Tag: movies

The Only Way A New Indiana Jones Movie Would Be Successful: Consultants and corporate looters can’t copy success, it never works

There is a way to do it, to make more Indiana Jones movies.  There have been at least seven different people who have played Indiana Jones at some point in time, everyone from George Hall, to Corey Carrier, to Sean Patrick Flanery—even River Phoenix.  Then, of course, there are all the video games and commercial appearances where an Indiana Jones-like character is seen doing something, from amusement park rides and Coke commercials to cameos in other movies.  Unlike other franchise characters, however, Indiana Jones is different in that Harrison Ford created a particular kind of character with a timeline expectation that society will hold Disney to.  There is a nice period in the character’s timeline, from age 25 to 35, where a new actor who resembles Harrison Ford could tell all-new stories that the public would love.  Most of the best Indiana Jones movies take place within a specific 3-4 year timeline that centers on Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones in the iconic movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, a film that revolutionized the way stories are told and movies are presented.  I personally think it was the best movie ever made and that changed the value of the character created for the public forever.  The chances of doing something like that again with the same character but a different actor is impossible. I think it’s possible to make more movies after seeing how Disney and Bethesda, the video game maker, produced the latest Indiana Jones video game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.  It was a great game and a lot of fun, and it didn’t try to “reboot” Indiana Jones; it respected the timeline that people had come to know and trust.  And many actors contributed to that effort, and those are the rules of engagement.  There is a lot of talk now, halfway through 2025, that Disney wants to reboot the Indiana Jones movies.  They own the property and want to make money from it.  However, there are rules they must follow; otherwise, they will cause all kinds of social problems, just as they did with the Star Wars movies.  If they want Indiana Jones to remain valuable to the public, they’ll listen and stay respectful.

But if they think they are going to retell Raiders of the Lost Ark with a woke actor like Pedro Pascal, or even a woman, then they are out of their minds, and another Indiana Jones movie would be a disaster.  Indiana Jones is not something that can be ruined in the way that studios often do with Batman movies or James Bond stories.  There has been over 40 years of story telling from books, television, comics, video games that for that entire time held to a stringent canon timeline, and that trust has been built across many generations of fans, from kids today to their grandparents who saw the movies in the theater when they were kids.  I love the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular in Orlando, Florida, the stunt show that has been performed for years at Hollywood Studios. It has featured several different actors portraying Indiana Jones in that stage play.  However, the difference was that all content creators were very respectful of the original idea.  During the period I mentioned, numerous exciting stories could be told about a younger Indiana Jones as he establishes his excellent and famous reputation, which people would love to see depicted in movies.  However, those movies would require directors, producers, and musical talent as passionate about making the movies as were Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Williams, originally.  Disney thought they would get away with a reboot of Star Wars by ignoring the story canon and essentially retelling A New Hope with The Force Awakens, and people have never forgiven them for it.  They might have made some short-term cash, but they destroyed the brand, and that has cost Disney a lot.  

This is important because the character of Indiana Jones has likely been the single most valuable narrative device that has advanced the arts and sciences in the world today.  There are many people who have become scientists because of Indiana Jones and the inspiration they received from him as children, which has been very beneficial.  The value of the Indiana Jones property lies in this social motivation.  And unless Disney respects that sentiment, it will harm them in very detrimental ways, and erode the character it currently holds socially.  Indiana Jones is more than just Harrison Ford, and unless a new production is presented with the same level of commitment as those original films were, it will be rejected at the box office, just as the Star Wars movies have been.  There is an arrogance that comes from the consultant class in society, who often con their way into the motion picture studios, never figuring these things out.  And those are the voices at Disney who think they could make a movie as good as the originals were, without understanding the social consequences of destroying the public’s love of the property.   The Indiana Jones timeline is unique in that it spans from his infancy in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles to his portrayal by a 93-94-year-old man with an eye patch.  Within that timeline, there is room to make movies just as exciting as Temple of Doom and Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the stories deal with the post-college years.  However, suppose they recast and retell the stories for modern audiences with music by different composers, cinematography that fails to capture the spirit, and scripts that don’t adhere to the formula. In that case, the project will be a disaster.

I think Disney should leave it all alone and let it be what it is.  They’ll make more money off Indiana Jones if they allow it to stay valuable in people’s consciousness.  However, Disney is not filled with creative people; it is essentially run by consultants who choose to live by copying what they think is successful and trying to pass it off as their own.  And it never works well, and it certainly won’t work with Indiana Jones.  So, with all the talk about Disney developing another actor to play Indiana Jones in a new movie, I would advise them to proceed with great caution.  I’d see the film if they were respectful to the established timeline.  But if they want to put a minority character in the role instead of a white guy, and change elements of Indiana Jones for a more modern audience, then it will be a disaster.  And I’m only writing this now in the hope of keeping them from making that big mistake.  But I don’t have much faith that they’ll listen, and will destroy this as they have so many other things in life, and the impact of that in the world is very significant. It matters more than people think it does; we’re talking about the way that humans create reality for themselves through story and narrative devices, and Indiana Jones emerged as a necessity for human consciousness that was more than entertaining.  Disney has been warned, so we’ll see what they do.  I’d like to see it work.  I think there is an actor out there who could carry the torch of Indiana Jones during an exciting period that audiences would accept.  However, short of that, it would be best to leave it alone, as the social impact of changing the value with new content would be devastating in ways that most people cannot measure.  What I have said is the only way that it could be done because all other methods would be very destructive and unnecessary. People are pretty forgiving as long as they know they can trust a story not to change on them. And that’s true with everything in life. People can come and go, but people want to know that the story stays the same.

