Lost among the burst of executive orders emanating from Donald Trump’s felt tip permanent marker was his decision to appoint three iconic actors—Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone—to serve as his special envoys to Hollywood.
Their mission, Trump said, is to return Hollywood to its former Golden Age.
Restoring Hollywood’s Golden Age is a big ask, but President Trump believes it’s essential.
Why not ask the three stars to do something easier, like climbing the newly renamed Mt. McKinley or kayaking the Panama Canal?
And why is fixing Hollywood even important, given all the country’s problems?
That’s a fair question, but we should not ignore the incredible power of those who make movies in America to shape our thinking and behavior and even to revise established history. That’s a lot of power embedded with just a few people.
Iconic filmmakers like John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Martin Scorsese, Howard Hawks, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder regarded films as mirrors of civilization.
During an interview in the 1980s, the late screenwriter and producer Norman Lear told me that ideally, movies should reflect society’s customs, traditions, history, and behavior, but often they don’t, he said. Instead, they sometimes reflect a particular writer, director, or producer’s interpretation of the world.
Lear was right. Hollywood’s films today don’t reflect society as much as they distort it to fit a leftist/socialist political and social narrative. Lear himself admitted as much to me regarding two of his blockbuster TV sitcoms: All in the Family and Maude.
“Those shows reflected my biases…and why shouldn’t they?” Lear said. “I created them.”
Lear had a point. Movies and TV sitcoms are not documentaries. Once upon a time, they were visual storytelling tools meant to entertain audiences, not educate them.
All of that has changed. Films and TV shows today often contain blatant or subliminal messages. And as any director will tell you, dramatic license has always trumped accuracy in most films—especially period or historical dramas.
The plethora of provocative points of view embedded in many of today’s films bears out that fact. The distortions are ubiquitous.
Think about it. After watching a film today, how often are you left feeling that only single, usually abused mothers are rearing children and that fathers are not required; that half or more of all relationships are interracial; that a majority of Americans are gay, lesbian, or transgender; that a preponderance of Americans are potheads, junkies, or chronic pill-poppers; that obesity is the new normal; and that men who exhibit masculinity are toxic brutes who beat their wives and abuse their children?
In today’s films, Trump undoubtedly sees the same distortions millions of Americans observe. That’s why he wants Voight, Gibson, and Stallone (all well-known conservative thespians) to address them while pursuing his mission to revitalize the U.S. film industry and restore its global dominance.
It’s a formidable task. The movie business is enormous, with global box office revenue reaching $33.9 billion in 2023.
Of course, that figure doesn’t mean that all movies are moneymakers. Many movies lose money. How will Trump’s three envoys deal with that fact? Movie budgets today are off the charts.
According to Investopedia, a global financial media website, the average cost to produce a major studio movie is around $65 million. However, production costs don’t include distribution and marketing, which add another $35 million or so, on average, bringing the total cost to produce and market a major Hollywood movie to about $100 million.
Before I proceed, perhaps a little Hollywood history is needed, so please bear with me.
At the height of Hollywood’s so-called “Golden Age” in the mid-1940s, the major studios produced about 400 movies annually that an audience of 90-100 million Americans saw weekly in the nation’s ubiquitous movie theaters.
According to the Film Daily Yearbook, at Hollywood’s height in 1940, there were 17,500 movie theaters in operation—one for every 8,000 persons in the United States.
Today, there are only 5,798 movie theaters in 51 states and territories in the United States, and the number continues to decline.
So does the number of films Hollywood’s major studios are producing today.
According to “The Numbers,” a resource for film industry professionals and fans that tracks business information on movies, the six major studios today (Warner Bros., Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony, and Universal) produced 71 films in 2024. Another 50 films were produced by “other” studios—including independent and foreign productions filmed in Hollywood.
That means 121 films were produced last year, a far cry from the 400 produced by Hollywood studios in the mid-1940s. Unlike the 1940s, only a few of those films were exceptionally profitable at the box office.
The reason? The big studios face significant competition from streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, FX, and Hulu. These platforms have created a demand for more content, leading to an influx of new, if not always first-rate, films being produced annually. More on that a bit later.
That competitive fact will be a high hurdle to clear for Trump’s three actor envoys to Hollywood.
Let’s take a look at the original Golden Age of Hollywood.
Eight studios reigned supreme during Hollywood’s Golden Age, which lasted from the beginning of “talkies” in the 1920s to the early 1950s. They were called “The Big Five and the Little Three.” During those years, Hollywood studios released almost 8,000 movies. Classic titles such as The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca, King Kong, and Gone with the Wind are examples of the studio system’s success.
The “Big Five” were Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Brothers., RKO Radio Pictures Inc., Paramount Pictures, and Fox Film Corp./20th Century Fox, followed by the “Little Three”— Universal Pictures, United Artists (UA), and Columbia Pictures.
During the early Golden Age, several upstart studios attempted to break loose and challenge the Big Five and Little Three. Most failed. The studios that emerged later and didn’t fail (DreamWorks, New Line, Sony, Miramax, Focus) were ultimately swallowed up or still exist as off-shoots of the Big 5.
United Artists and MGM are now part of Amazon’s film production stable. In recent years, Netflix, the streaming powerhouse, has become a major film production company, further altering Hollywood’s cinematic landscape.
However, the influence of films produced by traditional studios has waned considerably today. More and more independent filmmakers are grabbing a piece of the industry pie, further eroding the power of the major studios.
That fact also makes the job that Trump has asked Gibson, Voight, and Stallone to do even more daunting.
Streaming services that produce made-for-TV movies and direct-to-video releases each year also impact major studios’ bottom lines. These films are often lower-budget productions but can still succeed with niche audiences.
However, streaming services are not just producing low-budget content. They are increasing their budgets significantly.
An example was last year’s hugely successful 10-part historical epic Shogun, which FX produced. Its budget is said to have been $250 million, making it the most expensive international series ever produced for FX. Shogun also swept an unprecedented 18 categories in the 2024 Primetime Emmy Awards, solidifying FX’s position as a major player in premium television.
On the other end of the budget spectrum was the low-budget, independently produced film Napoleon Dynamite. It was made for just $400,000 and grossed $44,940,956 one year after its release in 2004. Jon Heder, the lead actor in the film, was only paid $1,000 for his work. Not to worry about Heder, however. A year after the film’s release, he was able to renegotiate his contract retroactively and nab a nice percentage of the profits.
According to Investopedia, movie production costs can be divided into a handful of broad categories, including script and development (around 5% of the budget), licensing, and salaries of the big-name players, which usually include the producer, the director, and the big-name actors or actresses. Then there are the actual production costs, which include the ongoing salaries of all the people (most of them in various unions) needed to make production happen. Production costs consume a big chunk of the budget, easily taking 20% of the total.
Let’s face it. Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone have been given a tough assignment.
Not only will they need to deal with the woke, politically correct content today’s Hollywood films are satiated with, but they will also need to find a way to push, pull, or compel Hollywood into the new Golden Age that President Trump wants.
Just what a new Golden Age will look like is anybody’s guess.
However, with fewer Americans visiting movie theaters and more preferring to stream films on their home theater systems, the next Golden Age will likely look very different from the first one.
As for me, I want Hollywood to produce films that entertain me—not films that distort history or reality, slather me with wokeness and DEI nonsense, or attempt to proselytize me with leftist codswallop.
In other words, I want to watch films like Gibson, Voight, and Stallone have made.
I have a feeling Donald Trump does, too.
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