At first glance everyone already knows how this is going to play out: there are conservative or liberal oriented movies, and then people on the corresponding side of the US political divide will watch one or the other, and reject the other. That happens. But there's a little more to it now. There is a tendency for a middle group to reject anything remotely like Hollywood liberal inclinations, among people who aren't actually politically conservative. At least that's how I see things playing out.
The early steps are well-known enough. In movies like the Star Wars sequels, or Terminator sequels, or later Marvel movies, they tend to build up female protagonists, by "nerfing" or weakening male characters, and gender swap characters, to make white characters into minorities. Of course this is regarded as fair and inclusive by some, or many, liberals, and rejected by conservatives.
There's a lot less to cite about the opposite trend. Hollywood is liberal-oriented, so an example of a movie just for conservatives is harder to come up with. Let's check with Google on that:
Major Hollywood studios rarely label or market films as explicitly "conservative," but 2025 saw a notable rise in mainstream faith-based projects, military/action features, and traditional values narratives. Notable examples include David from Angel Studios, alongside faith-themed and traditional family hits like The Chosen and House of David.
Right, I've never heard of those. I saw a 20 year old (or so) time travel movie about conservative Christian ideology awhile back; it was odd seeing anything like that. I had to look up what that was: Time Changer, from 2002. It was interesting at least seeing that opposing view, that people might re-adopt values from the 1800s (reject swearing, wearing more modest clothing, all the parts of a very literal interpretation of the Bible, etc.).
Let's skip ahead: this is mostly about the reactions to the Christopher Nolan Odyssey film. Of course, since they've replaced Helen of Troy with a black actor, and included a trans-man as a Greek warrior the issue is that it includes liberal signaling. But the movie is kind of neutral, related to the rest of it, per reviews on both sides.
That brings up an interesting context: more conservative viewers might either decide to never see the film, because of those issues, or if they did see it would need to find reasons to dislike it, even if ordinarily it would seem like a good movie to them. That's simple enough. You can just dislike the story treatment, the character development, any changes from the original Greek myth version, and so on. And more liberally oriented viewers can find plenty to like as well, to justify why this socially progressive film is good, not only for being socially progressive, but also as a film.
There is a set of Youtubers who benefit quite a bit from this divide, by outlining why the liberal orientation is a bad thing, for viewers who want to feel common ground with others related to disliking that. The twist is that they're not only conservatives (the viewers, or the Youtubers). The guy who makes the Critical Drinker Youtube channel stands out among them, related to popularity, and to quality of content (authored by Will Jordan, the name of "the Drinker," per online inpu).
He communicates clearly, and expresses ideas well. His perspective seems fine, although it does tend to become repetitive. His image gimmick is that he is Scottish, and drinks while watching films (supposedly; he has sort of moved beyond that early branding theme, although he still does reference it).
I see his perspective as matching one part of a "classic liberal" view. This relates to someone who was liberal in the 1980s or 90s, but who then fell into a middle ground for political perspective when the left shifted further left. There is one other complication to this: it's normal for people to be more liberal when younger, and then more conservative when older. This seems to happen for some of the reason I've just described, that society keeps changing, and when people fall behind the pace of the changes they are automatically a conservative. I'll give an example.
My parents were quite liberal in the 1970s. They were open to people of all races, nationalities, and social classes being regarded as equal. My dad was even a social worker; that was his career. But then as acceptance for people being gay became mainstream in the 1990s, and not just different races, that was harder for them to adopt. A couple of my close friends were gay, and they never seemed to express disapproval for that, but they still saw people being attracted to the same sex as somewhat unnatural.
Is it possible that it is unnatural? The question only makes sense within a conservative worldview, that can draw on categories of natural norms, instead of seeing these as assigned by society, and open to change over time.
So they don't really hate gay people, but aren't comfortable with that theme. It's the same as for others who can't relate to transgender self-definition today, or people being gender neutral, or whatever else. People who were liberally oriented in the 90s didn't have to accept these later designations, because they were either unheard of or very uncommon then.
I suppose some of this carries over to other minority issues, related to immigrants and such, or maybe to issues related to openness to societal class level changes, but I won't make this discussion more complicated than it has to be. Feminism also works out to be a complicated topic. Of course where I'm from, a conservative rural area, in Western Pennsylvania (not that it matters; rural areas are fairly culturally consistent in the US), people are more racist, and against any of the modern progressive agenda and perspective, and for most probably even the older forms of it (classic racism).
Related to that film, the Odyssey, it was interesting how the Critical Drinker, and others, were up against the challenge of explaining why they didn't like it. It should be easy, right; any parts of the plot or character development could be regarded negatively. Or the lighting, the action sequence development, use of CGI, and so on. But in this case most reviewers felt that it's a pretty good film, so lots of that wouldn't work.
The Critical Drinker settled on the portrayal of the main character as the main critique, related to how Matt Damon acted out Odyssius. Not so much as a personal criticism of Matt Damon's acting, but more the direction. Even pro-liberal reviewers said that his character is a bit war-weary and one dimensional related to character depth, for most of the movie, so it was simple enough, and a natural choice. Then the ending apparently doesn't match the original version, so that's easy to dislike. And the scenery apparently doesn't look like Greece, which would mean more to me if I'd actually been to Greece (parts related to there; I guess Troy was in North-Eastern Africa, so generally near the Middle East, sort of?).
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original source cited in the image, worldhistory.org |
It's an interesting divide, coupling "classic liberals" with conservatives, related to one part of their media preference. Maybe they're not so far apart, in terms of general perspective and worldview? The US isn't set up for there to be any moderate middle ground though, politically. People are suppose to be conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican. Lots of media tone reinforces this. Trump throws that off a bit, for being so extreme, but in general the society really does break along that line, and media content does, related to news, television shows, movies, etc.
Then one other irony is that Trump isn't really a conservative. He doesn't care about guns rights, or abortion, or really even about minority issues, although he can play the role of a borderline racist easily enough. He is pro-Trump, and the rest is flexible.
So what does this mean? Does this odd part of the culture war open up a space for moderate perspective? Probably not. It's just an idiosyncrasy, related to how some films work out, which I suppose would carry over to streamed television content.
These commentators aren't really leveling out the cultural field, in terms of saying that it's fine for people to be trans-gender, or that racial issues shouldn't matter anymore. It's easy to interpret them as saying the opposite, even though they're not, supporting negative views on racism and transgender acceptance (with negative here meaning bad, being racist, or transphobic).
They earn Youtube views and income by saying what people want to hear. They really do think that Helen of Troy shouldn't be a black character, and that casting a physically small trans man as a soldier doesn't really make sense. But they're not necessarily racist or transphobic, or unusually supportive of race or trans acceptance issues, more kind of in the middle, not particularly concerned with these themes, or against them. It's easy to take that in different ways, as a viewer, depending on your own biases.
That's how the 90s went; these things weren't issues, and people let others be however they wanted to be. You could change your gender back then, and you wouldn't be hated, or seen as some sort of progressive champion. You'd have been a social role and status outlier, which wouldn't have been regarded as good or bad, by most people. Conservatives would have found it off-putting, as they do today. For liberals it couldn't have seemed as normal, since it wasn't as conventional, but it still could have seemed fine.
It's interesting how "political correctness" has changed since, although it doesn't really shift the landscape of these ideas or positions all that much. Words like "oriental" became regarded as negative (pejorative), and fell by the wayside. The pronoun theme became complicated. None of all of that changed the world and personal perspectives all that much though; even among supporters it was regarded as the language simply catching up to modified and updated perspectives. Sometimes the changes don't stick, and they seem like overreach in retrospect, but often they do.
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