Rich Hoffman

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The Hidden Benefit of ‘Godzilla Minus One’: Understanding Budgets and Costs Imposed by organized labor and anti-capitalist Activities

There is another essential attribute of the new Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus One, at the heart of the global populist movement that is important to talk about.  Probably the most important thing in the world that has lingered always in the background and is now apparent for all to see.  In talking about how good Godzilla Minus One is, the obvious question everyone has is how could Japan produce a movie like this when the same kind of blockbuster produced by Disney in America would cost 300 million dollars.  The average moviegoer could watch Godzilla Minus One, Indiana Jones, and the Dial of Destiny and think they are of the same quality in every category: acting, special effects, music, writing, scale of production, everything.  So how was Godzilla Minus One so profitable, whereas all the current Hollywood productions or movies anywhere in the world these days, especially where the financial influence of the World Economic Forum has its hands in the production, are not able to compete?  Well, this is something I have been talking about for many decades and I said this was going to happen to the film industry for many years.  Unionized labor has destroyed the financial models of movie production, shown dramatically when a foreign film like Godzilla Minus One is shown in a movie theater along with the latest blockbusters produced by Hollywood and other markets.  Because of many market conditions unique to recovery from COVID lockdowns, theater owners are desperate to show anything that the public might want to see.  Just two or three years ago, a movie like Godzilla Minus One would not have played in a movie theater in the United States.  People would never see it, but in today’s market, where Hollywood products can’t keep up with demand, a movie like Godzilla Minus One gets a chance to be seen, which has burst down the door to an issue that can only be revealed by direct competition.   

Much of the way we are told about success in the world has been shaped by labor unions attached to the film industry, the mainstream media, and government reporting.  The ultimate solution to broken budgets and general performance everywhere in the world, no matter the product, is to make labor unions illegal, especially in government work and situations that prevent a competitive environment.  America has gone through just this sort of thing when it comes to the car industry, or most sectors of manufacturing that can’t compete with cheap foreign labor.  Well, it is not that the labor is cheap in foreign markets, but instead that the communist labor unions, all of which were formed out of elements of Marxism, have driven up the cost of labor not just in the increases in headcount but in how much each one actually costs.  When the government reports the numbers, as they do in American and European markets, of course, they will give a spin that suits them, not necessarily one that is reflected in reality.  Then, when the trade journals are either in unions themselves or are very sympathetic, the coverage has been how much studios spend on movies to make, not on their quality.  This has certainly been the case with Disney where to satisfy their radical employee base, all connected to labor unions, the approach has been to just outrun the costs, which have crippled them in 2023.  When it costs 500 million dollars to get a blockbuster out the door and into a theater, disaster is not far behind.  For a lot of these Hollywood productions, a movie budget to satisfy all the labor demands that you see at the end credits of every motion picture, 200-300 million on actually making the movie, then another 200 million in marketing to feed the machine, a film has to make a billion dollars at the box office to get into a profit category, and that just isn’t realistic, as Disney has discovered in 2023. 

Then, to make matters worse, these Disney movies have been loaded with content people don’t want to see.  The filmmaking has been lazy, and the product is lackluster when it gets to the screen.  It shows when all the people making the movie are only in it to get paid.  A film like Godzilla Minus One was created by hungry filmmakers full of passion, evident in what ended up on the screen, shocking many people.  But this is the exact reason why government reforms never happen and why budgets get wrecked in all production environments where Marxist labor unions have driven up costs and taken away the ambition of good merit from the products they produce, such as in public education in America that has become useless to most people for all the same reasons.  The labor costs too much and doesn’t do enough of what it’s supposed to.  When labor unions take over the management of an endeavor, they determine the pay rate and how many people need to be involved in the process, which then blows up all the financial attributes.  In a situation like this, where a side-by-side comparison isn’t usually available, the problem becomes apparent in the movie industry.  But this same rot is in just about every endeavor that involves money and financing, even in American intelligence agencies.  I will have some serious horror stories to provide about the CDC and how President Reagan was thinking of cutting the entire department, giving rise to Dr. Fauci’s radicalism.  Most bad things happen when lazy people seek funding not based on performance but emotion, such as fear of a new virus that can be manufactured in a lab and released from Wuhan, China.  That’s a topic all its own. 

The trick in hiding all this from the public has been to control the narrative, and the labor unions have been attached to most of the reporting.  But in 2023, because the declining Hollywood product has most abused theater owners, they have had to turn to direct competition to survive, which has set up this obvious matchup.  The same occurred when the Japanese entered the car market, and the Big Three in America found they could not compete in cost and quality because unionized labor took away competitive factors that could keep the costs down for the consumer.  Most of the problems in the world, including the CRs that Speaker Johnson is trying to work through Congress to keep the government open, are due to the outrageous costs of supporting all those expensive government employees.  Even the funding of Ukraine, which has been a topic, is to spend billions of dollars to pay for the massive administrative state government there to support this globalist employment structure.  All of them are failing under their weight; what they do for the world isn’t worth the money it costs to keep them.  Populism is rising everywhere because people would rather see Godzilla Minus One than the latest holiday offering by Disney and the other major studios.  The labor unions seek to destroy competition to justify their outrageous costs and sluggish performance.  But because of their actions, they have forced competition to overtake them to satisfy the market demands of a hungry public that wants to see a good movie, buy a nice car, or have a government that works for them and doesn’t get in the way of what society needs.  I know we are in a time when union supporters are moving toward Trump, and Trump is pro-union, and it’s not as much of a political issue for Republicans as it has been or should be.  But when you want to know why things are so expensive, why so many useless people perform the work, and how they keep their jobs underperforming constantly, the source is the Marxist labor unions that have embedded themselves in the process.  Where they aren’t, the quality and profit improve dramatically.  And if we are ever going to drain the swamp, the government unions will have to be made illegal.  And any future budget controls taken out of their hands, from the local public school to the control of the FBI and CIA.  Organized labor has destroyed them all. 

