Hollywood Conservatism – A Blast from the Past with Current Day Ripples

Superhero fatigue, superhero slump, or revenge on the superhero genre?

It has been said for years that Hollywood will eventually get the message and stop producing Socialist political pressure (liberal) films. That may be too much to hope for even now, when ticket sales are plummeting and Disney cannot sell either cartoons or superheroes to movie-hungry audiences – and has in fact seen the state of South Carolina pull its investments from the company. A lot of people tend to blame this on superhero films’ declining popularity (a result of poor writing, not the actors nor the genre itself) because that is the easy demarcation of the low water point. But superheroes are not the problem – as an old article from City Journal attests.

This 2005 piece from City Journal titled “Conservatives in Hollywood?!”, by Brian C. Anderson, goes over what at the time were current events. One of the interesting points it makes is far too familiar to most viewers now:

But guess what: ever more Americans are shunning Hollywood’s wares—and disgust with Left Coast politics, both on and off screen, clearly plays a part. In a time of declining moviegoing, what gets people out to the theaters, it turns out, are conservative movies—conservative not so much politically but culturally and morally, focusing on the battle between good and evil, the worth of heroism and self-sacrifice, the indispensability of family values and martial
honor, and the existence of Truth. Hollywood used to turn out a steady supply of such movies—watch just about any film from its Golden Age of the thirties and forties—and it still makes them once in a while (sometimes thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg). We may soon see a lot more of them. (Emphasis added.)

Even at the time of the article’s writing, hope appeared rather scant. While Star Wars (one of those movies made “thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg”) made a splash in 1977 as much for its hopeful story as for its special effects, another reason it did well is that the general trend in films at the time was a “nihilistic realism” which claimed heroism was a farce and the “real world” was a mass of grays that was impossible to escape. Star Wars offered an escape from this nihilist view and reaffirmed that heroism was not only true, it could and would win in the end. By 2005, however, there did not appear to be much in the way of franchise film material to keep these basic human (conservative) values in film.

But as this article points out, there was a sea-change – or an apparent one – coming in the form of superhero films. In fact, Mr. Anderson takes the time to discuss two such films that came out ahead of his article’s publication. Three years after his article’s release, Marvel Studios gave us Iron Man, a superhero film streamlined from the original comics that spoke to eternal themes in recognizable modern dress. It earned $319,034,126 in the U.S. and Canada, making $585,796,247 worldwide, according to IMBD. Calling it a good summer popcorn movie would be right, but the film kicked off a decade of storytelling that kept Tinseltown solvent.

The MCU became a box office juggernaut that tended to suck all the air out of the room from 2012’s Marvel’s The Avengers onward. Everyone who wrote, directed, or produced “serious” and “artistic” films took notice and, unsurprisingly, held a grudge against it.

That seems a little startling at first glance, but given those who interviewed these artistes would inevitably ask them about this “hot trend” in entertainment, it isn’t really a surprise. When the “cool kids” are faced with something popular they have two instinctive reactions to it: they either try to co-opt it, or they try to make it Not Cool. Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and others all went for the “make it Not Cool” option to steal back the spotlight from something which the general public enjoyed more than their films.

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, for instance, came out in June of 2012 and earned a cool $403,354,469 at the worldwide box office. Marvel’s The Avengers came out in May of 2012 and earned $1.519 billion, putting it well ahead of Scott’s latest addition to the Alien film series. Furthermore, Marvel did not cease its output or proceed in a slow, deliberate fashion, as Scott and Scorsese tend to do. Scott’s The Martian won $630.6 million at the box office while Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron raked in $1.403 billion in 2015. Scorsese’s historical film Silence had a $23.8 million box office while Captain America: Civil War walked away with $1.153 billion dollar prize. Both The Martian and Silence had superhero actors Sebastian Stan and Andrew Garfield in them and they still lost to the Marvel juggernaut. Why?

Maybe because the Marvel behemoth told stories with good, old-fashioned values that had heroism actually beating evil and proving that virtue was worth the pain. For all its good qualities, The Martian was a one-and-done film that was not necessarily family-friendly. Silence was certainly not family-friendly and could be seen as depressing, too. For all that Captain America: Civil War had its detractors among fans, the film ended on a high note and promised that heroism would win in the end. That was an assurance not included in Scorsese’s Silence, which left the question of salvation for the protagonists unconfirmed.

