Tech Bros Want Money To Start Right-Wing Movie Studio And You WILL Be Able To Resist!
What's the opposite of that TAKE MY MONEY meme?
The thing about rich guys is that they really do think they can do anything better than the people who have been doing that thing. Marx said that the workers should own the means of production in part because they actually know how to operate the means of production. A certain kind of rich guy, however, is pretty sure the workers are idiots who don’t know what they’re doing, and that most of them can probably be fired without affecting anything important. Venture capitalists spent the 2010s buying up nearly every online media property they could, and then subsequently driving them into the ground because they didn’t actually know anywhere near as much about “how journalism should work” as they thought they did.
Semafor reported this week that some tech executives from Palantir — yes, the Peter Thiel Palantir — have decided that Hollywood just doesn’t know what it’s doing and that they should actually be the ones making movies. Following in the footsteps of cinematic luminaries like Rick Santorum and Ben Shapiro, they are looking for investors in their new right-wing movie production company, called Founders Films. They already have plans for several movies celebrating the United States and Israeli militaries as well as documentaries about “[Elon] Musk, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, who led the development of nuclear-powered submarines.”
You know what else they want to make? A three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
Please, try to contain your excitement.
Via Semafor:
In a pitch deck circulated to investors in recent months, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett are raising money for Founders Films, a new production company based in Dallas that aims to push for films with a nationalistic bent and unsubtle political overtones. The company said its projects would adhere to a set of rules: “Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”
I suppose the best thing one could say about it is that they’re not just planning to film scripts written by AI robots.
“The American Brand is broken. Hollywood is AWOL. Movies have become more ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining. Large segments of American and international viewers are underserved. Production costs have soared and sales are flagging,” the deck, which is labeled confidential, says. Founders aims to be a production studio that would also co-finance projects, distribute films, and engage in brand partnerships.
So, in order to counter movies that they see as “ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining,” they intend to make deliberately ideological content aimed explicitly at a right-wing audience. Content by which, quite frankly, it is hard to imagine anyone, regardless of their ideological beliefs, would not be bored to death.
This three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged would not be the first, by the way. Another three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged came out in 2011, 2012, and 2014. The first installment starred a pre-“Orange is the New Black” Taylor Schilling, and absolutely no one else I’ve ever heard of. It did not do well! It lost a lot of money at the box office, because, as it turns out, even conservatives can’t sit through that shit.
So these dudes, who believe they will be so much better at making movies than all those bad Hollywood liberals, have decided that they are going to invest someone’s money (because remember, they’re looking for investors!) into three movies about the free market that the free market has already adamantly rejected. Genius.
But wait, it somehow gets worse!
The slate includes 102 Minutes, a feature film about the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 (“courage is contagious,” the tagline reads) […] and a film about killing Qasem Soleimani.
A movie about the evacuation of the World Trade Center? So just … people screaming and dying for 102 minutes? Is that a thing people want to see?
Not to be confused with the 2000’s stoner comedy Pineapple Express, the deck pitches Operation: Pineapple Express, a movie about the “botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Then there’s The Greatest Game, a “multi-season, global spy thriller that lays bare China’s plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power by showing their operations and sometimes devastating impact from Kenya to the Atacama desert in northern Chile.”
I honestly don’t have the words for how deeply unpleasant all of that sounds. It’s hard to imagine too much, in terms of cinematic entertainment, that could possibly be a worse time than any of that. It seems that they can’t even manage to describe an idea for a movie without making it seem vastly less entertaining than watching paint dry.
And yet, there’s more.
Founders’ proposed film slate also includes Roaring Lion, a movie about the recent attack against Iran, which depicts Israel as “striving for nuclear non-proliferation and exercising its right of self-defense against a crazed regime intent on destroying it.” The proposed projects also include When the Towers Fall, a film about Israel’s 2024 booby-trapped pager operation against Hezbollah.
Well, you can’t say they don’t have a formula.
But in case you were wondering what, exactly, it is that they’re going for here, Sankar detailed some of it on his Substack last year:
I remember growing up as an immigrant kid at the end of the Cold War, watching movies like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. These movies were the pump-up material of Peak America. They were awesome, and they instilled a healthy aversion to ushanka-wearing commies, for good measures.
Sankar then goes on about how he wants more movies dedicated to “inspiring” Americans to hate China the way they used to inspire people to hate the Soviet Union — because, again, this guy is very sick of all the ideological movies coming out of Hollywood.
Breaking out of our cultural malaise will require the studios to wake up and choose America. But it will also require a new crop of artists who are disenchanted with the status quo and who can re-enchant audiences with new, well-told stories. Something like this happened in the ‘70s, when upstart filmmakers like Milius, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg burst onto the scene. The film industry had fallen into a cynical, downbeat rut in the era of Watergate and Vietnam Syndrome. The upstarts made it fun to go to the movies again. They brought back heroes, villains, and romance. They rekindled the flame of the American Cinematic Universe.
Yes, if there’s one thing we’re lacking these days, it is movies about heroes and villains. Perhaps someone should consider making a movie based on a comic book?
Naturally, the point of all this nonsense is that conservatives want to control the culture so that they can control the nation, as if they don’t already do that. The problem they’ve always had with that, of course, is that they’re not especially creative — which might explain why practically every one of these movie ideas is based on a true event of some kind.
That being said, there are a whole lot of people out there who will happily sit through anything that tells them they’re wonderful, the America they want to exist is wonderful and which upholds their worldview, no matter how obviously terrible it sounds.
Unless, it seems, it’s a three part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
If they had guts, they’d do CGI Ayn Rand getting it on with CGI Trump and being extremely dissatisfied with the equipment and results. They won’t, so come on South Park guys, use your talents.
The founders also plan a Car Wash sequel, Atlas Scrubbed.