Rich Hoffman

‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ is Fantastic: The way they used to make movies, family-friendly, happy endings, and a real love for the audiance

The really good news is that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a wonderful movie. I have said it for years, and it’s certainly true here, one of the extraordinary measures of a society’s health is its box office because it tells the world what people are buying at the movie theater as an entertainment option. It accurately describes what kinds of things people really like in the world and provides a measure beyond political beliefs to the truth of public sentiment. It’s much more difficult to understand when you get into television ratings and streaming services. And I think what happened with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something that we talked about last year with the release of Top Gun: Maverick, another movie that, like Indiana Jones, was delayed for many years in production before being released to the public. I’m sure that Steven Spielberg will deny it, along with the diversity crew at Disney, but clearly, what happened with Indiana Jones and the newly directed James Mangold Dial of Destiny is that they learned some important lessons with Top Gun, one of the first big hits coming out of Covid. And as a result, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a fantastic film that seeks to be more like Raiders of the Lost Ark than the more slapstick Last Crusade. If you understand Indiana Jones like I do, and many people who have been with this character for over four decades now, and have watched all the television shows, read all the books, read the comics, played the video games, this Indiana Jones movie does a great job of showing a very complete character in a way that Hollywood has never had to deal with. And the movie pulls it off spectacularly and very respectfully. As only Harrison Ford could play, this is a very complex character, more so than most reviewers could wrap their minds around, and the result is something extraordinary with a very happy, family-friendly ending. I don’t think there was a single curse word in the entire film, and it didn’t have anything woke in it. It was an offering from Disney that was begging for forgiveness from the movie-going public.

What was clear to me was that this new director, James Mangold, loves Indiana Jones as many of us do, and he understands the character and his significance to actual history. I’ve also said many times that Indiana Jones has done more for science than almost any other resource in the history of the world. The publishing industry has really flourished because of Indiana Jones, not by direct correlation, but the hunger for the kind of content that is often discussed in Indiana Jones films and in Dial of Destiny; a lot is going on, things that work at many different levels that were built around a movie with a true love for the world of Indiana Jones and the way that fiction carries over into fact. I would go so far as to call Dial of Destiny as brilliant and ambitious while being very safe in the continuation of the character. As many have discussed, Indiana Jones is an old man in this movie. Harrison Ford is 80 years old, so we aren’t talking about a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type mixed with Humphrey Bogart as Raiders of the Lost Ark was often characterized back when it was first released. This is something unique and entirely of its own making that now has its own history that everything is measured from. And some of the real Indiana Jones types that are out there in the world doing great work, clearly inspired by these movies over the years, like Graham Hancock, the Joe Rogan Show, and even the religious writer Jonathan Cahn have shown that most of the thrill of Indiana Jones isn’t a youthful man fighting bad guys and escaping under speeding trucks. Over the years, the greatest thrills in Indiana Jones movies are more intellectual than physical, and that’s why Dial of Destiny works so well with an old Indiana Jones doing what only he could.

Instead, I would have Disney not made this Indiana Jones movie before I saw it. I raised my children on these movies; now, my grandchildren are tremendous fans. I enjoyed Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as an ambitious film that many didn’t like because it stepped out of the formula established in the first three films that were all released during Reagan-era politics in the 1980s. As much as people didn’t like the movie, and that Steven Spielberg didn’t seem to want to make it, there were a lot of positive things that came from that fourth film, such as the History Channel’s show Ancient Aliens, which culminated in the lives of great writers like Zecharia Sitchin and Erich von Daniken. These Indiana Jones movies open the broader market for these kinds of unique adventures into history, such as The Gold of the Gods so wonderfully portrays. Indiana Jones may have started as an adventurous playboy grave robber in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But he evolved quickly into the pent-up frustrations of George Lucas himself, a very smart person who wanted to live the lifetimes of dozens of the most brilliant people in all of human history, that over the years was attempted to flush out in all forms of media available to tell these stories. This movie, Dial of Destiny, does all that while still managing to keep Indiana Jones the person we have always known. He shoots guns in this movie, which I thought Disney would avoid altogether. There are fistfights that are not unbelievable for an 80-year-old man. And the development of Helena Shaw was respectful, fun, and dashing. I would easily see a movie that featured her as a main character. Played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she was a fun character, and I could see a sequel to Dial of Destiny where she is the feature, and Indiana Jones makes a guest appearance to help the movie along. This might be the last Indiana Jones movie, but I don’t think it will be the last Indiana Jones appearance by Harrison Ford, based on how this movie ended. 

It will be interesting to see how much business this movie does for Disney. Disney has severe brand damage now with their commitment to woke politics. But this movie is a clear peace offering to the ticket-buying public to help repair that brand. To invite people to come back to the theme parks. This is Bob Iger attempting to get Disney back in the public’s good graces. At least this film deserves to be in the billion-dollar club. But the Disney brand has made some people very, very angry. Yet this movie is as good as movies can be made and does not destroy a character the world has fallen in love with. And it leaves the door open to a happy ending for him, given that Indiana Jones is old. And that John Williams, who does a fantastic job with the musical score, as usual, is now in his 90s. This happy movie gives fans what they are looking for, and I couldn’t recommend it more. This is the kind of film that movie theaters were made for, that we used to get all the time in the 80s and 90s, but are now very rare. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is something special, and it was wonderful to see that movies like this can still be made. 