The City Journal piece points out the reason why Marvel walked away with Hollywood’s lunch money and practically did not notice it had done so. In 2005 as now, films with blatant partisanship (and there were many then, too) were ignored by general audiences. DVD sales had also slumped. This was blamed on rising ticket sales in 2005, but now it would be said that streaming is what has put cinema on the ropes, as it has led Best Buy and Wal-Mart to decide to stop carrying DVDs in stores. But that is a distraction from the main problem. Partisan films, which once could be ignored quietly, are being ignored with absolute prejudice by viewers of all political persuasions. Hollywood is finally losing money and – as City Journal noted back in 2005 – they still do not know why.

What does this have to do with superhero films? Many fans knew The Marvels was going to flop before it actually did a faceplant in theaters. The MCU ended with Avengers: Endgame and some believe that the studios are merely flogging a dead horse. But are they actually flogging a dead horse? Maybe not for the reasons one would think. These paragraphs from “Conservatives in Hollywood?!” suggests it may be more than a desire for power or control proposed by ESG and DEI (DIE) guidelines.

It might be simple revenge:

When Hollywood does put its liberal worldview aside to make movies that embody traditional values, it often scores big with the public. Consider 2004’s Spider-Man 2, a sequel far better than the original. Directed by Sam Raimi, the movie is a visual wonder: the scenes of Spider-Man (played by soft-spoken Tobey Maguire) battling the tentacled benefactor-of-humanity-turned-terrorist Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) high above New York—furious tangles of fists, mechanical arms, and shattered glass and stone—virtually explode off the screen. Spider-Man 2 is so eye-catching that you might miss the story’s old-fashioned moral truths.

The movie is a fable about duty and heroism. Young Peter Parker decides to hang up his Spider-Man costume, since his super-heroics—made possible by the bite of a genetically mutated spider—have kept him from chasing his dreams, which include, above all, winning Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). Parker takes this step after visiting an aging hippie doctor, Grateful Dead shirt under white scrubs, who advises, in vintage if-it-feels-good-do-it style: “You always have a choice.”

Yet as city crime skyrockets and the threat of Doc Ock grows, Parker’s conscience haunts him. In a crucial scene, his loving Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), the moral center of his life, sets him straight. “Everybody loves a hero,” she says. “People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they’ll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer.” Her old voice grows somber. “I believe there’s a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want most. Even our dreams.”

Struck by her plain wisdom, Parker eventually does the right thing, not his own thing: Spider-Man returns and saves Gotham from Doc Ock. Not, though, before a band of straphangers risk their lives by stepping between the injured superhero and his terrifying enemy, proving that one doesn’t need superpowers to be valiant—a lesson that New Yorkers know well after September 11. The movie’s essential message is exactly contrary to the guilt-free “just do it” ethos of the sixties: sometimes the choice you have to make, to live a morally meaningful life, is to do your duty. The movie resonated powerfully with the public, grossing a whopping $374 million domestically, and it took in another $400 million or so overseas. Factor in DVD sales, and you’re getting close to a billion-dollar movie.

Did you know Spider-Man 2 was a conservative movie? Most people did not – but then, most people would simply regard a good story as a good story. Most people would not say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was made up of conservative films, particularly if they wished to keep their jobs. There is nothing overtly conservative about a good story, yet as City Journal’s Brian C. Anderson notes, Spider-Man 2 is conservative in the emphasis it places on what were once considered “ordinary family values.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe continued in this fine tradition until 2017, when the fruits of Bob Iger’s 2015 decision to remove Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter from Marvel Entertainment and shut down the Creative Committee came to full flower. Presidents of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito wished to produce both Black Panther and Captain Marvel, but Perlmutter refused to greenlight the films as he felt they would not sell toys or other merchandise. So he constantly refused to let them go forward. Feige and Disney, however, desperately wanted both films made, and in 2015 Iger separated Marvel Studios from Marvel Entertainment so Feige would no longer answer to Perlmutter. Although both Marvel Entertainment and Marvel Studios are owned by Disney, they are semi-independent from the company and possess their own CEOs. Perlmutter’s concerns about the films were overridden and he has essentially been blacklisted from the franchise’s film branch ever since, though rumor has it he might be working on a comeback. Since he removed Perlmutter altogether from Marvel in 2023, the former CEO – who told Iger “You broke my heart” – will be yet another opponent they must contend with in addition to all the others they have acquired.

