Tag: Movie Business

A Review of ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ picking America over the illusions of globalism

For me, movies at the theater have always been measurements of social and political life. What films are made and what people vote on at the box office to see are often accurate predictors of what life will be three or four years away. For instance, I pointed out many of the woke problems that Hollywood would have in the pre-pandemic period where they got caught playing along with liberal politics only to nearly destroy their entire industry. As leftists, they were suckered and played to the future aims of Larry Fink and the Desecrators of Davos goals of global domination through the back door of finance. It was so bad that it has damaged the Disney Company in profound ways that will likely never recover. So it’s not enough for me to just say that the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is good, which it is. I’ve listened to all the reviews at this point, and I haven’t heard one yet that didn’t think the movie wasn’t spectacular. It was great, spectacular, wonderful, fun, and energetic; it was all kinds of great things. But there’s a bigger story here that everyone seems to miss, which is really the most critical factor. Top Gun in 2022 was noticeably, almost unapologetically, not “woke,” and that declaration was rewarded in huge ways at the box office. The film made $160 million domestically over Memorial Day weekend. It brought in an additional $139 million globally in all the other markets, giving it a roughly $300 million total in its first weekend. What does that mean? Well, people who don’t usually go to movies went to see this film, and it reveals the nature of an untapped market that Hollywood has ignored as they attempted to trade dollars for ESG scores. But this movie was tossing that measure out the window and going back to what worked, which is a significant decision.

Hey, I come from the 80s, where Hollywood used to make movies like Top Gun every week, and there was a new top 40s song released every Friday, or so it seemed. It was a rich culture where Ronald Reagan was president, and everything we saw and heard wasn’t tied to some political or social message like things are now. I had been looking forward to this new Top Gun movie since 2019 when it was supposed to come out in the summer of 2020. But that was interrupted obviously by the “pandemic,” which shut down movie theaters all across the country, and it looked for a while as if movie theaters would not survive to ever allow Top Gun the sequel to release.   Once they missed their 2020 release window, they might not have ever recovered it, so the movie has been held up for release for over two years, and a lot has changed over that period. Hollywood obviously was targeted by radical leftist globalists early in the process, going back to the 1960s. However, film executives still measured their success in dollars and cents, so that impact didn’t really hit the industry hard until Larry Fink and the gang started putting ESG scores to the film industry to secure financing for projects that would be the early formula for all corporate America after the 2008 housing bubble collapse and the start of the Obama presidency. After that, movies made a transition to hide the fact that they were pushing away domestic audiences and hiding the new numbers in global markets that were hoping to trade China for America, the way most corporations have been assuming would be the reality in every industry, from steel production to microchip manufacturing. 

Many have come to understand what I have been saying about the pandemic from the beginning, that it was always a fake crisis created by world governments in service to the Desecrators of Davos at the World Economic Forum, who wanted to push an economic change state that would give them control over the money flow of the world. Movies like Top Gun, which Paramount Pictures had already produced, were already done, and they were trying to adjust to this new market economy. They weren’t sure where their future audience would be and what kind of movies they would want to see. To appeal to the China movie market, the filmmakers had even taken off Maverick’s flight jacket the Taiwanese flag so as not to make the Chinese upset with the recognition. But fans of the movie noticed this in the previews and lashed out. So by the time the film was released, Paramount had put the flag of Taiwan back on Maverick’s jacket and pretty much threw caution to the wind. And what ended up on screen by release day in 2022 was an unapologetically American film, and it paid off big time for Paramount Studios. A bluff had been called in the world, and ironically, Paramount Studios was rejecting the premise of the World Economic Forum. They will go down in history as one of the first American companies to do so. The money for most economic activity is in the United States. Here was a studio essentially rejecting globalism and all its illusions for the gold of a domestic audience, and that is the biggest story of Top Gun: Maverick. And because of it, many other American companies are going to follow.

I call it the American Sniper market, which Clint Eastwood obviously revealed in the popular movie, the hidden Trump voters, the MAGA movement that people see on television waiting for President Trump to show up in Nebraska for a speech six hours ahead of time. Paramount Studios had obviously learned something from their popular streaming show, Yellowstone, that the actual money to be made in movies was from traditional American audiences. And they allowed Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer to make the movie that was pro-America the way they wanted. So what Top Gun: Maverick became was not just a throwback to the 1980s but an American flag-wrapped sentimental journey into the glories of American life that communicated to the world all the elements of American exceptionalism that the Desecrators of Davos wanted to destroy. And it put it on full display, which was remarkable. The last 15 minutes of the movie were quite audacious, especially to the way the world’s sensibilities are, especially in markets like London, Paris, and the Middle East. It was the kind of exceptionalism that only Americans would understand, and they certainly supported it by flocking to the movies in mass numbers to see it. And boy, was it worth it. I have not seen a better ending in film since the 1980s. Those last 15 minutes were the best since then and were quite remarkable. And it wasn’t by accident. Tom Cruise and the filmmakers knew what they were doing, and they put it all on film. Top Gun: Maverick was a special movie, not just in what ended up on the screen, but in what it says about the strength of American culture after one of the darkest periods the human race has ever experienced, a global takeover by the technocrats for world domination, starting with arts and entertainment. And Hollywood oddly chose the American people, the Trump-voting public, which was a bit of a surprise. Shockingly at the start of the movie, before the story even happened, Tom Cruise thanked the audience for coming back to the movie theater and the proclamation that they made this movie for them. And that he hoped they’d enjoy it. In other words, it was Tom Cruise asking for forgiveness on behalf of Hollywood. Which, based on the box office numbers, they were willing to do. And in that effort, we have just had a glimpse of the future, and it says many great things that are about to unfold.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a Fun Movie, but had terrible, communist politics from the Wanda Group

