It’s no secret that the woke crusaders in Hollywood were starving for a culture-war win. So it was only a matter of time before leftist magazines like Vanity Fair eagerly hitched their DEI wagons to the early box office success of Christopher Nolan’s twist on Homer’s Odyssey.
Vanity Fair Features Editor Hillary Busis prematurely popped the proverbial champagne in her July 19 screed headlined, “The Odyssey’s Epic Box Office Haul Breaks The ‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ Myth.”
Yes, the film was criticized for wokeness in casting, and yes, it made $264 million over the weekend. But that’s doesn’t prove proves that “flops” like the 2016 feminist-driven Ghostbusters and the live-action The Little Mermaid weren’t due to politics. She beamed that the movie’s success “put to bed an old conservative bugbear: the notion that Hollywood movies bomb when they’re overly influenced by the politics and qualities this cohort defines as ‘woke,’ a concept so broad as to be essentially meaningless.” Holy fallacy, Batman! That’s textbook begging the question!
Here’s the problem: Attaching Christopher Nolan’s name to any movie immediately gives it an instant edge that most feature-length films of this generation — especially those with underlying alphabet mafia political messaging — lack: a film director with a Midas Touch pedigree.
The Economist reported July 16 that Nolan “is the seventh-highest-grossing film director ever, and the most important British film-maker since Alfred Hitchcock.” He’s virtually a statistical anomaly in the movie-making ecosphere. The Economist even concluded that the seven most dangerous words to ask any film aficionado were, “What do you think of Christopher Nolan?” Nolan could pass gas on screen and people will buy tickets.
Busis, of course, doesn’t bother addressing this glaring variable. If she did, her argument would predictably implode. Obviously, any “woke” movie could be successful in theory if they just manage to land a modern-day Cecil B. DeMille like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, or Peter Jackson to lead it. In essence, find a needle in a haystack … then jackpot! But Busis proceeded to just lash out at the “manufactured controversy” of DEI messaging in cinema:
The real truth is that normal people, regular folks whose brains haven’t been pickled by constant exposure to the worst opinions on the internet, are unaware of this manufactured controversy. And even if they have heard about it, they certainly aren’t letting it influence their viewing habits.
Interesting. So using her logic, why did Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) — which was known for explicitly departing from the woke political messaging of its 2016 box office bomb of a predecessor — achieve such monumental success? The film grossed $204 million globally on a $75 million budget, compared to the 2016 film costing Sony an over $70 million loss. Even Vanity Fair itself reported on the film’s “nostalgia-rich” triumph In November 2021.
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2026/07/20/vanity-fair-claims-big-odyssey-opening-debunks-go-woke-go