Some may not have noticed at the time, but the MCU began coming apart at the seams as Feige, Iger, and the Studios’ partisanship increased tenfold. Granted, everything in entertainment that year became more partisan in ways that no one who was not willfully ignoring it could miss. But the fact remains that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had up to that point been holding its own and making money hand over fist precisely because the stories were conservative in their values. Most fans hung on until Avengers: Endgame, and numerous others hoped there might be some projects worth investing in after Endgame hit theaters. But by now even those fans have largely soured on the franchise and are turning their back on it due to the insane amount of partisanship that Feige, Iger, Walt Disney Chairman Alan Horn, and other unleashed on the franchise.

Thus, it is no surprise that Marvel’s films since that time have been declining in quality and in box office return. Scorsese and Scott, among others, now get to parade around and dismiss the cultural impact of superhero stories and films with impunity because superficially they seem to be correct. They are no more correct than Alan Moore was or than those who celebrated the downfall of the Western were, but most people are not going to realize that in time. Nor are they going to care, either. Those who do and who want to save these popular stories are going to need to wait until the Big Two inevitably crash before they can salvage anything from them.

The same can be said of Disney/Pixar, whose latest project – Wish – is the most recent in a line of poor box office showings. Take a look at this part of Mr. Anderson’s article to guess at one reason why this might be a form of vengeance as well:

Pixar Studio’s dazzling animated superhero film The Incredibles (2004) is another box-office winner—domestic gross $261 million—with a surprisingly right-of-center worldview. Writer and director Brad Bird’s story, enjoyable for kids and their folks too, revolves around an appealing family of five, who just happen to be hiding the fact that they’re superhuman. Like others with enhanced abilities, parents Bob and Helen Parr (the former Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl) “retired” with the help of the federal government’s “superhero relocation program.” Tort-crazy lawyers, you see, had slapped the superheroes with so many spurious lawsuits on behalf
of those they’d saved—“He didn’t ask to be saved, he
didn’t want to be saved,” one lawyer histrionically complains—that it became impossible to use special abilities without incurring financial ruin. The Parrs now raise their kids in a typical American suburb, a seemingly typical family.

The defense of excellence—and frustration with the politically correct war against it—is a central theme of The Incredibles, as in a scene when Helen chides Bob for not attending their son Dash’s “graduation” from fourth grade. “It’s psychotic,” Bob thunders. “They keep creating new ways to
celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional. . . .” In another scene, Dash yearns to play school sports, but Helen says that his super-speed would make it unfair. “Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of—our powers made us special,” Dash complains. “Everyone’s special, Dash,” his mother tritely replies. “That’s just another way of saying no one is,” ripostes Dash, glumly.

The film’s science-wizard villain, Syndrome, seething at the superpowered (since he has no superpowers himself), has been killing off the heroes with his advanced technology, which he then will use to play champion. “Your oh-so-special powers,” he snarls at Bob. “I’ll give them heroics. I’ll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I’m old and I’ve had my fun, I’ll sell my inventions, so that everyone can have powers. Everyone can be Super! And when everyone’s Super . . . no one will be.”

The Incredibles affectionately embraces the bourgeois family, flaws and all. The Parrs have their difficulties: teenager Violet is sullen, the kids fight, Mom and Dad bicker, Bob hates his drab insurance job. But for the Parr kids, the
family bond is all-important: a worried Violet, suspecting (wrongly) that their middle-aged father might be having an affair—Helen has rushed off to rescue him—tells Dash, “Mom and Dad’s lives could be in danger. Or worse—their marriage.” And the parents will risk anything to protect their children, as the film thrillingly demonstrates more than once. Like Pixar’s 2003 runaway winner Finding Nemo, the movie shows children “what adults are supposed to do,” writes author Frederica Mathewes-Green on National Review Online—“to be brave and self-sacrificing, to defend children even at risk to themselves, to give, even in the face of ingratitude.”

