WILL THE RED STATES SAVE THE MOVIES?
willingness to go out to the movies and buy some popcorn and a Coke that will make or break the motion-picture business this year, and perhaps for all time. The men (and they are mostly men) who have made it to the top of pop culture’s greasy pole look at Republican America and tend to see a blighted landscape that brought us Reagan and then Gingrich and then George W. Bush and then the Tea Party and then Trump. In song and story, in plot and affect, the villains are either red staters or their ideological confreres – conservatives, Republicans, and religious people. They’re science-deniers, gun-toters, frackers, polluters, despoilers, evil businessmen, real estate developers, and generals. President Donald Trump may or may not win reelection, but his supporters – many of whom hold the values and ideas of the entertainment industry in exactly the same sort of contempt showbiz has for them – hold the fate of the movies in their hands. To make the point even more starkly, consider that the final release from Hollywood before COVID-19 shut the theaters down was a movie partly satirizing its own hatred of the yahoos – The Hunt , in which rich liberals set in motion a killing spree of the people Hillary Clinton called “the deplorables.”
kid adventure Artemis Fowl (production cost: $125 million). The price of a Disney+ subscription (at least for now) is $6.99 a month, or half the price of a single movie ticket. And who goes to the movies alone? The squeeze on the theatrical business was already significant before the pandemic turned it into an existential crisis. For 70 years, the movies have battled for the attention of the American people with television, or at least for the share of the American attention span with television. In part due to the success of Netflix and Amazon Prime, but not solely, the sheer amount of televised offerings in the U.S. has exploded. There were an astounding 532 scripted series offered on American TV screens in 2019. Nine years earlier, in 2010, there were 216. And the new streaming services are only going to ensure that number rises significantly once production resumes. The movies are on the ropes... It may be too late for them in a historical sense. Pandemic or not, all of these trends were going to continue. The virus may just have set the cycle of permanent and rapid decline into freefall. And this brings us to the most savage irony of 2020... The salvation of the American theatrical movie experience may be in the hands of the Americans that Hollywood despises the most. President Donald Trump may or may not win reelection, but his supporters – many of whom hold the values and ideas of the entertainment industry in exactly the same sort of contempt showbiz has for them – hold the fate of the movies in their hands. It is the residents of the red states and their
American Consequences
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