vast majority of the time. Add to this the fact that the film is being premiered the same month that multiple mass shootings have been committed by leftist activists (including school shootings), Antifa mob attacks on immigration officers, as well as the assassination of conservative speaker Charlie Kirk committed by a gay man with a trans furry boyfriend using Antifa slogans written on his ammo.
There’s not a lot of public affinity for radical leftists at this time. No one wants to see a movie glorifying them as protagonists.
This is why “One Battle After Another” is flopping hard at the box office. The flick needs around $300 million to break even after marketing costs are included – It has only made $48.5 million globally. Keep in mind, half of all box office revenues go to theaters, the other half goes to distributors. And, a weak opening weekend usually portends a swift decline in ticket sales for the next few weeks after.
Ultimately, the movie is likely to lose hundreds of millions of dollars and probably end up on streaming services in the very near term with little fanfare. Get woke, go broke.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s otherwise excellent track record for dramatic films cannot overcome the intense gravity of the woke black hole. Few if any films escape its cold grasp. This is why it is suicide for content producers to jump onto political bandwagons; the movements they think are popular as usually not, and biases blind the creative process. The foolishness of chasing propaganda should be obvious, but not to the dimwits in Hollywood.
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