This post is not horror related but it is related to horror. We are in for a major shake-up as the Ellisons have begun their takeover of Warner Bros./DC Studios/a ton of other properties and the job of folding them all under the Skydance label. Already James Gunn and Peter Safran have been removed in favor of a strong Christian conservative in Jeremy Latchman. This is not surprising. Both father and son have been very clear that they do not view “woke” politics (read: anti-MAGA, anti-Trump) in a favorable light. Gunn is a staunch enemy of the Far Right (Ellisons’ Ilk) and now he is out as a driving force of the DC cinematic universe, a universe that the Snyderbros and others have decried as ‘WOKE’ for the last handful of years.
So the Ellisons are here and so is the age of far-right coded, Christian-Nationalist supporting, white-supremacist-dog-whistling cinema and television. It probably won’t be an immediate mandate at the new Skydance but slowly, within the next two years, the slate of films they produce and the television will be geared towards a very specific kind of white middle-aged man and white-middle aged woman. The Ellisons made a promise to release 30 movies a year, they did not state that they would be good and they did not state they would not promote the anti-woke, MAGA-loving worldview that Ellisons have purported since the early days of the rise of the Donald.
Couple this MAGA-shift and the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the Weinstein Company and Miramax and it becomes obvious that the Ellisons are the new Weinsteins. They now have the control, the influence, and the money to reshape much of Hollywood and the entertainment and streaming landscapes into whatever conservative Leave-It-To-Beaver wonderland they see fit. The Weinsteins tapped into our need for sleaze. They loved blood and guts and horror and scantily clad women and so our cinemas were replete with that content throughout the 90s and 00s. Then came Marvel and the downfall of the Weinsteins first as kingmakers and then as humans when Harvey was exposed as a monster of the worst sort. With Marvel on the decline and Disney constantly under fire from the Trump Administrations and the MAGA-folk, the Ellisons have now ascended to the firmament of the entertainment universe and we are all unprepared. I love the people celebrating the “Blue Wave” and acting as if it is going to matter in the long run. What they don’t understand is that the future is being seeded by these conservative billionaires and they have already won.
I am not crazy. They do in fact know what they are doing. While the left is engaged in a culture war, with affordability, with the rights of migrants and the LGBTQ community, with health care, and with a lack of civility; the right is shoring up its control of the major industries including communications, AI, and energy. Trump is installing oligarchs all over the place and has been since his first term. While Biden came in thinking that his predecessor was an idiot, he failed to see the series of traps that Trump had left for him. Health care was one. Immigration was another, as were massive gas prices. Trump’s economy cratered in what would have been his second term. Oh and let’s not forget the poison pill that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump made that promise and forced Biden to go through with it or extend a deeply unpopular ‘forever war.’ We now how that went. Time and again the left has underestimated or dismissed the right and the MAGA party and they have done so again here.
The Ellisons are going to destroy entertainment and the media as we know it. There is nothing we can do about this. It is too late. We will be subject to the whims of hyper masculine, anti-woke, anti-metaphor, anti-intelligence middle-aged white billionaires for the foreseeable future.
That is the reality of our situation.
That is real horror.
