Go Woke; Go Broke

Go woke; go broke.

Hollywood is now putting that pithy aphorism to the test. And apparently, its rage for woke content; its effort to become the propaganda organ of the left, has not been working out very well. Hollywood adopted wokeness with a vengeance, and now the marketplace is passing judgment.

So argues Joel Kotkin in a City Journal essay (via Maggie’s Farm).

After a decade of rapid growth, the nation’s media and entertainment complex is facing retrenchment and, perhaps, a necessary reappraisal. Firms are consolidating. Workers are being laid off at Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, CBS, and other production houses. News media firms like CNN, Gannet, and Buzzfeed are planning similar actions. In 2022, stocks in media companies lost $500 billion in value, and stocks in tech firms, increasingly big players in entertainment and news, suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion.

Of course, Hollywood is run by people who are attuned to ideological fads. Right now, they are riding such fads into the side of a mountain:

Meantime, much of the established media see their primary mission not as informing or entertaining but propagating ideologies. Yet this shift, executives know, is not sustainable according to the most critical metric—profits. “I think in the end no one much cares about politics but they do care about money,” one well-placed executive suggests. “People know that sex and violence sell better than political lectures. In the end, if you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

No small part of the problem lies in the quality-- or lack of same-- of the arts majors produced by our leading colleges and universities.

The vast overproduction of arts majors has flooded the market and made access to jobs more dependent on personal connections. Costing an average of $100,000 each, MFAs may be overwhelmingly left-wing, but they are also poorly compensated, with salaries paying on average just $67,000 annually. This creeping credentialism presents a powerful barrier to working-class entrants, notes the Guardian. Today, unabashed “nepo babies” increasingly dominate, while opportunities shrink for those lacking the proper bloodlines or expensive credentials.

So, Hollywood insiders have learned to hold their audience in contempt. Their audience reacts by not going to the movies.

By contrast, today’s award-winning films seem largely chosen for their appeal to insiders and reflect ignorance of or contempt for much of their potential audience. Indeed, many movies considered Oscar material today have gross sales worth less than the cost of a “modest” Beverly Hills mansion.

Exception made for superhero movies aiming at adolescent, postliterate audiences:

Hollywood now makes most of its money from superhero movies well-suited to a postliterate audience (though the Marvel franchise may be losing steam). Meantime, tastemakers increasingly marginalize the great films of the past because of their lack of minority or female representation. 

Of course, network executives believe in what they are doing, and embrace wokeness as good for business. And yet, the marketplace has had another idea:

Corporate America claims that wokeness is good for business, but there’s little evidence for that claim. As film critic Michael Medved has suggested, the media have been losing touch with much of America for at least three decades, but the problem seems to have reached a breaking point. Writing off huge audiences, like young white males or, more broadly, people with conservative values, turns out not to be the best way to grow your market.

In the world of television news, CNN has been imploding, as has network news; Fox News has been taking its audience:

It all points to a hunger among Americans for a return to a shared culture and history—the same one that would-be cultural arbiters want to abandon. On the news side, CNN has been most emblematic of the cultural disconnect. As the network has pressed on with its Donald Trump obsession and political correctness well past 2020, its ratings have collapsed, forcing it to attempt a course correction by expelling progressive agitators like Brian Stelter and Jeff Zucker. Under new Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav, CNN and its parent company appear to be attempting to move toward the center, pulling the plug on the CNN+ news service and cancelling a politically correct Batgirl movie that bombed with test audiences.

All things considered, the marketplace has had a say in the matter and the marketplace has voted thumbs down to the new woke content. There is only so much market space for people who hate the country.