Liberals Have Dominated Hollywood — but Are Audiences Starting to Push Back?

The left has had control over mainstream Hollywood for a long time now, and they rule with an iron fist.

Coming out as a conservative in Hollywood can oftentimes be a career ending move - unless you have the luxury of having been around Hollywood for long enough that your name can outweigh your politics, as has been the case with Clint Eastwood. Eastwood does describe himself more as libertarian than conservative, but to the liberal elites, it's the same thing.

There are others in Hollywood who self-describe as conservatives, but these outspoken few are the minority. For many more, they have to live in hiding for fear of having their careers destroyed by the left, who really does decide who gets the next job and who doesn't.

The left's total and complete conquest of the American entertainment industry doesn't just stop at who they choose to hire as screenwriters, directors and actors. It is becoming much more widespread than ever that the content of films is being driven by the desire to push the left-wing agenda.

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It's no longer enough to entertain the masses and make a few bucks, Hollywood is becoming more and more about indoctrination through film. Many audiences are rejecting this, especially when it involves changing an established story in order to force the square peg of the story to fit into the round hole of the leftist agenda.

Morality plays are nothing new, and they are a valid form of expression and can even be entertaining, but are the big summer blockbusters - which seem to be where such films are being firmly planted, in order to appeal to the largest audience possible - really the place for these agenda-pushing films?

2013's "White House Down," which saw Channing Tatum as a Capitol police officer protecting the president played by Jamie Foxx, fell about $100 million short of its break-even point and was met with very mixed reviews by critics.

Film critic Richard Roeper gave the film an F, going so far as to say that, "Everyone in 'White House Down' is an idiot, clinically insane, a cliché, or a vehicle for shameless exploitation."

"White House Down" was not director Roland Emmerich's first forray into the field of left-wing propaganda, either. He also directed 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," a man-made global warming parable which drew some criticism from actual climate scientists.

"I'd give [the science of the film] a D minus or an F. And I'd be concerned if the movie was made to advance a political agenda," NASA meteorologist Marshall Shepherd said of the film.

Summer blockbusters exist as an avenue for escapist entertainment. They are the place people go to get away from real life and try to make the outside world disappear for two hours, while they engross themselves with gratuitous car chases and gunfire. The summer blockbuster is not the place people go to be preached at, or lectured about how they are destroying the environment and starving the homeless for the purpose of their own greedy indulgences. And when half of the country's population is of the Conservative persuasion, moviemakers are severely alienating a large portion of the audience by doing so.

Never was this more apparent than in 1987's "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace."

In "Superman IV" Superman takes it upon himself to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, despite the fact that the Superman audiences know and love would never have acted that way. It's tyrannical, it's god-like, and it goes against everything the classic Superman had always stood for, and audiences saw right through it.

One can respect Christopher Reeve, who crafted the film's anti-nuke story, for having his convictions. We were still at the height of the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear war was still very real in the late 1980s. But Reeve failed to realize - and more filmmakers are falling into this same trap almost 30 years later - that audiences don't want to be preached at in their action movies, or their sci-fi movies, or their car chase movies. They want to see superheroes, gunfights, spaceships and car chases.

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Disney's "Tomorrowland" debuted on Memorial Day weekend to an extremely disappointing box office return.

“I enjoyed the first three minutes of this movie immensely. The remaining two hours and seven minutes were excruciating. It was oral surgery without anesthesia," said Bill Whittle on his YouTube show Afterburner.

Whittle goes on to explain that "Tomorrowland" isn't just preaching about man-made global warming. This time it is also preaching to audiences that they need to just fall in line with the narrative - whether it makes sense to them or not, and whether they have actual evidence to back it up or not - because the liberal elites are just smarter than the rest of us. And all liberals want is what's best for everyone, whether the masses understand it or not.

Liberals aren't alone in the propaganda film arena, not by a long shot.

"An American Carol," a 2008 conservative film, unashamedly lampooned Michael Moore and, to a lesser extent, Rosie O'Donnell. It was a satiric look at the left, as well as left-wing propaganda in the films of Michael Moore. Interestingly, it was directed by one self-proclaimed liberal, David Zucker, and starred another, Leslie Neilson. The difference, however, was that "An American Carol" owned the fact that it was a politically driven propaganda film, and it never pretended to be anything else.

Next year, we may see a blockbuster film slant more to the right when "Captain America: Civil War" is released to cinemas on May 6. Based on the 2006-2007 Marvel Comics miniseries, "Captain America: Civil War" will tell the story of Steve fighting against big government overreach when the U.S. passes the Superhuman Registration Act.

While it is quite common for movies, even movies directly based on actual comic book stories, to change a great many things from the original source, "Captain America: Civil War" would do well to take one important element from the comics.

In the comics, the narrative doesn't tell you who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. It lays out the story and allows the reader to decide who is right and who is wrong. The movie would do well to be ambiguous in its moral narrative, because no one goes to these movies to be preached at.

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