If there is one thing that the previous few years have shown, it is that the left likes taking revenge more than control. This backhanded reprisal against superheroes, Disney, and Pixar may not have been directly sought by any “off-screen lefties” in Tinseltown and Mr. Anderson’s article was likely not read by the usual suspects in Hollywood. Even if they did read it, they may have understood it only on a surface level, or reasoned on a surface level in the same way that Syndrome does in The Incredibles. Yet the fact remains that they got exactly what they wanted nonetheless – and it is costing them incredible amounts of not only money, but any shred of respect audiences gave them once upon a time.

“But you’re reading things into these films for your own benefit!” some say. The proper answer to this retort is: “And? So? Have you seen liberals try to read genderqueer-isms into The Lord of the Rings?” If they get to do that, why cannot conservatives adopt things like V’s mask from V for Vendetta? Or why can they not use Mal Reynolds’ “I aim to misbehave” line as they have since the film Serenity came out? Joss Whedon is on record as not being a conservative and outright disagreeing with Mal.

If the so-called Woke, social justice warriors, et al can find that Sauron is queer, what rule says conservatives cannot see their values reflected in superhero films like the MCU, Spider-Man 2, and The Incredibles? Nothing stopped Mr. Anderson from believing that the latter two films had conservative values in them, and he makes an excellent case for conservative values being fundamental to Tom Hanks’ Cast Away, nodding along the way to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Passion in his piece.

Present trends in Hollywood look even more like revenge when one reads this section of Mr. Anderson’s article. If said vengeance is not directed at a specific genre or creator, then it is meant primarily for the audience that continuously refuses Tinseltown’s increasingly desperate advances:

The size of the market for such conservative films first grew clear in the late sixties and seventies, when Hollywood nearly stopped making them. Swept up in the era’s revolutionary spirit, the industry junked its decades-old production code—which mandated respect for marriage, the military, and religion, and forbade cussin’ and nudity—and went in for movies geared to “a rebellious generation . . . challenging every cherished tenet of American society,” as leftist film scholars Seth Cagin
and Philip Dray approvingly put it. Production-code-era Hollywood hadn’t ignored
the darker side of human existence, but even its hardest-boiled noir films weren’t
anything like this. The countercultural movies of “New Hollywood”—such as Arthur Penn’s violent, criminal-glorifying Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Robert Altman’s cynical antiwar comedy M.A.S.H. (1970), Hal Ashby’s sordid paean to the sexual revolution Shampoo (1975), and Martin Scorcese’s urban nightmare Taxi Driver (1976)—wowed critics, who shared their anti-establishment and anti-American attitudes.

But moviegoers turned up their noses. Weekly film attendance in 1967, the first year after Hollywood dumped the production code, plummeted to 17.8 million, from 38 million the year before (television had already eroded moviegoing from its late-1940s peak of 90 million a week). “In a single one-year period,” Medved notes, “more than half the movie audience disappeared—by far the largest one-year
decline in the history of the motion picture business.” That audience then hovered around 20 million for the next three decades, despite a growing U.S. population.

There’s no mystery why so many stay home. Still dominated by countercultural types, Hollywood keeps churning
out “edgy,” envelope-pushing movies—more than half of its films receive R ratings, for example—and Americans keep giving them thumbs-down, as the correlation of profit and ratings shows. Only five of the 50 top-grossing movies of all time have R ratings, and 13 of the top 100. A big 2005 Dove Foundation study examined the 3,000 most widely distributed Hollywood movies from 1989 through 2003 in each ratings category. It found PG- and PG-13-rated films between three and four times more profitable on average than R-rated ones—and G films, like this year’s hit nature documentary, March of the Penguins, more profitable still. The average R movie loses $6.9 million, the study showed; the average PG movie made nearly $30 million; the typical G movie made over $70 million. And a Christian Film and Television Commission study of the box-office receipts of the top 250 movies over the last three years found that films expressing a strong traditional moral message, whatever their ratings, earned four to seven times as much as movies pushing a left-wing cultural agenda.