Rich Hoffman

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Woke Politics is Killing Disney: We are not “global citizens” we are Americans–the world follows

You can’t kill Indiana Jones. But that is the word from test screenings or previews that are coming out of rough cuts of the movie. And it wouldn’t surprise me that they would try. In this new ESG world for which Disney is offering itself as a leader, killing off an 80s representative of toxic masculinity with a time travel story that ends with Indiana Jones sacrificing himself to the next generation female woke hero is consistent with everything that Kathleen Kennedy has done since she became president of Lucasfilm in 2013. I’m sure George Lucas had good intentions, but he never expected this from his former company and the brands he worked hard to build over many years. For all the reasons he hated corporate filmmaking while trying to finish his famous film, THX-1138, now he is seeing that, left in the hands of corporate control, they could screw up anything. Filmmaking is not a collaborative enterprise, even though that’s what they tell everyone in film school. It is a top-down driver of unique minds who tell other people what to do to obtain a strong vision that audiences can then enjoy. The previous Indiana Jones movies were all from the mind of George Lucas, and that’s what people wanted to see. And what will be interesting about Indiana Jones 5, which is getting some press with about six months until the release in June of 2023, is how different it will be without George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. You can put the same actors, music, and color pallets into a movie, but it won’t be Indiana Jones without George Lucas. And clearly, Kathy Kennedy didn’t understand anything; she thought these popular movies would be vehicles for woke politics and would hold up. But ultimately, audiences will reject them.

I thought the trailer preview looked pretty good, but the problem was it confirmed all the rumors that also indicate that Indiana Jones dies at the end. So like the ESG values of BlackRock have indicated, the way to give audiences a last look at an 80s icon of heroics and toxic masculinity is to erase him from history and to replace him with a woman. Without question, Kathy Kennedy would sign up for that. Whether they stick with that ending after the terrible online reaction is left to be determined. Are they that radical at Disney these days? Well, of course, they are! They are crazy, so I don’t have much hope for the new movie, just as I don’t for the new Avatar film coming up. People don’t want to go to the movies to see woke propaganda and gay rights messages. They want to be free of that, which is one of Indiana Jones’s appeals throughout movie history. But the ESG values of stakeholder capitalism are all about social governance, and Disney has dedicated itself to that leadership, and it is showing in their stock. They have brought back Bob Iger as the CEO to help them make the transition from value-driven content to the traditional way to make good movies; they earn a lot of money at the box office, and Disney is rewarded with a lot of cash. But over the last few years, those values have changed, at least on the corporate side. Driven by Larry Fink and the Klaus Schwab types at the World Economic Forum, stakeholder capitalism is the new value system and a global currency. And Disney expects Bob Iger to navigate that new world in a beneficial way to show other corporations how the stakeholder model will work. So there is much more going on here than Disney killing off one of the most beloved screen heroes of all time. It’s about replacing the value system that western civilization has for this new global view of the world.

But people are people, and what they value won’t change. As Disney has learned with its release of Strange World, which feature a gay plotline for the primary characters, and the weak showing for Black Panther II Wakanda Forever, wokness doesn’t excite people. There was a lot made of Bob Iger’s statements about taking politics out of Disney to repair the brand a bit, but what didn’t get talked about much was that he went on to say that he didn’t believe that Disney was very political. Rather, he saw much of what they were doing as the responsibilities of a “global citizen.” He said that Disney has been telling stories for over 100 years and takes its responsibility to be good global citizens very seriously. And to the ESG values of the World Economic Forum, gender-bending is much more important than box office votes. So Disney is deep into it now. They are off on their projections, and stockholders still measure value in dollars, not ESG scores. And that will continue as we move into 2023, and they find out Avatar won’t make the kind of money they are hoping because nobody wants to waste more than 2 hours on a climate change lecture about nature being more powerful than imagination and productivity. And if Disney sticks with the previews of Indiana Jones that have him being killed, that will kill Disney in ways they can’t even imagine right now. They thought Crystal Skull damaged the Indiana Jones brand. Killing Harrison Ford and replacing him with a woman just isn’t going to work. 

Oh, I wouldn’t mind a female type of Indiana Jones story. I loved Lara Croft until they gave her a stupid bow and arrow instead of the double guns she used to shoot. There is nothing wrong with strong female characters but much wrong with wokeness. And Lara Croft went woke years ago. And yes, the people who want to bring down western civilization and big media companies who have told lots of great stories selling western civilization to the world want to see it all come to an end. Disney these days is a woke company that has permanently damaged its brand. Of course, China and its partners at the World Economic Forum are happy to have that competition removed. But the world is truly at a loss. Yet, people will get over it and move on. They won’t care if there is never a Star Wars movie again. They can live without Indiana Jones. If this movie Indy 5 goes woke the way reports say it is, it will fail, and Disney will further slide down the ESG pit of doom. And Bob Iger won’t be able to save it. Disney was already slipping when he left as CEO just a few weeks before the Covid lockdowns hit in 2020. He knew all about it from the role-playing that went on at Event 201 at the end of 2019. Disney was always built on a house of cards of value that depended entirely on the public sentiment to enjoy the movies. And if Disney isn’t making movies people want to see and instead is committed to woke politics that nobody wants to see, then everything will dry up for them, and their stock will tank. And ESG isn’t going to catch, leaving Bob Iger and the gang holding all the losses for history to remember. People will paint this Indy 5 from their minds, just as many have Crystal Skull. And they’ll live their lives. But Disney will not survive, and Bob Iger looks like he’s going to dig in, much to his own demise. The preview confirmed the rumors, and that has already damaged the brand.

