The Hollywood Death Spiral: From Woke Ruins to Decentralized Gold
Obsession, Iron Lung, Backrooms, Siren Head. A year ago, Hollywood didn’t know that these names would constitute a growing tidal wave of systemic change, shifting the pillars of power from centralized corporations to decentralized creative voices.
The last decade was mired in demands for “social justice” which was a cover to reward undeserving and unqualified people and put them into positions of power and influence while actually talented people were actively excluded. That vise grip of social control is breaking, and the actual talents are achieving their natural state of success. The men who created Obsession, Iron Lung and Backrooms would never have been allowed into the woke-obsessed Hollywood machine just a few years ago. The truth is that the dead weight comprised of diversity and guilt-based hires produced nothing of value. In fact, they cost their parent companies dearly.
Giving gilded franchises like Star Wars, Doctor Who and Star Trek to self-titled “marginalized peoples” proved why these types weren’t previously given opportunities: when given a microphone, all they used their voices for was complaining about supposed injustices rather than entertaining audiences to the fullest. They used their new positions to dole out revenge and punishment for non-existent (or perceived) crimes.
In the wake of the destruction, male audiences have largely checked out of Hollywood, opting for video games, anime and manga, which provide all of the universal entertainment that used to be provided by American studios. New franchises are replacing the old. Previously popular male-branded Gen X franchises like Marvel, DC, Masters of the Universe, Mortal Kombat and others are dying on the vine—with rare successes like semi-regular Batman and Spider-Man releases.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe, which once elicited concern at the abundance of White male characters—in a franchise aimed at males in a country that was built by Whites and who are still a large majority ethnic group—decided to fix this supposed problem by changing the raison d’être from creating massively popular movies to using them as a platform to project left-wing talking points. The majority of the world couldn’t even relate to the messages that were largely provincial. Foreign markets gave up on American entertainment, and rightfully so.
Rather than producing films that generated global interest and entertained a natural audience, the priorities shifted to “representing marginalized groups”. Demand fell off immediately. Imagine a steakhouse being used to promote veganism and berate its carnivore customers? They’d go out of business in short order.
Across the board over the last decade, documented losses to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in American IP devaluation. The traditional monthly comic book model is effectively dead, with superhero comics having collapsed as a viable youth medium. Nobody is buying toys for the old tent-pole franchises, and teenage boys don’t have comic book characters on their walls anymore. The world has moved digitally—for better or worse—and people are hungry for new stories and characters.
In what I call the “Boötes Void” era of anti-entertainment in the States, China, Japan and other countries built out their own industries to fill the gaps left by distasteful modern American culture. While American studios are facing mass layoffs, foreign studios are growing at staggering rates and issuing pay raises and bonuses to their employees. Companies like South Korea’s Shift Up are creating new franchises like Stellar Blade that are taking the world by storm.
Sandfall Interactive, a small studio founded by former developers from the French behemoth Ubisoft—a conglomerate that has relied heavily on regurgitating titles like Assassin’s Creed—created the passion project Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which went on to take the gaming world by storm. The relatively small studio produced an amazing title on a modest budget, showing the world that these bloated productions, which employ hundreds more people than are necessary, are a flaw in an antiquated system in sore need of a reboot.
The boundless, corrupt bureaucratic labyrinth that inflates the cost of films in America—mostly due to vast layers of abstraction coming from unions, special interest groups, and the like—is being exposed as parasitic and destructive. Los Angeles risks a collapse similar to Detroit, Michigan, a town whose most profitable industry was done in by greedy union bureaucrats, wealth redistributors and social organizer hacks looking to pick a once healthy body clean, leaving it a rotting carcass. The actual builders took their business elsewhere; this is the same rhythm of what is happening with Hollywood as studios are traveling to other states or even countries to invest in their productions.
The old ways are dying off in their entirety and the world is changing. With the advent of AI, automation, robotics, increasing optimization and a move to an all-digital world, entire industries are being leveled. However, in the end, what people want is the same: entertainment with universal themes. The franchises that used to provide this have been irrevocably infested with ideologues who are irrationally defiant against market forces.
The recent Hollywood bomb, Supergirl, attempted to sell global audiences on the idea of a woman portrayed as a mentally broken drunk who is emotionally imbalanced and is prone to violence. She comes off as an obnoxious dog-mom with questionable morals—she isn’t someone female viewers would want to emulate or male viewers would want to root for. This Supergirl isn’t someone whose adventures would appeal to global audiences; she feels more like a living embodiment of Hollywood’s social ecosystem than a true superhero.
The people spoke and the usual suspects have reacted with performative obtuseness as to why it failed, blaming the classics like “misogyny”, even though straight men made up the vast majority of the paying audience for the opening weekend. This is all despite weeks of build-up where red carpet journalists asked important questions like “How does it feel playing a ‘queer icon’?” to Supergirl actress Milly Alcock.
Of course, Alcock excitedly played along. However, the majority of viewers, who aren’t initiated in this coastal leftist echo chamber, responded with confusion. This is the key point: mainstream corporate entertainment producers don’t actually know what normal people want; they only know what messaging they want to employ to mold the public into the kinds of zombies that will parrot back the assigned talking points.
In the 80s and 90s, producing entertainment was seemingly effortless and even “bad” movies from that era are looked on with newfound excitement now. The occasional banger like John Wick or Top Gun: Maverick is surrounded by layer upon layer of putrid agitprop that lacks any self-awareness.
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Here are some of Necropolice’s inspirations.
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