We are supposed to function under the assumption that politics and entertainment are separate, and that we shouldn’t talk about politics. Yet, with the last two Legendary Entertainment monster film releases, first Kong: Skull Island and now this 2019 release of Godzilla: King of the Monsters the films are about nothing less than communist propaganda which is to be expected after Legendary was bought up by the Chinese Wanda Group in 2016. In the case of this second Godzilla film, Warner Bros. distributed the film, but the contents were clearly guided by the Wanda Group and that is the way things are now in Hollywood. When it is wondered why the American domestic box office was less excited about this monster movie entry than the 2014 predecessor it is due to the massive amount of subtle collectivist propaganda contained within it. I actually lost count of how many times western culture was body slammed in the new Godzilla film and Eastern cultures propped up. So, it should be expected that the domestic total would be less than the original. I thought the Eastern collectivist rants in Kong were bad, this new Godzilla was much worse.

That’s not to say that Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a bad movie. I enjoyed it immensely. As a conservative who loves movies, I am used to not having representation in Hollywood. I enjoyed the movie for what it was, and there were some great ideas. But the politics of the movie couldn’t be ignored. It was very much the star of the show. The theme of the movie was that Eastern understandings of dragons and monsters are that society is to take their rightful place in a kind of harmony with them. Meanwhile the West always intends to slay them. The message was quite clear, East good, West bad. We are supposed to learn to live in subservience to nature not to master it. And Godzilla was a force of nature that was to be worshipped like a God.

Then again, the villains of the movie were all environmental wackos who wanted to unleash all the monsters of the world to kill off humanity and to restore nature back into balance. The film also made an argument against that type of extremism which was interesting. It reminded me of the current Chinese difficulty of accepting Hong Kong capitalism but still holding on to the premise of communism. This Godzilla film was very much a product of Chinese politics, which is to say, a mess of ideas made under the thumbprint of a very authoritarian government. The ignorance of a blissful coexistence with authoritarian regimes and nature continues to be a problem with China and their movies reflect that problem.

Back in 2014 the Godzilla film then earned around $90 million domestically during its opening weekend. This movie made only $49 million. That is a consistent decline since Kong: Skull Island headed on that downward spiral after the Wanda Group bought up Legendary. Kong was also permeated with this promotion that the hostile indigenous people of Kong’s island were no longer deranged lunatics as they had been portrayed in the past, but now they were more advanced than the science of the Western world who were portrayed as greedy and doomed to failure. Monsters like Kong and Godzilla of course are part of an older than civilization intelligence and they watch over us as if we were all pets being guarded the way we would a hamster in a cage.

With those thoughts aside, some of the best moments for me in the new Godzilla film is the confirmation that more and more, we are accepting that ancient Egypt and the Mesopotamian Valley are not the oldest cultures on earth. Our story tellers are now routinely examining much older possible origins for the human race and that is a good thing, so its not all bad in these movies, so long as you don’t care about any of the people, because they are all pretty stupid. And that held true for the original monster movies from Japan. We didn’t watch those movies for the people, but only for the monsters, and that makes these movies fun. But the politics was very distracting, and I would say that it really hurts the domestic box office in North America.

I’ll have to say that the special effects in these monster movies are so much better than the originals and they are a lot of fun if you don’t take them too seriously. But it was hard for me to turn my brain off and enjoy the monsters because the politics of Godzilla and the communist ways of China were so over-the-top. The story of symbiotic relationships after a half hour was really getting on my nerves and that is exactly the kind of thing that is hurting these films at the box office. Honestly, I want to see the next Godzilla movie about the epic fight with King Kong do well, but the films are performing well under what market predictions would have expected, largely because the films aren’t fun enough due to all the political utterances. This is what happens when we let foreign companies take over American media outlets and start bringing their dumb ideas into our culture. The movies would do great if the monsters just destroyed communist civilization and the world would be much more interested because communism to the minds of all human beings represents tyranny, and a lack of freedom of thought. Not to live in symbiosis with them, which was, and continues to be the subtle message of all these films. The “state” (Godzilla is more powerful than you. Learn to live with that power, not against it).

That is also why the mixed messages of Godzilla seeking to recover from injuries in this most recent movie at an ancient temple at the bottom of the ocean was so compelling, because even as the messages of the movie are submission to nature, Godzilla sought healing and refuge at the temple of an ancient culture that has long since died away, following the Vico Cycle that I’m always talking about. It is actually in human creation that anything happens, even for these monsters, and that is the message that the Wanda Group is continuing to miss, because they aren’t just telling a story, they are trying to propagandize their form of government and using all these cool monsters to do it.

But American audiences can smell a rat, and they weren’t in a hurry to go see a movie about communist propaganda. People like me go see the films to see great monsters battle it out and create mass carnage. But nobody wants to sit through over two hours of a communist lecture about how the world would be so much better if the West would only fall and be eaten by a bunch of 300-foot-tall creatures from the ancient past. Even though such a thing is a fantasy for the East their childish understanding about the ways of the world can’t even be buried behind the visual spectacle of the giant monsters themselves. And ultimately that is the reason Godzilla: King of the Monsters didn’t perform well at the box office. It may do well in China, but American markets see through the veil, and it certainly hurt a film that was otherwise a lot of fun and worth the money.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.