Rich Hoffman

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The Liberalism Behind ‘Avatar Way of Water’: It won’t turn out the way Disney hopes

Usually, the people reading the tea leaves on television and radio get it all wrong because the leaves they are reading aren’t the right ones. I would suggest a different approach: to read the leaves of media currents themselves and to study what the public likes and doesn’t like as a much more accurate measure. And to that effect, much of where the world is going by way of populism, corporate control, and the way many treacherous characters hide their acts of malice behind liberal causes are on a crash course with destiny and collapsed diabolical intent. With that in mind, I’m talking about the new Avatar film, Way of Water, as if the world is being steered back to nature, into some oriental wisdom from the ancient past to reveal to our modern selves how far we have fallen from the tree. Because the tea leaves that Jim Cameron, the director and writer of the film, and the parent company of the new Avatar films, Disney, are reading the tea leaves of a wilted plant from the past that has long died. The world is a much different place from when the first Avatar movie came out, which earned a record-breaking 2 billion dollars at the box office. I was doing some work with Hollywood then, specifically with RealD 3D, so I knew what many producers and distributers wanted to do with 3D to convince movie goers to put their butts in seats instead of staying home watching movies on their magnificent home theater systems. And the first Avatar movie benefited from a good story, a great filmmaker, and outstanding cutting-edge 3D technology. But people at that time were comfortable with their lives; they trusted that America would always be there and that government wasn’t nearly as corrupt as we know it to be now. And the World Economic Forum was something that nobody knew much of anything about. People lived their lives and were open to strange ideas about environmentalism because there was room in a comfortable life to accept such ideas, so long as they could go home in their gas-powered car and had a full bank account. Church on Sunday put their minds to ease about what would happen tomorrow. 

It will be interesting to watch how audiences accept this new Avatar movie, released over a decade after the first. Disney hopes it will make a lot of money like the first, but I think it will be far short of the original. As will the subsequent films that are already planned will be. People will go see the movie for the same reason they are waiting in line for more than two hours to ride the magnificent ride at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom because they want to step out of their lives and into a unique experience. The Avatar ride at Animal Kingdom in Florida is one of the most outstanding technical achievements I have ever seen for human imagination. The whole Avatar land there is a monument to what the human imagination can produce, and I think it’s great. But, the cat is out of the bag now on Disney and Jim Cameron, who are both much more liberal than they used to be, and the country of America isn’t that liberal. The Desecrators of Davos “back to nature” message is not the priority for the people living in the world. With an overt message of environmentalism versus technical achievement, humans tend to cheer on the products of their minds, not the pagan superstitions of the past, which is the true intent of liberalism and its desire to reset the Vico Cycle into anarchy and back to a theocracy where nature is worshipped as the modern Earth Goddess. The first Avatar walked a very fine line between overt lectures about the terrors of corporate greed and the majesty of nature’s wisdom. And that redeeming message is the heart of the Desecrators of Davos plan to unite all the corporations of the world behind their pagan religions and to drag everyone in the world who uses those products with them to the Liberal World Order priorities for existence. 

It’s not that the new Avatar film The Way of Water will be boring. I’m sure that after ten years of making the movie, Jim Cameron has done some great things in film. But the message itself, this Dances with Wolves in space concept of rejecting technology for the idea that we are all cells within the body of something greater than ourselves, is a political message that people don’t want to hear. It’s been crammed down their throats for a long time now. Since the first Avatar movie in 2009, we’ve been through the Obama presidency and all the terrible things that happened as a result. That led people to vote for Trump in 2016. And when the great America that came from the Trump administration was taken from people in 2020, the Desecrators of Davos through their election tampering, especially with Facebook, they gave us Joe Biden, an embarrassment who has declared war on fossil fuels and represents the forces which essentially want to create Pandora, the land from the Avatar films, here on earth and as a political platform. Through public relations trickery, they can attempt to show that elections are close in America, just as in other places worldwide, such as Brazil. But in reality, people do not vote against their best interests, and this evidence shows in other aspects of our culture the kind of things people choose to be entertained by.

And that’s ultimately the problem with the new Avatar films; they are essentially the Biden political platform, the new religion of the globalists around the world of earth worship, presented as entertainment behind top-level special effects and all the magic a movie theater experience can provide. There are movies scheduled all the way through Avatar 5 that I think are getting way out over their skis. If they were just entertainment, people might enjoy them. But if you have read Klaus Schwab’s books from the World Economic Forum, you would see that Avatar and Disney’s production of them is essentially the world they want to get to hear on earth; it’s a political platform and their goals for the transformation of the world. They want us all to strip down naked, make love to our animal powers, get right with nature, and bend to its will, like the characters in Avatar do. And because of that, I think people will reject the films aside from their initial spectacle and the lack of anything else to see at a movie theater. I predict that all the hard work that Jim Cameron has put into these films will ultimately be lost on a public that is sick of the politics of liberalism being pushed into their lives from every direction, especially in their entertainment. And the results will be embarrassing for Disney and Cameron in the end. It is one thing to visit the Avatar World at Animal Kingdom and to marvel at the technical achievements that essentially attempt to make a primitive life great again in the minds of the Desecrators of Davos. But when you get tired of it, you can go back to your nice hotel, get a nice meal, sit by a very modern pool, and enjoy the world of technology and business with all the audacity that American capitalism can provide. But the point of the Avatar films, and the liberalism behind them, is to get rid of that comfort and to return mankind to a primitive state, so there is nowhere else to go. And people don’t like that message at all, and it will show in the box office results and, ultimately, Disney’s stock.   

