Article

Culture

Film & TV

12 June 2025

5 min read

The death of Hollywood

Out of the ashes, new stories will rise

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

Seth Rogan's The Studio, a Hollywood satire.

Apple TV.

There is no more obvious sign of the ailing of the Hollywood behemoth (if not to say, its actual death) than the utter failure of Disney’s latest live-action re-release of Snow White.

According to Forbes, Disney’s total investment in the movie, including production and marketing, likely exceeded $350mn. To break even, it would have needed to take around $500mn gross at the box office, after distribution and movie theatre cuts. To date it has made just under $200million.

If nothing else, that is a tremendous waste of money. But the essential problem seems to have been that the movie’s creators were trying to bend themselves (and the story) into pretzel-shaped contortions to satisfy the various demanding (and contradictory) ideological axioms of LalaLand. The result? Not only do they fail on their own terms: a movie about a young princess finding her inner girl power and leading an oppressed people to overthrow a tyrannical autocrat ends by setting up a new regime under one unchallengeable and all powerful ruler: a system of “Snow-White Supremacy”. It also fails on the archetypal axioms of story. There’s a reason why parents still read to their children the traditional version of Snow White, which scholars believe to be so long-living and so “true” that its roots seem traceable as far back as Ancient Greece. Modern storytellers mess with that long lineage of audience appeal at their peril; as no doubt several Disney executives have now found to their cost.

Last month the veteran Hollywood screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan concluded, after watching the last annual offering of glamour-slick virtue signalling that is the Oscars, that Hollywood is indeed a dying beast. He argued that the collective movie-making culture has become so captive to a certain ideological mindset that it has prioritised that over the more basic and primary objective of telling stories. When ideology overrides the essence of storytelling - delivering stories reflective of life as it actually is and as we find it - then the art suffers and audiences instinctively turn away.

Why? Because we all come to stories to find truth (even if it is dressed up in the “lie” of fiction). The problem with the ideological mindset approach to storytelling is not that it does not start with good intentions (let’s say a value like “compassion”); but that it drives towards and ends with outcomes very far from life as we know it to be. So, for example, compassion for allowing female-identifying men into women’s sport ends up with Olympic crowds applauding a man punching various women in the face to earn himself a gold medal. Or well-intentioned young people marching throughout the cities of Europe in support of terror groups who behead babies. There is a cognitive dissonance between the makers of movies imbibing and propagating this sort of mindset and their audience of millions.

No wonder those audiences are tuning out. Because the central thing that people want from art are good stories. Good stories make us nod and say: yep, life is like that - however far-fetched the premise or the setting may be. Bad stories make us feel like someone has tried to sell us a lie. They are “phoney” - and at a gut level, we know it.

So, if Hollywood’s time in the limelight (and the pay dirt) may be running out, where should we look for a new resurgence (dare we say, resurrection?) in the art of storytelling?

“Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.” Collaboration seems to produce the goods.

It would be foolhardy to come down too hard on an answer to that question, since ultimately stories can and have come from anywhere. But if I had to lay down money on the kind of environment out of which any resurgence in the storytelling industry (whether of the moving image or the written word) will come, I would be betting on some sort of life-affirming, collaborative, creative network or community based around the foundational values of truth, goodness and beauty, and motivated by a shared desire to see the renewal and revitalisation of Western culture everywhere.

Such networks have been springing up with the ubiquity and rapidity of mushroom colonies all over the West, particularly in the US and across Europe.

Angel Studios has emerged as one of the more front-footed of these. This is a US-based media company that produces and distributes films and TV series with inspirational and faith-based themes: projects like The Chosen - the globe-conquering pay-it-forward re-telling of the Four Gospels - and Sound of Freedom, the latter grossing over $250million worldwide. (Disney take note.)

While Angel’s content may have arisen out of niche audience demand (it was founded as a successor to the VidAngel app that sourced child- and faith-friendly content), other collaborative networks exist with a broader mission for cultural renewal. The Everything Network is one such example. A UK-based Christian network of leaders across multiple fields of society, it operates from the principle that, for centuries, society has benefitted from the way Christianity has contributed to the whole of life: from the art we create, to the laws we make, and the way we care for those in need. If God cares about everything, then the invitation persists for us to work towards the renewal of all things.

This includes the stories we tell. Hence, under one aegis, authors, poets, or screenwriters are connected with financial backers, producers, directors, animators, marketeers and so on. Implicit within the network’s mission is a recognition that stories have the power not just to entertain, but to change the world. For good and for bad.

Just look at the Bible.

At a more modest level, creative networks are coming together all over the West: in churches, across the broader arts and entertainment landscape and so on, in part as support communities for people working in those industries, but also as incubators for collaborative output. Some are more ambitious than others. And many are proving the truth of the proverb: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil.” Collaboration seems to produce the goods.

So, if truth, beauty and goodness are the weapons on the battlefield of imagination, and the soul of the world is the prize, perhaps these emerging creative networks are the divisions, the battalions, the platoons deployed along the front line. Time will tell which are most effective.

What is certain is that, long after Hollywood’s spell over us all is broken, humans are still going to want to hear good stories. Stories that tell us something meaningful and true about life as it appears before us.

