For years, normal Americans have been telling struggling Hollywood the same thing over and over again, which is to stop lecturing us and to start telling good stories again.
Earlier this year, they accidentally proved conservatives were right the entire time.
“Project Hail Mary” exploded into one of the biggest box office hits of the year, pulling in roughly $676 million worldwide against a reported $200 million budget.
And it didn’t get there by scolding the audience. It got there by being fun, emotional, exciting, hopeful, and genuinely entertaining.
If that sounds simple, it’s because it really is that simple.
Families do not go to theaters to hear activists lecture them about gender theory, stolen land, privilege, or whatever other obsession infected the writer’s room in a given week.
People want heroes, harrowing adventures, and dazzling visuals without a side of neo-Marxist gender queer theory.
Do you plan to watch Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey?”
That is exactly what audiences got from Andy Weir’s “Project Hail Mary” adaptation, which starred Ryan Gosling as an unremarkable science teacher forced to save humanity through grit, luck, and a lovable alien to team up with.
Americans and moviegoers across the globe rewarded the people behind that film with a word-of-mouth campaign that made everyone involved a ton of money.
Meanwhile, Disney spent Memorial Day weekend watching “The Mandalorian & Grogu” stumble to an embarrassing opening for a “Star Wars” film.
Its Friday-through-Sunday opening landed at just $81.9 million, which would have been unthinkable for this franchise a decade ago.
It’s not a bad opening for any other film, and it did lead the weekend, but this is not an average franchise.
Disney has now spent years alienating its own fan base while pretending anyone who objected to the gaying up of everything it touched was the problem.
Fans didn’t exactly show out for pro-trans activist Pedro Pascal’s movie.
That brings us to Christopher Nolan and his upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” Nolan is one of the best directors in modern cinema, and he rarely misses (although “Tenet” got a little too cute).
But his much-anticipated summer flick could be headed for trouble, and it’s because of the same stuff Hollywood has failed to learn from audiences for basically two decades.
Casting decisions have Nolan fans and other potential audience members rightly willing to skip “The Odyssey” in order to avoid wasting their time and money.
Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, one of the most famous Greek figures in all of ancient literature.
Helen was described in the myth by Homer as light-skinned and fair. Nyong’o is black.
Nolan also cast Ellen “Elliot” Page in the project.
While the “transgender” actress’s exact role has not been released, rumors online saying that she would play Achilles started a backlash that will almost surely hurt the movie when it opens in July.
True or not, this is bad press:
One of the dumbest and twisted things I’ve ever heard 🤡🤡
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2026
Nolan has rightly earned enormous goodwill with audiences over the years, and a lot of that dried up instantly with the early and negative chatter on this film.
In any event, Hollywood keeps making the exact same mistakes, which “Project Hail Mary” avoided completely. The movie proved audiences are starving for stories built on competent writing and casting, and not political messaging disguised as entertainment.
In other words, Hollywood was handed a survival blueprint that many in the industry have been and might continue be too arrogant to follow.
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