Reagan Movie Will Test the Box Office with Conservative Audiences

This is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime – a flattering portrayal of Ronald Reagan. All of the time I’ve been going to the movies, the Left side of the political aisle had almost complete control of the message. That might not have been true in the 1970s and maybe in the early 80s but by the 90s it was most definitely true and in the last 20 years, there is no difference between the Democratic Party and Hollywood.

Jimmy Kimmel is hosting both the Oscars and a Joe Biden/Barack Obama/Julia Roberts/George Clooney publicity event. The Obamas have a producing deal on Netflix. John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert are cozy inside the tent of the Democratic Party, which means they’re also in bed with Big Pharma, the FBI and all of the other institutions they once railed against. It’s kinda wild to see.

But that is how things were during the last Fourth Turning too, back in the late 1940s and into the 1950s when Ronald Reagan was an actor. There was a direct effort to block Communism the way the Left now believes they are blocking racism, bigotry, etc. That made it political and made Hollywood the government’s business. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Well, Hollywood all but collapsed now under the weight of their own ideology or dogma. It consumed them, essentially, and even now, there are so many of them still worried about whether or not there is enough representation for women in Hollywood.  What they’ve lost is the free market. The last two generations, millennials and Gen-Z don’t have as much interest in Hollywood – not by big numbers, not like it used to be.  They’re far more interested in the fast-moving Big Tech industry. TikTok is far more entertaining than anything Hollywood can put out and it’s just regular people making their own videos. The algorithm takes care of the rest.

The clucking school-marm vibe doesn’t suit Hollywood all that well. No one likes to be told how to live and what to think by the richest people in the world, especially now. Yet, Hollywood continues to make movies that are meant to be textbooks on how everyone should see the world. It has led to a bottleneck across the board. It’s like skit night at the Scientology center.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the Conservatives will bring back the box office either, not in this economy where most of them can’t afford to fill up their gas tanks, let alone drop money on a movie. Having spent the last four years of my life getting to know that world in a way I’d never had – it was one big mystery to me for decades — I know that Ronald Reagan is their hero. On my side, we always hated him. We hated him because he was a Conservative and an actor. We used the same disgust to talk about him then as we do to talk about Trump. The difference is that technology turned our talking into a massive campaign of dehumanization, at the very least.

The Reagan film will be attacked by Hollywood because it appears to be a positive look at the man rather than a major takedown for his stance on gay marriage or his neglect when it came to the AIDS epidemic. The Republicans have changed in that way, though they’re still not fully on board with how the Left has evolved into the LGBTQIA+ clubhouse. There is no doubt they’re not on board with that.

I’m skeptical that Reagan will make Sound of Freedom money. Dennis Quaid does have one foot in the world of Conservatives, though. I’ve seen him pop up on talk shows. And we know Jon Voight does too. How much that will drive people out of their homes and into the movie theaters is an open question. I guess it’s worth a try.

What I see happening now are movies Hollywood thinks Conservatives would like, like faith-based movies. But really, they’re just like everyone else. They like GOOD movies. Don’t we all? Movies that reflect what the majority experiences in life. That is what has fled. Hollywood reflects the loud minority, not the silent majority. I personally think that they lost their audience after 2020 when they sacrificed telling good stories for presenting themselves as good Puritans. But what do I know?

The people who follow the Cannes Film Festival, those who write reviews and attend festivals, don’t reflect the taste of the majority most of the time. Every so often, the two collide.  One thing I know for sure is that the more the critics and the Left attack the Reagan movie, the more it will make Conservatives want to go see it.