Rich Hoffman

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Beetlejuice and the Head-Shrinker: Standing and fighting instead of getting up and leaving

What’s going on with conservatives? Aren’t they all like Mitch McConnell asks the modern progressive loser working in government, bowing to the feet of the United Nations, and has always had globalism as the sovereign idea for the future of humanity? No, they were never like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, or Liz Cheney. The Cheney family, the Bush family, the McCains, the Portmans, and other similar political figures have been propped up to represent the conservative side without actually representing anybody but liberals. And there aren’t that many real liberals in the world; not once people started really talking to each other. Instead, Republicans are more like the witch doctor at the end of the great, funny movie from the 80s, Beetlejuice. You might remember when Beetlejuice was in the afterlife at the end of the movie, and he had a long wait in the receptionist lobby for his appointment with the everlasting. But next to him is a head-shrinker who will be called next. So Beetlejuice steals his number by tricking him into cutting in line. The behavior of Beetlejuice in that movie is how I see Democrats, takers, ostentatious imposers of time and money upon the world around them. And Americans, real Americans, are tired of them and want to do to them what that head-shrinking witch doctor did to Beetlejuice upon realizing that the guy had just stolen our ticket. The witch doctor simply sprinkles some dust over Beetlejuice’s head; just like that, his head shrinks to close out the movie with a funny ending. That’s where America is with globalism and the sorry, loser Republicans who have helped it along.

This issue hasn’t been addressed before in America because conservatives have always responded to liberalism by moving away. You can see the trend clearly if you have watched real estate values over the years. Where liberals move to, conservatives move away to get away from them. It’s even more evident in crowded movie theaters. You might notice that few people ever choose to sit next to someone else if they don’t have to. Americans like their space and their personal freedoms, so when given the option to turn the other cheek and leave, they usually do. Conservatives never choose to sit down next to a heavily tattooed, blue-haired liberal covered in body piercings and to start conversing with them. Instead, they’ll do what they need to do to be as far away as possible from them. When those types of people start moving from one place to another, conservatives pack up and leave. Only now, we live in a time where there really isn’t any place to go. Traveling a lot around the country, you can see this condition  most apparent in places like Austin, Texas. Liberals have been encouraged by radical progressives like George Soros and many like him to invade conservatives in their home areas and attempt to convert them to liberalism or make them move away so that liberals can take over the local government in those areas. Those areas then become blue areas, states, or cities, and then start the process of personal destruction because Democrats take over those governments. 

Now there isn’t anywhere to go. People have moved, turned the other cheek, and are now red with the slaps. And Republicans have not represented them the way they sold themselves. Real Republicans are tired of having Beetlejuice continuously stealing their number and cutting in line, playing them for suckers. So they are fighting back; they are turning toward Trump, who fights back the way they want conservatives always to do. And that is why voters are picking Trump-backed candidates in the upcoming election over traditional offerings. That’s why political machine families like Liz Cheney are suddenly ineffective. They never represented conservatives, but Democrats knew if those people were in government, it would be easy to destroy conservatives any time they wanted.

For many years people just tried their best to ignore politics and its influence over their lives. But eventually, it was just Beetlejuice and the witch doctor sitting alone in that lobby of the afterlife, and everything was going to come to a head, which is where we find ourselves now. Republicans want their party back. They don’t want to keep moving and avoiding Democrats wherever they appear. Aside from moving into space, there isn’t anywhere in the world anymore to get away from the globalist goals of Democrats, so finally, the idea of standing and fighting is part of the conservative view. Ten years ago and beyond, conservatives might have said about their liberal instigators, pray for them, wish them well. Then they would go to their homes in rural America and give themselves space to deal with Democrats, and it worked so long as they could get away from them. But not anymore. Now the Democrats are moving all over the country like the disease they are, destroying healthy tissue in government whenever possible. It’s what they do; it’s all they do.

Fortunately, there really aren’t that many Democrats, which will become very obvious if America moves to paper ballots and a one-day election as they have in France. All the early voting that Democrats want and the mail-in considerations have only opened the door for massive cheating, which has obviously been going on for a long time, and in giving the impression that Democrats were even with Republicans in real numbers among the population density. In actuality, there is only one Beetlejuice in a roomful of Republicans. There really aren’t that many loser liberals out there, which becomes apparent when you see a voting map of America where only a few blue areas show concentrated in large cities and their surrounding counties, while the rest of the nation is overwhelmingly red. In the past, conservatives would just sell their property and move to leave behind their homes to incoming Democrats. They’d move to Florida or wherever liberals weren’t and hoped to avoid dealing with Democrats in any way possible, just as they do in crowded movie theaters. But a point comes where people realize there is nowhere to go, so they are turning their need for change toward the Republican Party as a whole and replacing the kind of candidates that represent them. And that is what is at the heart of the MAGA movement. People are tired of their own version of Beetlejuice and want retaliation for Democrats always stealing their stuff. And they want to fight back, finally and fully. That means Fox News has lost its audience. The Chamber of Commerce’s view of the world has lost its grip on mass populations. And publishing is obviously making a turn; the books that are selling are not the memoirs of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as they used to be. It’s The Great Reset by Alex Jones and news about the Trump White House by Jarad Kushner. And people will go wherever Trump is on social media because they want the head-shrinker who will retaliate against Beetlejuice and defend conservative values instead of always being a sucker to liberals. Sure, there is panic among traditional media and the leaders of political parties. It’s scary to have their head shrunken by an angry conservative. But it’s the wave of the future and will just get more intense as people stop doing what they have done for years, and that is to get up and leave. When there is nowhere to go, standing and fighting are the only and next option.

