The Year Hollywood Rediscovered Men

[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]

If 2023 was the year of Barbie, 2024 has proven to be the year of the man.

The summer box office roared in, shaking off flaccid girlboss entries like “Furiosa” and “The Fall Guy” (which had little in common with the two-fisted Lee Majors TV series from the 80s) with male driven action movie leads in ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die’, ‘Twisters’ and ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’.

Back in the 80s, the 90s, the oughts or even not that many years ago there would have been nothing extraordinary about a summer box office driven by male action movies, but this was exactly the sort of movie anathema to the new woke Hollywood which had replaced muscles with CG and male audiences with hectoring lectures about the evils of toxic masculinity.

Five years after Star Wars was reinvented as a matriarchy and Arnold Schwarzenegger was reduced to filming insurance commercials, the adult box office winners of 2024 are for the most part male skewed and male-led beginning with ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ which set a new box office record for R-Rated movies. ‘Twisters’, from the man who brought back ‘Top Gun’ as ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, made a point of refusing to virtue signal on global warming. And ‘The Beekeeper’ was one of the big success stories becoming a massive hit on a $40 million budget.

‘Beekeeper’ star Jason Statham remains one of the industry’s biggest bankable actors even though he’ll never be nominated for an acting award or get any real respect in an industry that has come to value neurotic male actors so primped they’re hard to tell apart from the actresses. (The term ‘actress’ has largely been retired in the ‘what is a woman’ age although the award ceremony categories often remain.) Every time Statham appears in another movie that scores nine figures on an eight-figure budget, he serves as a living reminder that Woke Hollywood’s hatred of men is leaving billions on the table and driving away its core male audience.

But in 2024, Hollywood became willing to try anything. Even Disney, tired of losing endless amounts of money, got on board with  ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’, a male action movie rife with toxic masculinity. With the faltering Marvel franchise that has seen loss after loss headed for over $1 billion with ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’, the question is has Hollywood learned anything?

Maybe. Maybe not.

Streaming platforms driven by subscribers are already dominated by female leads and female audiences. The few exceptions like Amazon Prime’s ‘Reacher’ are oddities that are quickly neutered like the titular character was in his second season of his own series. Couch TV is systemically hostile to men and male audiences.

UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report found that “women made up the majority of viewers for nine of the top 10 streaming films of 2023”. Only one of the top 10 streaming movies, Extraction 2, was a male-driven action movie. But in-person movies are fundamentally different and more cinematic than the Netflix laptop and couch fare that has taken over the industry. By replacing male action movies with material that would play just as easily on their private streaming platforms, Netflix’s Hollywood rivals hoped to dominate multiple screens, instead they lost movie theaters and then they lost billions trying and failing to lure away Netflix subscription addicts. Many of the movies they made were too cinematic for couches and too ‘couchy’ for theaters.

‘Top Gun:Maverick’ with its massive $1.5 billion box office already showed Hollywood what was possible two years ago courtesy of Tom Cruise who still insists on making action movies. Two years later, the summer box office provided clear evidence that if Hollywood wants to fight for the movie theater, it’s going to need to appeal to the men and kids who still enjoy going out.

The battle between theaters and streaming, between social seats and slumped couches, is a culture war. What is at stake is whether we actually socialize or withdraw into our screens. The pandemic lockdowns devastated theaters and socializing. It also made the streaming wars of Peak TV seem like a viable strategy. Four years later, it’s clear that they no longer are.

Dot coms like Netflix and Amazon with infinite amounts of shareholder capital to burn will continue to dominate streaming which is a primarily technology driven business which hoards big data and uses it to build algorithms inside the heads of its most pliable consumers. Despite some prestige offerings, the core content of streaming is soap operas dressed up as different IPs. And for the most part they are as expensive as they are substance-free and disposable.

Theaters offer an experience that is both interpersonal and immersive. Rather than an algorithm crawling inside the individual amygdala, the movie theater connects us to other people. Even when going alone, the shuffling seats, laughter, groans and other annoying artifacts of the theater are a shared experience that is an antidote to the empty rooms and glowing screens.

We have become a Netflix culture of isolated people binging videos which is a lonely step down from the vigorous culture of blockbuster lines outside elaborate movie palaces we once were.

In 2024, Hollywood seemed to have belatedly realized that it still needs men and how to get them. There’s no dark art in the male-driven action movie. The only strange thing about it was its disappearance under the weight of the new woke consciousness that viewed men and anything they liked with mistrust, suspicion and even outright hostility.

If men liked it, there must be something wrong with it.

Drowning in a sea of DEI guidelines, BIPOC casting mandates and Bechdel tests for female characters, a few movies emerged out of the ooze that actually spoke to men.

And those movies and the men who go to see them may be what saves the movie theater.