Hollywood is on pace to enjoy a record year at the box office. With $10.7 billion banked domestically, and 10 days remaining, this year is already +3.4% ahead of last and a full +9% ahead of 2014. And “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” will help the industry close on a high note. Yes, the film biz still has problems. Attendance is stagnant, Disney is gobbling up a disproportionate amount of overall revenue (it owns Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel)… The trend lines, though, are headed in the right direction. And the strikingly apolitical “Rogue One” explains a lot.
As my colleague Harry Khachatrian pointed out, despite the rumors and public post-Trump meltdown of many of its key creators, “Rogue One” is much more conservative than liberal. 1) There is nothing partisan anywhere in the story. 2) The themes are universal ones of self-sacrifice, fighting for a cause bigger than yourself, individual freedom, and, yes, a colorblind society.
Honestly, the most conservative thing about “Rogue One” is that, despite what the crybaby screenwriters tried to claim — “Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist organization, opposed by a multicultural group led by brave women,” Chris Weitz sniffed on Twitter — that is a TOTAL LIE.
“Rogue One’s” heroes might come from different ethnic backgrounds, but there is only One Culture at work here — people who believe in the liberal values of Western Civilization: self-determination, self-government, personal liberty, live and let live, human life is sacred, and that these values are worth dying for.
This is a group of heroes that melts together, that e pluribus unums like no other. No one is denigrated or promoted, or seen as more or less virtuous, due to race or gender. “Rogue One” is a world where race and gender do not matter, where Identity Politics do not exist, where people work together to stop a fascist central government (The Empire) from telling them what to do. In “Rogue One” you rise or fall on merit alone. Everyone does not get a trophy. That is the exact opposite of multiculturalism.
This unapologetic Trump-supporter not only enjoyed “Rogue One,” he sat for two full hours and found his worldview legitimized, even mythologized. Imagine Hollywood spending $200 million to tell me I’m pretty much right about everything (not that I didn’t already know that).
This is nothing terribly new, though. Hollywood has changed a lot over the last decade. Apparently, after getting burned time and again and again with all those left-wing movies released during the aughts, unlike our national media, the film industry has learned its lesson.
For generations Hollywood has released tentpoles, but for a time even those were filled with partisan shots, or what I call “sucker punches,” these hideous moment where the movie broke its own spell to TELL IT LIKE IT IZZZ. George Lucas even did this in 2005’s mediocre “Revenge of the Sith.”
But look at movies today. There are certainly exceptions that prove the rule, like the gun control-flop “Miss Sloane” or the Social Justice Warrior-flop that was the “Ghostbusters” reboot. Overall, though, the cineplex is filled only with big-budgeted crowd pleasers aimed to put as many butts in seats as possible.
That doesn’t mean politics have completely vanished. The last two “Captain America” films were extremely political, thoughtful examinations of surveillance, drones, vigilantism, and in “Civil War,” nationalism versus globalism. But they are not partisan, they do not tell you how to think, they do not sucker punch you, or call you a Nazi because you vote a certain way.
Even the latest Jason Bourne movie managed to get out of its own way!
Before “Rogue One” began, I saw trailers for the “The Mummy,” “Cars 3,” “Guardians of the Galaxy 2,” Transformers 5,” “Wonder Woman,” the Spider-Man reboot, and a host of other Big Movies. All of them aim to please, all of them want to appeal to Trump supporters and Hillary supporters alike. And there is no question that the film industry has made leaps and bounds when it comes to its approach towards Christianity.
Although I resent the hell out of being sucker punched, as long as they are well made, I personally have nothing against openly political or even partisan movies. Nevertheless, that doesn’t appear to be true for most of us.
To its credit, Hollywood has, at least for the time being, surrendered its partisan propagandizing in an effort to simply entertain.
Oddly enough, according to the box office, not insulting half your customers is starting to pay off.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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