If more evidence were needed that the progressive snowflake era of Hollywood has officially melted, “Basic Instinct,” a movie that cemented the ice-pick-wielding post-feminist man-slayer in the character of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell, is back.
Amazon MGM just bought a spec script from Joe Eszterhas — yes, the man who brought the sexy in “Flashdance,” “Jade,” “Sliver” and “Showgirls” as well as “Basic Instinct” in the ’80s and ’90s — in a $2 million deal to write what he has called an “anti-woke” reboot.
“I don’t believe in woke and I don’t believe in being politically correct because I think it’s not the truth, and I like the truth spoken,” Mr. Eszterhas, who gets an additional $2 million if the film gets made, told me in a recent interview about the deal. As for how the movie will be “anti-woke,” he wouldn’t say a lot other than it would be “raunchy,” but I got the impression that he’d know it when he wrote it.
Hollywood is rapidly shifting away from the socially conscious framework that for more than a decade has driven its narratives, casting and green lights.
A new series on Netflix called “The Hunting Wives” has Malin Akerman dressing up as the saucy Texas wife of a rich businessman, complete with big hair, a big rifle, a Southern twang and an affair with the teenage son of the pastor. Nearly everyone on the show is hot, horny and white.
No less an authority than “South Park” declared last month that “woke is dead” in the season premiere that went viral for featuring President Trump crawling naked through the desert in a fake public service announcement. In the same episode, Cartman loses hope after learning that “woke” has died. His once politically correct principal has suddenly embraced religion, inviting Jesus into their public school. (Cartman’s later bid to asphyxiate himself with the car running in the garage fails because it is an electric vehicle.)
And the furor over the actress Sydney Sweeney’s sexy ad for American Eagle in which she slithers on a couch while extolling her “jeans” (jeans/genes — you get it)? The right-wing outrage machine has revved up over a few critical comments that the ad somehow is code for white supremacy. But, surprise: It’s had no echo in Burbank or Beverly Hills, where not so long ago Ms. Sweeney might have had to apologize for her insensitivity and make a donation to the A.C.L.U.
Trends are sometimes hard to pinpoint, and “wokeism” itself is a loaded term. For the purpose of this essay, I will define it as the belief in progressive values aimed at correcting systemic injustices tied to race, gender and other marginalized traits.
It is no leap to say that Hollywood, an enclave of liberalism nonetheless largely run by white men, was generally aligned with these values for decades. But after coming in for criticism with #OscarsSoWhite and for the lack of diversity among directors and top showrunners, in recent years there was a far more deliberate effort at inclusiveness in hiring and storytelling. FX’s “Reservation Dogs,” written and starring Native Americans, was celebrated along with the long-running Amazon series “Transparent” and HBO’s short-lived Black horror show “Lovecraft Country.” Hollywood’s newest stars and power players — Ryan Coogler, Lena Waithe, Quinta Brunson — were going to change the game.
The new rules resulted in a strict if unspoken set of boundaries that tacitly put certain topics and categories outside the accepted circles of casting and green lights. It isn’t only that conservative groups gripe that “their” stories — by which I think they mean religious stories or maybe a heroic epic about the fight to end Roe v. Wade — don’t get produced. But I also can’t count the number of times I’ve heard quiet frustration from a reasonably accomplished white male screenwriter who felt cast out by the top talent agencies. In the process of “recentering” Hollywood, some people suddenly felt shunted to the side.
That has led to its own kind of backlash, possibly because the leadership in Hollywood remains overwhelmingly white and male.
This shift had been coming well before Mr. Trump’s election in November. The entertainment industry is nothing if not finely attuned to the social and cultural signals that affect the box office, streaming subscriptions and the market. The pendulum that swung all the way left after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, with among other things the installation of D.E.I. leaders at the studios, started to go the other way in 2023.
This seemed to track with the rest of the country, which soon voted Mr. Trump back into office, where he has made the eradication of D.E.I. a major goal. Now nearly every major Hollywood studio has buried those policies. This is happening in an environment where the Trump administration appeared to extract concessions from the Paramount-Skydance merger in the form of a $16 million settlement with CBS News over what legal experts called a nonsense lawsuit . When the Paramount deal was finally OK’d, one of the first announcements Skydance made was about its plan to eliminate D.E.I.
At the talent agencies where Hollywood’s hustlers are out selling scripts and projects, no longer are queer writers of color, for example, so much in demand. No longer are preferred pronouns expected on your email signature.
So was “woke” all performative? Was it just a nod to a liberal orthodoxy that’s now rejected as bad for business?
Yes, and maybe. Hollywood itself is undergoing a moment of self-examination — or maybe just truthfulness — as prominent people like the megaproducer Brian Grazer step forward to admit that they voted for Mr. Trump. At Disney, movie after Pixar movie has been driven by themes that some might consider woke — acceptance of immigrants (“Turning Red,” “Elemental”), diverse ethnicity (“Coco,” “Soul”) and the experience of being “othered” (“Elio,” about a misfit boy mistaken by aliens as an ambassador for Earth). One top executive there admitted to me privately that the movies have come to seem one-note.
And maybe they are.
In the end, Hollywood is in the business of giving its audience what it wants, not what it thinks it should want. In a place that remains a bastion of liberal values, a quiet conversation is underway about what those values really mean, what they cost, whether resistance to the most showbizzy of presidents is worth the price and whether the liberal pendulum swung too far in an industry aimed at serving all of America.
In the end, it’s not the anti-wokeness that will give Mr. Eszterhas a hit, even if maybe that helped get it greenlit. It will be whether people like watching it.
Sharon Waxman is the founder, CEO and editor in chief of The Wrap News.
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