Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh released his bitingly comedic documentary, Am I Racist?, in early September to great acclaim, vexxing film critics and industry insiders who see themselves as the exclusive gatekeepers of the silver screen.
The movie’s surprise success—even while facing vicious left-wing attacks—stood in stark contrast with the failure of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a sci-fi political drama with an anti-Trump political subtext that opened over the weekend with neither critical nor audience acclaim—despite its bloated budget, all-star cast and abundance of Hollywood hype.
This pattern may signal a shifting trend in consumer sensibilities. Prior conservative-friendly films, such as Angel Studios’s Sound of Freedom, have exceeded box office expectations, while movies and television series deemed exceedingly “woke” have continued to fizzle.
That includes Disney’s most recent addition to the Star Wars canon, The Acolyte, which drew backlash from loyal fans for its preoccupation with feminist and LGBT virtue-signaling.
By aggressively alienating conservative viewers, leftist Hollywood studios “are leaving plenty of money on the table, and we’re happy to come in and take some of it, because, at a minimum, you are explicitly refusing to serve 50% of the audience,” Walsh said, according to Variety.
Am I Racist?, an irreverent look at how “diversity, equity and inclusion” proponents fail to grasp their own hypocrisy, raked in $4.5 million on opening and has a 97% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Walsh, who incurred leftist notoriety with his previous documentary, What Is a Woman?, goes undercover in the film as a progressive interviewer, meeting with prominent DEI speakers like White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo.
The movie, which cost $3 million to make (the expenses paid to so-called DEI experts are a running joke throughout the film) had grossed more than $11 million as of Sept. 30, according to Box Office Mojo.
Meanwhile, Megalopolis made $4 million at the box office in its opening weekend and has a 34% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film—a $120 million passion-project decades in the making for the Godfather director—is a cautionary tale about a fragile republic, susceptible to greed, corruption and fascism, with a plot that loosely transposes the fall of the Roman empire into a modern setting.
Unfortunately for Coppola, his film failed to impress most critics, who thought the message was obfuscated by too many ideas.
While the movie tried to be nominally inclusive by casting Trump-supporting Oscar-winner Jon Voight, Coppola wasn’t shy about connecting it explicitly to the current U.S. political landscape, insinuating that democracy hung in the balance with the upcoming Nov. 5 election.
“Men like Donald Trump are not at the moment in charge, but there is a trend happening in the world, there is a trend toward the more neo-right, even fascist division, which is frightening,” Coppola said, according to Deadline.