I’ll have my bucket of popcorn ready just in case.

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Explainer

Culture

Gaza

Israel

Politics

2 June 2025

5 min read

Politics is the only way to solve the tragedy of Gaza

Trump is not the first person to want to create a Riviera by the Mediterranean.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A sign projected on to the Houses of Parliament reads: how many is too many.

A projection protest sign, London.

Christian Aid.

Whichever side you take in the Israel-Gaza conflict, the stories can't help bring a sense of desperation. Images of starving children, the fate of Jewish hostages still held in darkness - either way, this remains a place of unimaginable suffering. And meanwhile, the bombs keep dropping, people die, and Hamas retains its hold.

Among Israel’s friends, voices have been murmuring a radical solution to the problem of Gaza. Donald Trump’s plan was to raze the territory to the ground, shift 50 million tonnes of debris and displace its people to neighbouring countries to build the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ in what had until now, been Gaza. The plan might have been met with some amusement when it was aired, but it gave permission for many within Israel to think similar thoughts.

Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, recently claimed that after the Israeli operation, “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” Many within Israel seem to think the stubborn, Hamas-ridden enemy living next door needs to be eradicated. To a population weary of decades of conflict, fearing that there will never be peace while Hamas remains in Gaza, and aware of how difficult it is to winkle out the Islamic terrorist group while the Palestinian population remains there, you can understand the attraction of this radical solution.

However, the Israelis might have good reason to be cautious. And that is not a counsel from their opponents - but from their own history.

In the early 130s AD, the boot was on the other foot. It was the mighty Gentile Roman Empire that ruled over the same patch of land, which they were soon to call Palestina. Jews were a minority, but they still harked back to their long roots in the land, the days of Joshua and King David, and even more recently to the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom 200 years before - the last time before the modern state of Israel that Jews were in control of the land.

The emperor at the time, Hadrian, passed through Jerusalem in 130 AD, along with his entourage and his lover, the young slave boy Antinous. He started to paganise the city, erecting statues of gods and emperors, even of his young favourite, all of them offensive to Jewish sensibilities. The smouldering resentment soon erupted with a revolt led by a fierce and determined Jewish fighter, Bar Kokhba. This was the second Jewish uprising after the earlier one in the 60s that had led to the destruction of the great Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, under the reign of the emperor Vespasian in 70 AD. For the Romans, one revolt might just be tolerated, two was too much.

Hadrian came to the same conclusion as Bezalel Smotrich – a rebellious territory had to be erased from the map, although this time, it was Jerusalem that was to be eliminated, not Gaza. Its Jewish population was to be scattered, its name deleted, and memories of past glories buried for good.

And so, in 135 AD, the bulldozers moved in. Jerusalem was effectively flattened, and a Roman city built on its ruins. Aelia Capitolina was its new name, a smaller city, yet decadently built around the worship of Greek and Roman gods, with splendid gates, pagan Temples, a classic Roman Forum, expansive columned streets – not quite the Riviera of the middle east, but maybe the Las Vegas. ‘Jerusalem’ was scrubbed from the map.

At the centre of the sacred Jewish Temple Mount, Hadrian erected a statue of himself. He deliberately planted a statue of Aphrodite over the very spot where the early Christians insisted that the death and resurrection of Jesus had taken place – where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today. Circumcision was outlawed, many Jews were killed, and those remaining were banned from the city, dispersed anywhere where they could find shelter. In fact, the map of the Old City of Jerusalem today is still marked by this design, with the two main Hadrianic streets diverging south from the Damascus Gate, with archaeological remains of the Roman city still visible for visitors.

Yet of course it didn’t work. No-one calls it Aelia today. People's attachment to land goes deep. The Jews could not forget their roots in this patch of the earth's surface. As Simon Sebag Montefiore put it: “the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered”, praying three times a day throughout the following centuries: “may it be your will that the temple be rebuilt soon in our days.”

Palestinian attachment to land is similarly strong. Nearly 80 years after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, families still cling on to the keys to homes that were taken from them during that traumatic period. Like the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem, they too, like people across the world, have a deep attachment to ancestral lands, which go back to the ‘Arabs’ mentioned in the book of Acts, to whom St Peter preached in the early days of the Christian church.

Executive decisions by distant rulers such as the emperor Hadrian or President Trump might seem like neat solutions to intractable problems. But they seldom work in the long term.

The famous biblical injunction ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ was meant not as an encouragement to violence but the exact reverse. It was mean to set a limit to the development of blood feuds, which could, out of anger and trauma, so easily lead to disproportionate reaction and never-ending vendettas. When St Paul wrote “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’”, he was recalling an ancient piece of Jewish wisdom that set limits on human capacity to sort out intractable problems by violence. He knew a better way: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford and a Seen & Unseen writer, argues that there are really only four ways you can deal with neighbours who prove difficult: you can try to control them, cause them to flee, you can kill them, or you can do politics – in other words, try to negotiate some form of common life, as ultimately happened in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and so many places of long-standing conflict.

Politics, the business of learning how to live together across difference, is messy, complicated and hard work. Especially so when there are deep hurts from the past. Yet, as the failure of Hadrian’s radical solution shows, there is no real alternative in the long term.

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Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
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