Rich Hoffman

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What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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They Have Already Eaten the Pie: Steve Bannon and Titus Andronicus

“It’s too late; the bad guys have already eaten the pie.” That’s the message I left for Steve Bannon, whom I like, respect, and have been talking to a bit through text messages and on Gettr.  Steve had been reposting some of my contributions, and we have had discussions about the ground game of the populist movement. As he gets raked over the coals for the phony trial in Washington D.C., intent on destroying the populism that put Trump in the White House the first time, I am proud of what he has done. And happy to say publicly I support him and still would despite the mudslinging from CNN, who published a documentary about Bannon at 8 PM on the 17th in an obvious attempt to taint the jury in the case against the popular Warroom host. I thought the documentary fascinating. I often pay a lot of attention to the enemy’s thoughts and where they get their information. I try to see the world from the enemy’s perspective, walk in their shoes metaphorically, and understand their motivations. And with CNN, they were clearly lost as to why Steve Bannon was so popular. They were looking desperately for some way to stop Trump from running again in 2024, and their obvious hope was that perhaps if they took out Bannon, that Trump would be left dead in the water. But, the situation is much bigger than that, much bigger than Steve Bannon. And as the Bannon case for contempt of Congress goes to court and the Biden Justice Department attempts to stop the strategy of the populist movement across the world, it looks like the light is going out of their eyes as they begin to realize that Steve was just a tiny drop of water in a massive ocean of red that is coming at them from all directions. The rejection of the administrative state, the Liberal World Order, and the dreams of progressivism most expressly conveyed in the 1988 book Looking Backward were coming apart. And there was nobody to blame but themselves. 

To understand Steve Bannon, you would have to understand the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus. It is by far my favorite play by the famous English playwright, and Steve translated it to movie screens in the 90s with his Anthony Hopkins effort, Titus, which featured a whole cast of Hollywood heavyweights who told what many consider the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays. I loved the movie when I first saw it and when I found out that Steve Bannon had been the executive producer, I was a fan of him, even when he took over at Breitbart before the first Trump term. Bannon would have to really understand the role of Titus to do what he is now in the world, and I would argue that he is the real-life embodiment of the famous character. For a quick review, Titus Andronicus was known throughout Rome as their hero general. He brings to the emperor the captured queen of the Goths, whom Titus had killed her son. The emperor then marries the captured queen making her superior to Titus now as a head of state. She vows revenge against Titus. She uses her remaining sons to torture and rape the daughter of the great general.  Titus falls into despair and goes mad. The emperor gives him a job in the court kitchen out of respect for his depleted condition. But Titus was only pretending to be crazy. He traps the queen’s sons, hangs them upside down in the kitchen, and slits their throats in front of his disgraced daughter. Then he slices up the boys and makes a pie out of them. Then he invites the emperor, the queen, and the rest of the court to a fine dinner he has prepared for them and feeds them the pie, which they eat happily. Revenge is a wonderful dish served cold. 

CNN was very upset that Steve Bannon’s Warroom has connections to populist movements worldwide. Bannon has been involved in Brexit, the uprisings in Hong Kong, the populist revolts in Europe, and of course, the Ulta-Maga posse in America that is poised to put Trump back in office with even more votes than he had in 2020, which officially was 75 million. He likely had much more than that, and the election fraud story just won’t go away from those who committed the biggest crime in the history of the world. Now, after two years of a failing Biden administration, the fantasy from the insurgents, who gained the power of the White House through illegal activity, believe that if they can shut down people like Bannon, they just might get away with it. And in so doing, they might send a message to the rest of the populist movements around the world to put away their mechanisms of rebellion and to fall in line. They intend a crucifixion of Bannon on the largest stage possible. And many of the same people involved in the election fraud scandal are involved in this attack against Bannon. The crime is one thing, the coverup is far worse, and we are into the coverup now. That’s what the contempt of Congress charge is all about, and only about that. 

Yet like the queen in the great Titus story, they have already eaten their own. Bannon has already made the pies with over a decade of leadup to the present day. And if Bannon hadn’t done it, someone else would have. There is a vast network of freedom fighters out there who will always refuse the tyranny of the globalists. The only reason this fight hadn’t happened sooner was that those attackers of America were hiding their intentions behind charities and tax shelter foundations with globalist intentions. And with his crazy hair and disheveled appearance, Bannon has been playing the cook, Titus, and has been busy making pies in the kitchen to feed to the globalists the flesh of their own kind. And they have been eating it with smiles on their faces. They thought he was crazy. They thought he was done and destroyed politically when Trump released him as the White House strategist. But now you know the rest of the story. Steve Bannon is the real-life Titus Andronicus, and to do what he needed to, with the forces that were against him and the MAGA movement, he put the sword away and went into the kitchen to fight the battle in a way that the enemy would never suspect. And now that they are at the table and presented with fine pies to eat, they had no way of knowing that all their progressives’ schemes from the last century were cooked within it. And now they have eaten it and turned the whole thing into digestive interest. And now comes the time when Titus gets to tell the world what was in the pie.

