Tag: Top Gun

The Elephant in the Room: Why the new ‘Top Gun’ movie is so successful and what it means to ESG scores in corporate America

I have always looked at box office results as a kind of vote for what the temperature of the political world truly is. As we know now, elections are often rigged, especially regarding the digital machines and ballot stuffing efforts that have been common in big American cities for years. So political votes don’t often reflect what people really desire culturally. But when a person is willing to get out of their chair and go out into a darkened theater and share a movie experience with perfect strangers, which is a discomfort of its own, the kinds of choices people make reflect a lot about their true character. So I have always looked toward box office numbers to understand what’s happening worldwide and the kinds of mythologies the human race responds to. Knowing all that, I was not surprised that Top Gun: Maverick did well at the box office; it looks like it will come in over 1.2 billion dollars for the summer of 2022. It has been remarkably strong for what I consider a typical 80s movie. I grew up in the 80s, so I remember when there was a movie like Top Gun coming out every weekend, and then when you got back in the car to drive home, there was a new top 40 hit on the radio. We had a thriving culture back then mainly because Ronald Reagan, as an actor, knew how to sell America to America, and people felt good about their country. Hollywood rushed to make movies that appealed to them, which was reflected in the movie-making industry. 

Obviously, I loved the new Top Gun movie, but as I said, I don’t think the film is a technological masterpiece. It will likely win some awards because the kind of people who pursued careers in movie making are happy that finally there is a movie out there that reflects why they got into the business in the first place, the way Hollywood used to make movies before all the woke ESG rules took over and ruined everything for everybody. While Top Gun has been doing well, another film franchise from Disney, Thor: Love and Thunder, came out over a similar summer season release. It died on the vine by the second weekend because it embraced all the woke ESG garbage injected into corporate America, and the voting movie audience decided they didn’t want any of it. For a film with big intentions to gain a billion dollars at the box office from a global audience, Thor: Love and Thunder quickly fell out of favor, while Top Gun: Maverick continued to be in the top 10 even after two months in theaters. Because of this behavior, there is a massive elephant in the room to talk about that I have heard nobody in the commentary business from entertainment or politics nail down, which is worth discussing because of what it means. What we see with movie audiences is a total rejection of the globalist push for ESG values that will undoubtedly be reflected in society in general, and what has been happening in the movie business will ultimately be reflected in society in general, with restaurants, business commerce, and populist politics. The only way the ESG system was ever going to work was to take away all people’s options for what they really wanted. Top Gun: Maverick shows just how successful breaking the ESG formula can be for anybody who dares to, and now that people have seen the benefits, the ESG attempts will fail miserably.

Considering that Top Gun: Maverick was entirely filmed before Covid came along to destroy its original release date for the summer of 2020, the film was not a conscious effort to push back against the globalist trends toward ESG. It was able to get funding because it had been in the works for many years and had Tom Cruise attached to it, so the movie got made. But the global sabotage with Covid, as I said in the beginning, was more of an attack against American culture in every way and the intent was to destroy American capitalism. Small businesses were meant to be destroyed. Amusement parks bankrupted. And the American film industry was targeted to be choked off, even though the political lefties in Hollywood were kissing the ring of the globalists most aggressively. Those market sectors were intended to be destroyed before the year of 2020 ran out, which was the goal of the World Economic Forum members behind the Covid virus, using China to be the face of the disruption. The world was going to have a Great Reset, and America would come out of it under the fold of global socialism run by health agencies controlled by the United Nations, and that was the end of the story. Paramount Pictures was shrewd to wait out the storm and hold Top Gun: Maverick for another two years to hope the American movie industry would survive and that theater owners would not all go bankrupt. Along the way, Paramount listened to its potential audience, and they decided to tweak the film toward a domestic market and ignore China completely, which many considered to be suicidal. But once the movie was released and movie theaters finally opened into something resembling normal, great things happened, and people were hungry for a non-woke movie without ESG goal posts that told a pro-American story that people could feel good about. And the rest is history.

It’s not that Top Gun: Maverick is a great movie. But it offers a non-ESG story that people are starving for, and they have voted with their feet. There are so many other options now with streaming services that people could easily have just stayed home and watched hundreds of other options. So it says something any time people are willing to go to the theater to see a movie of any kind. But what we are seeing happening with this particular movie is that people are voting against the ESG world that is being imposed on them, and the first real offering of American patriotism since President Trump was removed from office through political upheavals is the true sentiment of the voting public. You can’t fake personal choice. Ballot stuffing and other forms of fraud can manipulate results to look like more people than really do support progressive causes. But the tickets bought for a darkened theater in direct competition with other offerings, like Thor: Love and Thunder, show the true sentiment of the public when choice is the deciding factor. With most movies these days being produced for a global audience, especially from Disney, it had been considered suicide to focus on a domestic release, which is what Top Gun: Maverick boldly did. And the result was that the world came to the doorstep of the movie because they wanted to experience American life with their movie purchase. Not to see the same old ESG political nonsense that all the other films were offering, the same homosexual propaganda, the soft stories without defined heroes, and the noticeable lack of patriotism that was clearly part of the plan for a post-Covid world. Top Gun: Maverick broke all the rules and returned to what worked for years. And because of that success, many other industries and political movements will follow. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

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

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to 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