Hollywood’s Apoliticism Is Only Going to Get Worse
On ‘The Studio’ and how Trump could change Hollywood’s calculus over the coming years
Like many people who re-signed up for Apple TV+ just to watch the second season of Severance, I’ve now moved on to watching the service’s new series The Studio, a Seth Rogen-led satire of a major Hollywood studio at a very strange time in the movie industry. Three episodes in, I’m ready to hail it as one of the best shows of the year. So far at least, it pretty expertly mixes prestige TV aesthetics and storytelling with a toned down version of Rogen’s comedic style.
What I’ve been most struck by in The Studio is how inside-baseball it is. A lot of the conversations that the studio executives have sound a lot like the conversations studio executives are really having right now, including explicit references to recent blockbusters that production companies are trying to copy and real-life creatives (including Martin Scorsese!) in the cast.
It’s an exaggeration, of course, or else it wouldn’t be a satire. The titular studio’s owner at one point says, “We don’t make films. We make movies.” But you do get the sense that the kinds of factors Rogen’s character has to consider—money vs. art, money vs. prestige, money vs. respect, money vs. literally every other consideration—are a reflection of reality.
There’s just one thing missing: politics.
The executives never discuss political or hot-button social issues when discussing their business considerations. I’m willing to give this specific show the benefit of the doubt and assume that the timing of production for the series—it began filming more than a year ago—is the main reason why.
And yet, the lack of political talk is notable because since November, Hollywood studio executives have almost certainly talked politics in boardrooms, trying to determine both how the administration of President Donald Trump will affect their business and what audiences will respond to topically and thematically during this political moment.
On the former, the immediate concern among many observers is that studios will look at the Trump administration’s attacks on democracy—including the targeting of private corporations like law firms—and try to get ahead of it by appeasing the president.
To some, this is already happening, and the evidence is there to support that view. Since Trump got elected:
Amazon announced it will make a (almost certainly fluff) documentary about Melania Trump, and made Trump’s reality TV series The Apprentice available for streaming.
The movie The Apprentice, about a young Trump, has yet to be picked up by a streamer in the United States, and Trump tried to block its release in the U.S. altogether.
Disney cut a plotline featuring a trans character from its Pixar-made TV series Win or Lose, which is about a preteen softball team.
The Oscars featured a noticeable lack of political jokes compared to during Trump’s first term.
Netflix inked a deal with Tony Hinchcliffe, the stand-up comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage” at a Trump rally days before the election.
The fact that multiple major studios are owned by bigger companies that have already settled with Trump after he sued them over news coverage.
These are concerning developments, and I’m sure more examples will pop up in the coming years. To some observers, these moves are also early indications of how major studios and streamers will make decisions about their content going forward.
I’ve seen two arguments to that effect:
Studios and streamers will fund more works that are explicitly far-right in their ideology and even directly appease Trump.
Studios and streamers will more broadly push their entire content strategy in a rightward direction.
I think the former is extremely unlikely. Hollywood is in the business of making money, and despite what he would have you believe, Trump is still broadly unpopular, and only getting less popular by the day. Most of the ideology he espouses is even less popular, meaning it would simply be bad business to make explicitly far-right and/or pro-Trump movies and shows, save for a fluff documentary or two.
I’m more open to the second argument, which Josef Adalian summarized for Vulture back in January:
Network and streaming execs are forever in search of finding programming that speaks to the Zeitgeist — or at least the Zeitgeist as they read it. And right now the conventional wisdom seems to be that the country has taken a rightward tilt. While I’m not convinced that’s entirely accurate, I think the folks who make such decisions absolutely are reading things this way.
I’m still skeptical, though. It is probably true that studio execs who are only slightly less caricaturish than the ones depicted in The Studio viewed the 2024 election, incorrectly, as a massive rightward shift. But they will want to appeal to a wide audience, and the artists that make movies and TV series are still broadly left-leaning.
As a result, I think the more likely effect of the second Trump term on Hollywood is a chilling effect on the kinds of political and social ideas we see depicted onscreen in the coming years. I think studio execs are likely to look at the current administration’s targeting of opponents and the broader political climate and push for safer, more apolitical content across the board that will avoid attracting attention from the White House or the far right altogether.
That would mean fewer works from major studios that take thematic risks or speak to political issues, and more works with boilerplate messages, if they have any messages at all. Put another way, fewer White Lotuses and more Yellowstones; fewer Squid Games and more Night Agents; fewer Barbies and more Minecraft Movies, despite the fact that all of these are successful, not just the apolitical ones.
And considering that the movies and shows taking the most risks thematically also tend to be the ones taking the most risks artistically, this will in all likelihood lead to more mundane content from the major studios in general. It won’t happen entirely, and not all at once. But financial considerations have already pushed studios and networks in this direction, and the political climate is only set to exacerbate the trend.
Of course, outright censorship and capitulation to those in power is concerning, too, and I won’t rule out that those things will happen with increasing regularity during Trump’s second term. But upstream of those trends is a move toward apoliticism, which would be a disservice to an artistically flourishing society. And considering that the U.S. remains the dominant cultural exporter in the world, that will have global ramifications.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture. Feel free to reach out anytime with your thoughts, questions, comments, hopes and/or fears.