The midterms are coming; the red wave can’t be stopped now. Europe is turning to populism. So is Hong Kong against China. Japan will strengthen its constitution to take the passivism out of it. And Brexit is such a real thing that Boris had to step down because he failed to stand up to globalism. And to the Desecrators of Davos, they are learning that they aren’t safe in the mountain town any longer. The world is on to them, and they want their scheming antics in the next pie they intend to eat. The sentiment goes way beyond Steve Bannon. He was just the cook. The hunger for pie was already there.

Rich Hoffman

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Why The New ‘Top Gun’ is So Popular: Americans like rule-breakers, not conformists

It is funny to hear industry analysts trying to figure out why the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is doing so well going into its third weekend. I’ve listened to and read several hundred reviews of the film at this point. Unlike other kinds of movies, I have not yet found anybody who understands why the American market is flocking to see it many times now. Is it patriotism and the lack of wokeness that is in the movie? Or is it Tom Cruise himself, which many in the trades would like to think is the case? Well, Tom Cruise was smart to make Top Gun the way it needed to be, especially coming out of the Covid years. The film was done well before there was ever a pandemic, and Paramount sat on it for several years because of the uncertainty of the future of Hollywood, Top Gun: Maverick has the feel of a movie made in a different time and a different country, all the way back to 2019. I remember being on an airplane flying out of Orlando and watching Comic-Con footage of the movie for a 2020 summer release, so it’s been out there for a long time. But the film was released during a market recovery in a post-Covid world, and all kinds of forces were at play that inspired Americans to return to the movie theaters to see a movie worth leaving the house to view. Yet, there is an element to Top Gun that is very much reminiscent of the 80s when Tom Cruise was making so many blockbuster films, along with other movie stars, that say more about Americans to the world than anybody has seen in a while. It is that element that was on raw display in the new movie and is why the film is doing well without the rest of the world driving a majority of the box office numbers, specifically the Chinese market. 

The character of Maverick is a rule-breaker, and that is a trait that Americans love. They don’t like someone who follows the rules to the letter. Americans want out-of-the-box characters who will bend or break the rules to accomplish something great in the world, even down to the name of the Tom Cruise character. Tom Cruise himself is not like Maverick. But he was wise to play a character like Maverick and let all the elements of a rebel within the military shine in many reckless ways. Just the name of the character, Maverick, indicates a loner, a rugged individualist, someone who goes their own way in life. And that is not how the rest of the world is. Only American cultures celebrate such traits. The stories other cultures put on the silver screen are conflicts with conformity as opposed to what we see in Top Gun, a character so reckless that he costs the military hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in just this one movie. Maverick crashes two very expensive aircraft and puts at risk many more in his exploits of individualism that are often audacious, unapologetic, and way over the top. In most cultures, Maverick would be in jail. But in America, he is considered the top navy pilot that the military has, and audiences love it.

Literally, in the movie, all the people who have trouble are those who follow the rules. There is a scene where all the best pilots are in a bar talking about the upcoming mission, and they wonder who will be able to teach them anything. And of course, it is Maverick who has been picked to lead the mission because for it to be successful, it will require someone willing to break all the rules and discover what nobody yet knows. There is a scene where Tom Cruise playing Maverick, stands in front of a giant American flag and tells his students to throw out the rule book because it’s what your enemy knows. To succeed in this movie, the characters must learn to “not think” and act on “instinct.” It’s really the message of the first Star Wars movie from way back in 1977 and is a yearning that most people often experience in their lives. The desire to be their own authentic person and not some caricature of social order. The only way a mission like the one featured in Top Gun: Maverick can be accomplished is by breaking all the rules because the enemy is stuck in rules and is their ultimate weakness. It’s not the military jets, the companionship, or even the music that makes people love movies like this one. They help sell the story, but the essence is that Americans love rule breakers. So does the rest of the world, but they can only experience such things in American movies, and that is precisely why all these woke politics have infected the industry to the extent they have. For the producers of Top Gun to turn loose a character like Maverick again into the movie business was a very deliberate act, and the results are apparent. 

In much the same way that ESG scores are failing the financial industry because the world does not value those measures, they have been artificially created to inspire liberal political change to a climate change fanatical religion. Real value is what people are encouraged to see in the movies, not just in the act of buying popcorn actually to see a movie just because it’s there. It’s what the story tells that matters to people, and in Top Gun, it’s about recklessness over logic. It’s about breaking the rules in a rigid military environment to do what the military itself can’t do. It’s thinking out of the box to solve the problems society at large gets stuck on. And that’s why this movie Top Gun: Maverick is doing such good business while other movies come and go, and people forget about them five minutes later. So there is much more going on with this new Top Gun movie than just great music, interesting visual effects, and a vintage throwback to the kind of movies made in America during the 80s. Americans love rule breakers, before and after Covid. Covid was everything that Americans didn’t want to be. They gave authority a chance in case it saved lives, but knowing what we do now in hindsight, they would never do it again. Instead, millions of Maverick types sit in a darkened theater cheering on the new Top Gun because they see themselves in the character. And they want characters like that to succeed, to win at all costs. That’s the American way of doing things, and the rest of the world is fascinated by it. Even though they can’t relate, they will still buy a movie ticket to see it in the fictional character of Tom Cruise’s Maverick. For them, it’s the closest thing they will ever get to a society that thumbs its nose at procedures and conformity and embraces adventure and the treasures found in recklessness. And like all great movies, because Maverick was so reckless, so brash, and such a rule-breaker, he saves society in the process, which says more about us all than any other measure of human achievement.

Rich Hoffman

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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

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