Towards the end of the fifth season of ‘Stranger Things,’ the character of Will Byers gathers his family and friends together. He has good reason. They need to prepare for the final battle against Vecna, a terrifying, skinless monster with a penchant for mass murder and apocalyptic terrorism. But instead, Will comes out as gay.
This is perhaps the most anticlimactic moment in television since Pam woke up to reveal that the entire tenth season of ‘Dallas’ had been a dream. In laborious and earnest tones, Will takes four minutes to tell everyone that he just isn’t into girls. Cue the inevitable chorus of solidarity from his friends and a warm group hug. Given that this series is set in the 1980s, a more realistic approach would have been for them to storm out and declare Will to be more disgusting than Vecna.
This has happened so often in Hollywood that it’s become the norm. A storyline is upended to promote the ideological obsessions of the present. We’ve had a Black Cleopatra, a lesbian kiss in the ‘Toy Story’ spinoff ‘Lightyear,’ empathetic, home-loving orcs in Middle Earth, and a robot in an animated series of ‘Transformers’ declaring its pronouns as ‘they/them,’ as though mechanized killing machines are sensitive about their gender identities.
A key aspect of storytelling is verisimilitude. Movies can present completely unreal worlds, but unless an audience buys into the internal logic, they quickly lose interest. Consider the recent Netflix series ‘Ripley,’ in which a major male character is played by a female actor who identifies as ‘nonbinary.’ The characters don’t notice that she’s a woman, and we’re expected to play along. It insults our intelligence and completely derails an otherwise brilliant series.
If we want to save the arts, we must return to the universal. We have to remember that we’re meant to be entertainers, not high priests of a new religion that nobody asked for.
The audiences know it, too. The ‘coming out’ episode of ‘Stranger Things’ is currently the lowest-rated episode on IMDb. The recent live-action remake of ‘Snow White,’ with its emphasis on diversity rather than murderous stepmothers and subterranean dwarves, reportedly lost over $115 million for Disney.
The all-female leads of ‘The Marvels’ might have made a few executives feel good about themselves, until it turned out to be the franchise’s biggest bomb of all time. And after poor test screenings, HBO’s big-budget wokefest ‘Batgirl’ was shelved altogether.
So, while executives pat themselves on the back for their ‘virtue,’ their studios are plunged into debt. According to public filings, as of late 2025, Disney’s debt is roughly $35.3 billion and Warner Bros. Discovery’s debt stands at approximately $33.5 billion. Cinema attendance continues to decline, with annual box office receipts in North America struggling to reach $9 billion. In a world where production and marketing costs have skyrocketed, these numbers represent a dying industry.
It turns out that audiences prefer to be entertained rather than hectored. If people wanted a sermon, they’d probably just stick to church. I’ll make a prediction right now: if things don’t change, they won’t be making movies on those legendary big studio lots in five years’ time — they’ll be selling them off as prime real estate for luxury condos. You can’t continually patronize and insult your customers and expect to keep the lights on.
Since the rise of the ‘woke’ movement, and its total domination of the creative industries, anyone with a conservative point of view has been punished and even blacklisted.
Artists are meant to be the most free-thinking people in the world, but the industry demands conformity above all else. Worse still, the woke fixation simply doesn’t tally with the views of the general public, most of whom don’t want their children being indoctrinated by studios smuggling in ideology and propaganda under the guise of entertainment.
Contrary to what the self-identifying, morally superior, adjacent elites want you to believe, the woke ideology has never been popular with the public. It represents the luxury beliefs of the privileged few, those who spend most of their time pontificating about ‘social justice’ and ‘environmental responsibility’ while flying in their private jets and ingesting enough cocaine to keep the cartels of Mexico living like kings.
The good news is that the American people aren’t waiting for permission from the big studios anymore. We are seeing a massive explosion of alternative media. Whether it’s independent streaming platforms, podcasts or creator-owned networks, a new frontier is being built.
Audiences are migrating to where they can find authenticity and truth. They’re supporting creators who prioritize strong storytelling over ‘the message.’ While the legacy studios are busy building ‘safe spaces’ for their writers, and scolding audiences for not being sufficiently ‘progressive,’ we are building a new industry for the people.
Hollywood used to be about what brought us together. Now, it’s about what divides us. They’ve traded the Dream Factory for an Indoctrination Lab, and the American people are voting with their wallets and their remote controls.
If we want to save the arts, we must return to the universal. We have to remember that we’re meant to be entertainers, not high priests of a new religion that nobody asked for.
If that doesn’t happen, get ready to see a lot of ‘For Sale’ signs on those studio gates.