Hollywood Has A Problem It Can’t Throw Money At

Hollywood has grown fond of taking Western ideas and destroying them; the latest example is “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.”

We created an entire company to fight this, and we pledged we would outcompete Hollywood on their own terms. We as a company are dedicated to the proposition that our civilization is worth defending on every front, including the artistic front.

Now, obviously, we can’t outcompete Hollywood at their budget.

But you know what we can do?

We can make sterling, extraordinary content that challenges the best Hollywood has to offer.

And we are doing it right now.

Our new movie, “Confession,” tackles the deepest questions we ask and answers them in a way that is consonant with the truth.

The film is character-driven, intellectually weighty, and serious, and it asks real questions such as: what values are we supposed to live for as human beings? What does it mean to sacrifice for those values? How do we stand up to tyrannical forces that want to obliterate freedom and meaning?

And here is what we already know just from the reception to the trailer: People are starving for this kind of content.

How do we know this?

Our film’s trailer is currently outpacing Narnia’s, which was released on the Netflix account. They have 24 million followers. We released the “Confession” trailer on my account and the Daily Wire account, which have a combined total of roughly half of Netflix’s total.

More people have watched our trailer than the “Narnia” trailer, which is insane.

Just for good measure, “Baywatch” also dropped their trailer yesterday. They have hot people running around in bathing suits, and we are almost doubling their trailer’s viewership. People are more interested in our serious examination of Soviet tyranny and human freedom and the value of God in our lives than they are in a film with hot people in bathing suits. That means people are starved for content with meaning. They want meaningful properties.

We were honored to work with so many unbelievably talented people, and the end result is an unbelievable film. Vaclav Marhoul directed it; he previously did “The Painted Bird,” a Venice Golden Lion nominee. He is a true artist.

The cast for our film is astonishing. It includes six-time Golden Globe nominee and Emmy nominee Rob Lowe, who delivers the performance of his career; Oscar nominees James Franco, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Brad Dourif; and three-time Oscar nominee Nick Nolte.

We had true artists, people who are amazing at their craft, working on this movie because it’s great.

Rob Lowe told Deadline Hollywood, “This is an incredible story of the human spirit and its survival against those who would crush it.” Marhoul said, “From a director’s perspective, this film was a truly great challenge for me. I ventured into a genre I hadn’t explored before: an intimate, dialogue-driven psychological drama set in a single location. Together with cinematographer Peter Menzies, I sought the most sensitive approach to directing and visual style — one that matched the story and characters. A wonderful crew and cast helped me meet that challenge.”

Now here’s the news. The movie premieres at the Warsaw Film Festival on Thursday. It’s a big honor, and then we’re going to follow that up with a one-night run in 100 theaters nationwide. It comes out on Daily Wire on November 11.

We wanted to do something that’s top-flight filmmaking, not just missional with a message, but an awesome film.

Why is all this important? Because our culture is starved for a basic defense of Western values and art that reflects the serious questions we all face.

That doesn’t mean that every film we make at Daily Wire is going to be a serious drama. We want to dedicate ourselves to winning the culture on all fronts. Sometimes we’re just going to make a fun action movie like “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.”

So why write a film about the Stalin era?

Because we have now arrived at a point in American history where people don’t remember how terrible our enemies in the world are and were.

Let’s say you wanted to destroy America in favor of one of these systems. You would do a couple of things. First, you make people forget God. Second, as a corollary to that, you’d make people forget the individual. That is what the Soviet Union tried to do.

The reality is that members of the Left in America have dropped the mask. When the Soviet Union existed, there were some members of the Left who were openly sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

The New York Times covered up the Ukrainian genocide, the starvation of somewhere between five and eight million people. They covered that up because they were sympathetic to Stalin.

But now people don’t even play around with this. Zohran Mamdani is sympathetic to full-scale communism. Abdel Rahman El-Sayed and Bernie Sanders are sympathetic to the same thing.

They’re not hiding the ball anymore. The Democratic Socialists of America released an image with a red fist, deliberately meant to mimic Soviet-era worker imagery.  Nearly half of the members of the DSA leadership body, according to the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith, identify as communists. In their December 2025 newsletter, the Red Star caucus members celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday. Hasan Piker, who dresses up as Mao, said that his dream for America is a United Soviet Republic of the U.S.

The Democratic Party is ingesting this stuff at scale and pretending that the Soviets were fine and good.

Communism is alive and well in the West.

And that is an essential reason why we have to remind people of what the reality of communism was — and is.