Anti-Woke Movement Flips The Script In Hollywood

One of the unintended -- but providential -- side effects of America's anti-woke wave isn't just that companies are walking away from LGBT extremism, but that entertainment is. In a market pivot that's gone somewhat under the radar, key Hollywood players seem to be quietly turning away from the wokeism that's financially punished the industry for years. Families in this country want more wholesome options -- and, in a surprising twist, producers seem much more willing to provide them.

The sex, violence, profanity, gay and trans themes, and other vices that have characterized modern entertainment have started to give way to more decent and uncontroversial fare. And audiences are eating it up. While other movies continue to tank at the box office, PG-rated films made up a whopping third of ticket sales in the U.S. in 2024, the highest percentage, Axios points out, since 1995. A quarter of those profits went to animated films, four of which topped the charts as last year's highest-grossing movies.

Even industry titans like Disney -- who, not so long ago, bragged about intentionally "queering" content to indoctrinate kids -- have taken some modest steps back from their personal Pride parades, reining in recent projects and internal goals. Although the signs of impending doom were all around them (the Mouse House lost a jaw-dropping 700,000 streaming subscribers in the last three months of 2024), very little about CEO Bob Iger's social agenda changed. After Donald Trump's landslide election in November, however, alarm bells finally went off.

Suddenly, Disney began rethinking a transgender storyline in its new Pixar series about a middle school softball team, "Win or Lose." By December, writers of the show had scrapped the idea from their character development altogether. A spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, "When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline."

In its place, Iger's team leaned into explicitly Christian content for the series. To the astonishment of most Americans, one of the team's girls is shown bowing her head and praying. "Dear Heavenly Father, please give me strength. I have faith, but sometimes the doubt creeps in. I promise I'll be good, and I uh, won't do that thing again. I'm not sure where you stand on it, but I WON'T do it. I just want to catch a ball. Or get a hit. For my team, of course."

It was the first time in 30 years that a Disney character openly embraced prayer, a move producers hadn't made since the 1996 classic, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," Ian Giatti noted. That's not to say Iger's brand is completely quitting its Human Rights Campaign pals. At another point in the same series, there's a "love-charged same-sex scene" between the umpire and janitor, Breitbart warns.

But at least the brand seems to be slowly moving in the right direction. According to its latest SEC filing, Disney is dropping its controversial project, "Reimagine Tomorrow," which was meant to help amplify "some of Disney's [DEI] commitments and actions," Fox Business explained. Whether that's part of a genuine turn away from radical social politics remains to be seen.

It wouldn't be entirely far-fetched, given the growing number of content creators who don't have the stomach for open LGBT extremism anymore. And the data bears that out. According to GLAAD's (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) so-called Studio Responsibility Index, there was a 30% drop in the number of LGBTQ-identifying characters in the movies they tracked (down from 100 to 70) in 2023. 

The authors complained that Hollywood isn't doing more to feature their movement, writing, "the overall lack of representation in the kids and family genre is disappointing." Last year, the 2024 report notes, "GLAAD called for more representation in this area, and rather than stepping up, studios told even fewer LGBTQ stories in kids and family films this year."

In some pockets of the industry, executives who are more reluctant to pare down sexually-deviant themes are losing audiences to other networks. Hallmark, which, at one time, had cornered the Christmas market, is watching viewers walk toward the exits. Alternatives like Great American Family (GAF), whose leaders pride themselves on sticking to the winning recipe its Gold Crown competitor partially abandoned, is rocketing up the ratings chart.

Last year, while Hallmark stubbornly stuck to same-sex themes in movies "The Holiday Exchange," "The Groomsmen Trilogy," "The Holiday Sitter," "The Christmas House," and "Notes of Autumn," GAF was busy becoming a Top 25 channel -- just three years after it launched. In the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, the network saw a household growth of 19%, a female audience spike of 13%, and a total viewership boom of 21%.

That's thanks, in large part, to the president and CEO of Great American Media -- and former Hallmark executive -- Bill Abbott. During a sit-down with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on "Washington Watch," he talked about the evolution of entertainment and what prompted him to leave the once-beloved Kansas City franchise.

Abbott explained that "it used to be that the 9:00 hour or the 10:00 hour was the only place on television that you would see anything even a little bit salacious or violent -- or that didn't meet up to the values of most people." Now, he shook his head, the standards have really "diminished to now any time of the day." "Anything goes," Abbott said. "And actually, the more salacious, the more rewarded the content is in Hollywood, and the more it's celebrated in so many ways." It's really "a race to the bottom" in the industry.

That wasn't always the case with Hallmark, but increasingly, the network proved that it wasn't immune to the Left's woke pressure campaign. Abbott thought back to when things changed for him there. "We ultimately became the highest-rated network, especially during Christmas. And in 2017, there was a dramatic change in terms of the way [that] they were approaching the entertainment landscape." Leadership "really wanted to become much more 'diverse' and abandon the audience that had made us number one."

Abbott disagreed, knowing very well that the tastes of their audience were family-friendly themes. "[T]hey didn't want to have a conversation about certain things with their 10-year-old at 9:00 at night during the Christmas season. ... A large part of the management team did not agree with the wokeness and really the pursuit of normalizing activity and behavior that contradicted the vast majority of the values that we believed our audience held."

Asked who was driving these changes, Abbott pointed to the family that owned the business. "It was a private company. And so, certainly, as time changed and time moved on, the family became much more liberal. And they wanted to be cool at the cocktail party. And you're not going to be cool at the cocktail party with faith and family content," he acknowledged.

And yet, Perkins observed, "When the Lord shuts one door, he opens another. You started the Great American Family channel." Abbott nodded, explaining that the company has "a tremendous group of backers ... not only from a viewership point of view, but from a financing point of view." The network's chairman, he explained, "is a big believer in the values that we hold dear: faith, family, and country. And so, everything we do is to uplift family. It is to portray faith in a respectable and earnest and really authentic way -- and also to support ... the military and the things that have made the country great over the years. ... All of our content that we create is focused on portraying those elements positively."

As one of his most prominent stars, Candace Cameron Bure, put it, "Most networks are not trying to be all things to all people. What really differentiates our channel from some of the other ones out there is that we're not afraid to talk about God and God's hand in our lives instead of fate or providence."

Abbott pointed to another one of their domains acquired in 2023, PureFlix, a streaming service that he describes as "relentlessly faith-focused." These are movies, he wanted people to know, that only tell stories that "are uplifting, positive, and ultimately make you feel good." More than a million people are already subscribed -- another sign that there's a booming market for clean and inspiring options.

Just as they've done in the corporate world, Americans are rewriting the future of entertainment, breaking the chokehold of woke, offensive, and provocative content with their demand for less edgy, uncomfortable, and divisive themes. Embrace the trend, recent history shows, and be rewarded. Ignore it, and wildfires won't be the only thing threatening Hollywood.

Originally published at The Washington Stand