Hollywood’s feminist, victim narrative no longer sells tickets or makes headlines.
We had all gotten used to children’s movies being one of the hottest battlegrounds of the culture war — until Disney’s Snow White seemingly brought the left to its knees. The film’s aggressively “diverse” casting, combined with its star’s incessant lefty yapping, sparked more than a year of delays, reshoots, negative press, and a grassroots backlash, resulting in a highly publicized box-office flop that caused Disney to rethink its future woke endeavors. The right was quick to proclaim victory.
Declaring victory is always tricky in the culture war; wins quickly turn to losses as the tastes of America’s normies ebb and flow. Yet in a post-Snow White Hollywood, average movie watchers can be cautiously optimistic. The even larger conservative victory is the quiet flop no one seems to have noticed.
Juliet & Romeo, released in the second week of May, offered all the leftist narratives that Hollywood has been obsessed with for years. With a 26 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, an effectively non-existent press tour, and a shockingly pathetic box-office showing, it’s proven to be anything but a success.
Girlboss Juliet Seizes Control
The title alone gives the game away. The film is a “historical reimagining” of Shakespeare’s classic love story, elevating Juliet’s perspective to the narrative forefront in an overdue correction of the patriarchal record. Oh, and did I mention it’s a musical? Eye roll.
This Juliet is the typical modern girlboss who knows what she wants and takes it. She spots Romeo first. She pursues him. She knows his name before he tells her.
“What now?” Romeo asks his mysterious temptress early on. “It’s a mystery,” she responds, flipping the script on the man being in control. Yet she’s far from alone. Every woman in 14th-century Verona seems to have a feminist consciousness 700 years ahead of her time. Midway through the film, a female ensemble performs a pop ballad about “trying to find my truth” beneath the “mask” Juliet is forced to wear.
More Treats for Politicized Audiences
Beyond forced feminism, the film checks just about every box “modern audiences” are told to want. Friar Lawrence follows science more than he trusts the church. The Apothecary hides refugees from the authorities. Of course, an ethnic rainbow inexplicably appears in Renaissance Italy.
Even the pop-style score — which trades iambic pentameter for music that sounds like someone fed Shakespeare to an AI trained on Disney Channel — follows a leftist formula, prioritizing perceived accessibility over thematic or textual consistency.
“Romeo, where the hell art thou?” someone from the Montague crew asks. In the end, the two love birds even get their happy ending.
Even Lefties Dislike Seeing Their Ideas Onscreen
Juliet & Romeo is a bad film. The classic is stripped of all style and substance, replaced with the shallowest political trends millennial leftism offers. But for the modern viewer — say, on a media diet of CNN chyrons, celebrity gossip, and TikTokified pop culture — the flashy sets, hummable tunes, and big-name cast (Rebel Wilson, Ledisi, Jason Isaacs) should have landed butts in seats. A few years ago, it probably would have.
Somewhere in the last decade, Hollywood fearfully reframed its story structure to “cater to modern audiences” — a pleasant euphemism for a business model that placates the critics and the mob (often the same people) while still offering generically stimulating slop for the apolitical masses. Much to the right’s chagrin, and even sometimes denial, it often worked.
Disney’s The Little Mermaid (2023) remake, with a black actress playing the canonically red-headed Ariel, annoyed many viewers. The filmmakers pushed back, implying their audiences were racist for noticing the obviously antagonistic casting choice, while critics and the media piled on against the right. Yet normies ignored the noise. They paid to watch a classic story they loved to a tune of over half a billion dollars.
The same can be said of the Trump-era Star Wars installments, with its cast members chosen for their race and millennial girl bossery of equal measure. Of course, this launched a years-long media discourse of both cast members and executives opposing the franchise’s “toxic fandom” and driving it even further left. Yet outside a small vocal cohort, viewers didn’t care; both the 2017 and 2019 installments grossed over $1 billion each.
The Ideological Flame is Dying
Maybe Juliet & Romeo is just plain bad. Maybe viewers care more about recent classics than the ones they read in high school. Maybe the right’s reaction always sets off the firestorm.
But that makes it hard to explain why & Juliet (2019), the Broadway version of feminist-Shakespeare that the film surely tried to capitalize on, broke box-office records at the end of its 2023 run, despite being just as tediously poppy and obsessively political. Even if the right’s reaction drives the discourse on woke filmmaking, it’s undeniable that the left often twists the knife and converts a controversy into a culture war victory.
Yet here we are, almost two weeks out from the film’s release — silence. No press tour is highlighting the overdue need to reimagine patriarchal classics, and critics feel no obligation to defend the film. Cast members aren’t sitting down with friendly journos to lob rhetorical bombs about how the film resonated with their experience of oppression or inspired them to be a better ally. No one is even outcrying about how well the film would have done if Americans weren’t so racist and sexist.
A Silent Left Allows a Conservative Victory
While the movie fails to recoup even a tiny fraction of its $25 million budget, the left is doing something it hasn’t done in years: sitting quietly and taking the L. So much for what was once promised as “the musical event of the summer.”
In the post-Snow White era, normie viewers are consciously peeved enough to not show up. This signals a turning point in the aggressively political filmmaking we’ve all reluctantly accepted as the new norm. Hollywood may finally recognize that it’s a losing strategy to browbeat their audiences — their customers — over perceived moral failures. While successful at first, in the long run, the leftist narrative has limited returns and will only push more people away.
From here, there’s two options: keep making the same films that quietly hemorrhage money, or ditch “modern audiences” in favor of classic storytelling that viewers of all stripes actually want to see.
Gage Klipper is a writer based in New York. Previously, he was the culture critic at the Daily Caller and an editor at Pirate Wires.
