Hollywood's message to US red states: Our movies are for you

After a period of openly using movies to display progressive values, studios seem to be heeding a message that many ticket buyers have been sending for a long time: We just want to be entertained, no homework attached.

Los Angles: For nearly two decades, Hollywood has seemingly missed no opportunity to sound the alarm about climate change.

There have been cri de coeur documentaries, most notably An Inconvenient Truth. Superheroes have been concerned, with Batman bemoaning humankind's treatment of the planet in Justice League. Nary an award show goes by without a star or several begging viewers to take environment-saving action.

So it was startling when the weather-focused Twisters arrived from Universal Pictures this month with no mention of climate change at all. If ever there was a perfect vehicle to carry Hollywood's progressive climate change messaging—a big-budget movie about people caught in worsening storm patterns—wasn't this it?

Apparently not. Movies should not be about "preaching a message," Lee Isaac Chung, who directed Twisters, said in a prerelease interview that served as a dog whistle to conservative ticket buyers.

Trend spotting in cinema is a hazardous pursuit. Sometimes a movie is just a movie. Twisters, however, is emblematic of a clear shift in Hollywood: After a period of openly using movies to display progressive values, sometimes with success at the box office (Barbie) and often not (Strange World, The Marvels, The Color Purple, Dark Waters), studios seem to be heeding a message that many ticket buyers—especially in the center of the country—have been sending for a long time: We just want to be entertained, no homework attached.

Put bluntly, it amounts to an attempt by Hollywood to bend to red-state audiences.

"It's a reflection of economics and the desperation of the film industry," said Corby Pons, a movie marketer who focuses on the faith community and is based in Nashville, Tennessee. "We want you to attend our movies. We need you to attend our movies."

Disney, which owns seven studios, including Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century, has put its creative ranks on notice. "We have to entertain first -- it's not about messages," Bob Iger, Disney's CEO, said at a conference late last year. "I don't really want to tolerate the opposite."

His comments were a sharp reversal from Disney's shareholder meeting in 2017, when he spoke with pride about more openly weaving sociopolitical messages into the company's movies.

"We can take those values, which we deem important societally, and actually change people's behaviour," Iger said then. (The shift seems to be going well, with escapist Disney movies like Inside Out 2 and this weekend's Deadpool & Wolverine arriving as instant smash hits.)

For 20 years, Participant Media was Hollywood's preeminent maker of films with a conscience. An Inconvenient Truth was one of its early successes. But the company shut down in April.

Participant relied on studios and streaming services to distribute its eat-your-broccoli documentaries and dramas about underrepresented communities, and those partners have cut back on such "niche" content in favor of more populist offerings. Streaming services like Netflix have also started to sell ads, and advertisers prefer all-audience, apolitical content.

Paramount describes its current focus as "all-audience, flat-out entertaining films." Those include Gladiator II, one of the most-anticipated movies of the fall. "Many moviegoers don't want agendas or Hollywood telling them what they should be thinking," said Chris Aronson, Paramount's president of domestic distribution. He cited "IF," a feel-good PG movie that came out in May about a girl with imaginary friends, as one that "resonated strongly" with ticket buyers in the heartland.

Some stars are steering more directly to the right. Although it didn't result in the hit he envisioned, Kevin Costner squarely pitched his Horizon: An American Saga -- Chapter 1 to red-state moviegoers last month. (One Horizon ad prominently quoted conservative commentator Glenn Beck saying, "Kevin Costner may be the only one capable of telling the true American story.") Dwayne Johnson, ever attuned to the marketplace, went on Fox News in the spring to decry "woke culture" and say that he regretted endorsing President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Universal's approach to "Twisters" involved positioning the movie as escapist fun and studiously avoiding sociopolitical issues. The last thing Universal wanted was a film that doubled as a climate change scolding, which would likely repel conservative ticket buyers. "We couldn't afford to overlook any audience," said Michael Moses, chief marketing officer at Universal. "With every decision, it was about how can we include and not exclude."

Twisters, which cost $155 million to make, not including tens of millions in marketing costs, collected $82 million in ticket sales over its first three days in theaters in North America, roughly 65 per cent more than box office analysts had expected, with red states providing most of the upside. To play up the movie's countrified bona fides, Universal arranged for marketing tie-ins with Ram trucks and Wrangler jeans; Moses dispatched the film's stars to a Luke Combs concert, where they shotgunned Miller beer.

"This movie is killing it for us," said Mike Barstow, executive vice president of Main Street Theaters, which operates 50 screens across Nebraska, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. "It's a relatable story -- our communities deal with tornadoes all the time -- but it's also just fun and doesn't feel condescending to rural values." (Instead, city dwellers are mocked. "Kate's from New York," one guy sneers in the film, which was written by Mark L. Smith. "You can't trust a thing she says.")

A lot of people in Hollywood only seem able to discuss the middle of the country while holding their nose. But entertainment is a reactive business: chase what worked over the weekend, drop what didn't. And some moviegoers and theater owners in the vast center of the country have recoiled from films they see as too progressive.

"WARNING," read a sign taped to the glass door of an Oklahoma movie theater in 2022. "The management of this theater discovered after booking 'Lightyear' that there is a same-sex kissing scene within the first 30 minutes of the Pixar movie. We will do all we can to fast-forward through that scene, but it might not be exact."

There was a line outside that same theater over the weekend to see "Twisters," which played on two of its three screens.

"Go woke, go broke" jokes, in some ways, have calcified into conventional film industry wisdom. Disney's storytelling shift came after an extended period in which the company was attacked by conservative pundits and politicians. Rival studios watched in terror, afraid they might be next.

More than ever, studios need every dollar they can find. Most are part of larger entertainment conglomerates that are under severe pressure to boost revenue, not to mention profit, as traditional cable channels wither and streaming services struggle with high programming costs. Last summer, ticket buyers in red states caught Hollywood's attention when they turned Sound of Freedom, a thriller with QAnon overtones, into a runaway hit. Sound of Freedom, made independently for $15 million, collected $184 million in the United States, beating big-budget Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible sequels.

Hollywood has not recovered from the pandemic (in part because pandemic closures were followed by two lengthy union strikes against studios). Ticket sales so far this year in North America total $4.3 billion, down roughly 35 per cent from the same period in 2019, according to Comscore, which tracks box office data.

As studios try to climb back, the heartland represents a specific opportunity. Ticket buyers in red states were the fastest to return to theaters after the pandemic, while those in coastal cities were the slowest. Some large markets, including San Francisco, have not fully recovered, according to studio distribution executives.

As Sarah Unger, co-founder of Cultique, a firm in Los Angeles that advises companies on changing cultural norms, wrote in an entertainment industry newsletter Wednesday, "Hollywood is missing a massive audience in plain sight."