I'm going to start by answering the question in my title first.
No. Hollywood is not going to listen. Because the reason they're doing this isn't the reason you'd think.
I want to show you a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
I've spoken before about Christopher Nolan's adaptation of "The Odyssey." Nolan is a famed director with a long list of movies that people love, including the Batman trilogy with Christian Bale, "Inception," and, of course, "Interstellar." Even Nolan's less popular films have attracted loyal fan bases, with "Tenet" among them.
The point of this is that Nolan is a celebrated director with a rabid and dedicated fanbase, even among the "normies." People trust Nolan to make a good film, no matter what subject he's tackling, be it a fictional superhero or Robert Oppenheimer.
Yet even all that success and all that trust couldn't stop his latest trailer for "The Odyssey" — his upcoming film saturated with so much modernity that it might as well not be depicted as an ancient epic at all — from receiving an overwhelming amount of dislikes vs likes on YouTube. As That Park Place reported, the like to dislike ration is massive:
Christopher Nolan has earned a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers, but that hasn’t shielded his latest project from mounting backlash. The newest trailer for The Odyssey has been hit with an overwhelming wave of dislikes on YouTube, adding another chapter to the growing list of controversies surrounding Universal Pictures’ adaptation of Homer’s legendary epic.
According to publicly available estimates from browser extensions that track YouTube dislikes, the trailer currently sits at approximately 39,000 likes compared to roughly 118,000 dislikes—nearly a 3-to-1 dislike-to-like ratio.
Everyone saw this coming. Time after time, major studios are introducing modern leftist concepts or "wokeness" into entertainment, from gaming to movies, and they always fail. A lot of money spent for next to nothing gained, if not losing tons of cash.
This has been happening for years now, so why do they keep doing it? Why aren't they listening?
Because you're not the audience.
These creations aren't supposed to entertain you. How much money they make doesn't matter.
This is an ideological investment.
If you're like me, you're a huge fan of C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia." I was raised on it. My mom would read it to me before bed. My grandma would put on the BBC adaptation of the books when I was at her house. I would read them again and again as a man and found that, despite it being a series for kids, the stories only get deeper as you age. These books grow up with you, and it's because they represent something far deeper than a simple adventure in a foreign land.
Narnia's Aslan is an allegory for Christ. That much is obvious, but it's more than just that. It's a display of bravery, redemption, and — something I think is so important — a belief in hard moral lines.
Netflix got its hands on the rights to make live-action adaptations, and what are they doing with them?
We're being told by producers and directors that this "won't be your grandmother's Narnia" and it's all about "Rock n' Roll." Aslan, the aforementioned allegory for Christ, will be voiced by Meryl Streep.
Read: Netflix Is About to Ruin 'The Chronicles of Narnia' With Their Own 'Rings of Power' Moment
Do you see what's happening here? They're not making Narnia for you. They're redefining it, the story, its most important character, and the lessons behind it, for your children. They want their reinterpretations to be the ones your kids identify as "Narnia." Whatever Lewis was trying to teach gets thrown out the window, and it gets replaced by whatever vapid, morally nebulous lesson they want to impress on the ignorant and the youthful.
It's more and more apparent to me that the only people who need to learn a lesson here are us. We need to understand that they're not out to entertain us and just keep missing the mark because they can't get out of their own way. This is an intentional redefining of the foundational stories our society uses as guidelines so that we're subtly redirected toward more of their way of thinking.
And their way of thinking revolves around being self-serving, unmistakably anti-Christian, and shallow in every discernible way. It's meant to eliminate bravery in the face of great odds, make traditional Western values seem out of touch and outdated, and most importantly, push the idea of indefinable moral lines so that what is and isn't moral can easily be changed when necessary.
They don't need to learn a lesson about creativity; we need to learn why they're doing it and make this common knowledge.