Hollywood owes its best recent years—2002 and 2003, when it cracked the 30 million ticket mark again for the first time since 1966—largely to the massive box-office success of a handful of conservative, family-friendly movies, including the first two Lord of the Rings installments, Finding Nemo, and the low-budget smash My Big Fat Greek Wedding, virtually an ethnic Father Knows Best. The non-R movies draw more children to the theaters, as you’d expect, and more moviegoers 40 and up, too—their parents. “The largest consumer segment in America is mainstream families with traditional values,” emphasizes Dove chairman Dick Rolfe. National Association of Theater Owners head John Fithian concurs: “Family values sell tickets.”

Another aspect of this conflict bears mentioning. Does anyone remember the Friends of Abe group of conservatives in Hollywood? It had well over 1,800 members, with some sources saying there were over 2,000 there. Several of the named actors are familiar to conservatives in various capacities and have always championed “family values.” But most of the Friends of Abe’s members stayed anonymous to avoid being blacklisted by liberal Hollywood.

That means there are many actors, studio workers, prop masters, grips, and so forth in Tinseltown whom the masses do not know for sure are conservative. Furthermore, it means that Hollywood has no idea how many conservatives are in their midst. While many may end up not making a dent for one reason or another, the fact that they are there means that the recent turn in films to complete garbage may not just be a form of vengeance.

It might be a glorified witch hunt.

Right now it is hard to imagine that things would ever change and that conservatives could be free to speak plainly without fearing blacklisting by Hollywood. With Warner Brothers reportedly preparing to no longer put films on DVD and Disney preparing to do the same, starting in Australia, it looks like Mr. Anderson’s article favors the revenge theory as well. If DVD sales were down in 2005 and are reportedly in the tank due to streaming at present, it looks like Hollywood is either taking streaming for granted as the way to the future…

…or they want no one entertained, if the audience refuses to accept the drek poured out into theaters and insist is “entertainment.”

Is there hope? To quote Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings, there is always hope. But hope doesn’t mean folding one’s hands and praying really hard. It also does not mean wishing that things will go back to normal. As the saying goes, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. To make the hope worthwhile, one must work for it.

Buying superhero media from independent authors at the same time one purchases material produced by the Big Two that was actually worth a tinker’s dam is a good strategy. When Hollywood and the rest manage to exhaust the trend in superhero stories, as they did with Westerns, the tales will go underground. We cannot afford to forget them or where they came from, so we should preserve them while we can.

At the same time, we need to plant seeds for the future that will reinvigorate the genre. These will be independent works – some of which you can find reviewed here at Upstream – that will help keep the ground fertile and bring new ideas to the table, ideas the Big Two won’t be able to play with even if they are restored somewhere down the line. Louis L’Amour, William W. Johnstone, Peter Grant, Jim Christina, and others have kept the Western genre alive through books. If Hollywood regains some sanity in the next twenty years, it might start turning those novels into films and even television shows again.

Fans of superheroes need to keep an eye on the long game in the same way. This means that they also need to be ready and quick to grab the DVDs of their favorite superhero films, tv series, etc., along with DVDs of other series they enjoy. Without a record of what inspired those who wrote the stories they love, they and the writers already working on reseeding the genre aren’t going to be able to rebuild it better in the future.

That is really what this battle is about, because if one cuts a man off from his past he can direct that man’s present and even his future. Archetypes ground and guide fiction, and this grounding for fiction serves people in “real life” as well. Not only writers but everyday people find the sturdy guide of archetypes helpful by showing them they are not alone. That their history – transmitted through song and story as much as through fact – can show them where to go, how to get there, and what to avoid.

Without that guide life is much harder than it might be. So, make certain to grab as many waymarkers as you can. Pray, hope, don’t worry, and fight back with your wallet so independents like those of us here at Upstream Reviews can reseed the ground and make it fertile for other writers now and in the future.

The only way to lose is not to fight. So: “Avengers! ASSEMBLE!”