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

Belief

Books

Creed

Poetry

23 May 2025

6 min read

Why a book? The words that change the world and me

Living by a literature that’s imbibed in countless cultures.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits on a pier intently reading a book on his lap.

Ben White on Unsplash.

I have a belief system, a story that I live by, a lens through which I perceive the world. That doesn’t make me unusual or in any way different to you – we all have those, whether we’re aware of them or not. What may make me different to you is that mine are primarily explained to me through a book – or, more accurately, a library of sixty-six books – which we call the Bible.

The story that I live by, that I breathe in and out, is bound. It sits within a cover, it moves through pages, it unfolds according to a contents page – it has genre, it has authors, it has punctuation.

And I’ve never really found this odd.

I think it’s because I’m what Charles Taylor would call a ‘storied creature’, my default is to make sense of the world on a largely imaginative level. I’m also quite romantic; poetically inclined, one could say. It sometimes feels as though words flow through my veins – if you were to cut me open, I may just bleed a puddle of my favourite Jane Austen monologues straight onto the floor. And so, my personality happens to lend itself spectacularly well to living my life according to a spiritual, sixty-six book wide, library. I’ve never really had to wrestle with the strangeness of such a thing, I’ve never sat down and stared the oddness of it in the eye, I’ve never even really asked myself (or God): why a book?

I feel I should pause here, and offer a quick Rory Stewart-esque explainer, just so that we’re all on the same page.

What I, and Christians through time and place, call the Bible is an anthology of sixty-six books, written by around forty authors, in three languages, over the span of 1,400-ish years. Within it, one can find poetry, narrative, apocalyptic literature, erotic literature, lists and figures, instructions and explanations. It is – year in and year out – the bestselling book in the world, with over 100 million copies sold or gifted each year. The New York Times Bestseller List actually omits it from its rundown, because otherwise it would always be so boringly there – sitting comfortably right at the top. No other book ever comes close. Words from this anthology of literature are graven into the floors and walls of the Houses of Parliament, they’re woven into almost every work of Shakespeare, they’re spray-painted clumsily onto billboards in the city I call home.

And so, I guess, in one way, the answer to my question – why a book? – is all of that. The peculiar far-reaching resonance of the methodology speaks for itself. I think of Robin Williams’ impassioned monologue in Dead Poets Society…

‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.’

… And I get it. I understand why it was literature that was compiled, why language and words were the tool of choice. For better and for worse, biblical words and ideas have changed the world – they have been ‘the making of the western mind’, just ask Tom Holland. And so, pragmatically, one could argue that the Bible being a book (or a book of books) means that it has successfully imbedded itself in countless cultures, while also transcending them. It’s gone further, lasted longer, sunk deeper than any other form of communication could. Such is the power of words.

But to stop my pondering there feels like I’d be stopping short. I’m not sure that a distant, pragmatic, academic answer is one that I feel satisfied with.

So, this morning, I sat down with a cup of tea, a pen, my notebook, and a newfound curiosity - and I asked myself, and God, why a book?

Why poetry?

Why story?

Why wordplay?

Why have I – an educated, arguably disenchanted, most definitely left-brained, twenty-first century adult - been so willing to let these things mould my interior life? Why am I so moved by them? Moved to action, moved to tears, moved to rage. How can I read something that was written a millennia ago, in a part of the world I have never trod on, and somehow feel as if it is a love letter written exclusively to my own soul?

I think that those are the real questions - the questions to which I have both a thousand and zero answers.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Zero answers, because I fundamentally think that it’s a spiritual thing, a God-designed thing, a thing that sits beyond any explanation I could piece together. The God that I believe exists wants me to know about him, wants me to learn and study, wants me to get glimpses of how thinks, how he works, he feels about me – and you. That’s a wild and wonderous thing. That reality leads me be stunned not only at the methodology, but the desire behind it, as St. Augustine wrote,

‘the whole Bible does nothing but tell of God’s love’.

And so, this literature, to me, is a source of truth, leaning into Iain McGilchrist’s inkling that,

‘the fact that religions and mystical and spiritual traditions have always had to use language in a poetic way doesn’t mean that what they’re talking about is not real, it means it is ultimately real.’

The biblical literature uses words to take us to the edge of them.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Sometimes reading it feels like a balm on my heart, other times it feels like a wrestle in the dirt. But I guess that’s the beauty of it being a book, right? My worldview sits within a piece of literature that is adorned with my scribbles, tear stains, tea spills. A book that meets me every single day, ready to read me as I read it, giving my as many questions as it does answers.

So, why a book? Because now that I think about it, it is odd. The powerful resonance of words for all cultures at all times, perhaps? Or the way that poetry was designed to make a bee line for the deepest parts of us? Or the fact that it is only through language that we can talk about the things that go beyond it?

There are a thousand human-sized answers, if you really need them. I happen to enjoy the mystically-charged zero answers, myself.

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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.

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