The Downfall of "Conservative" Movies and TV is Complete, Pop Star Fandoms Becoming Religious Cults, Teens Using Less Alcohol, Drugs--But Way More Depressed (The Five for 06/06/25)
Legendary Actor Directing a New Movie--At Age 95. Christian Bale as Frankenstein. Final Stranger Things season dropping in "three volumes."
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter, but don’t always make the front page.
It’s Friday, so let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
Another chapter has been written in the “pop stars as cults” book, as actress and singer Selena Gomez was trashed for [checks notes] looking at an NBA score during a Beyonce concert.
From Yahoo
But Selena quickly followed up with a photo of herself seemingly sitting in the bar area furthest away from the stage in her private suite, with her phone stuck onto the glass partition wall screening the sports game. “Still got my eye on the game,” she captioned the post, with Beyoncé’s performance seemingly in full swing in the background of the image.
Needless to say, many felt that this was disrespectful to Beyoncé, especially as Selena wasn’t even in the designated seating area for the show. One viral tweet simply shared a screenshot of Selena’s story with the caption: “booooooooooo” and a series of tomato emojis.
Keep in mind the source of the rage here. A grown adult looked at an NBA score on her phone, during a concert she paid to be at.
The “Beyhive” like “Swifties,” are largely filled with (mostly) women who treat their musical idol…as just that. An idol. This religion also has dogma…there are certain things you can’t speak about, like how Beyonce’s latest, Cowboy Carter isn’t very good.
There’s plenty of evidence here, as the album was critically panned and quickly fell off the billboard charts. But to the cult…not only is Beyonce the greatest country artist ever, she INVENTED the genre.
Like I said, dogma.
And when someone leaves the cult?
It requires a public declaration and recovery.
From Protestia on X.
And the next thing is to stop calling all of my merch and all my stuff, my Taylor Swift shrine. 'cause that was just, no, there are power in our words. And the last thing is I stopped wanting to be known as a Swifty, and I started wanting to be known as a follower of Christ because I used to just want people to know, oh, she likes Taylor Swift.
That's her personality trait. Oh my gosh, look at her. She's a swifty. Um. I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not ashamed of liking Taylor Swift, but that is not the number one thing that I want people to know about me anymore.
Much has been made about Gen Z males turning to the Christian faith, particularly Catholicism and Greek and Russian Orthadox Churches, while young women become “more secular.”
That’s not correct. A stadium concert and obsessive fandom is a religion all it’s own.
A very bad one that will leave people empty and alone, with plenty of absurd legalism (like scolding someone for looking at their phone). But it checks the boxes of religion nonetheless.
[two]
During the 2024 election, there was a trend going around on social media called “The Left Can’t Meme,” in which the political left tried to create memes…but missed that they’re supposed to be funny. Or at least clever. Or something other than this…
Uhhh…wut?
Well, the other side of the coin is…the political right can’t make movies and TV shows. Cultural commentator YouTube Channel Jose has a pretty good breakdown of the most obvious example of this, The Daily Wire’s Movie and TV division, which has consistently produced pretty bad movies (with a couple of exceptions as far as streaming and box office success—What is a Woman, Am I Racist and Lady Ballers all did well).
But DW also completely tanked an entire kids streaming service and laid off all the staff, botched a multi-picture deal with former Star Wars alum Gina Carano, canceled a Snow White movie mid production when star commentator/actress Brett Cooper left the company, and has failed to finish The Pendragon Cycle, a Game-of-Thrones-ish fantasy TV show with a reported $50M budget. The show was supposed to be out in 2023, and still hasn’t materialized. Pendragon, based on a popular novel series looks cool, but it was supposed to be out in November 2023, and still has no release date.
From YouTuber Jose:
"The Daily Wire failed to realize that they are serving a niche—conservatives who are so politically engaged that they regularly watch Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh. There are enough people like that to keep a modest conservative media company afloat, but certainly not enough to create a company that was hoping to one day rival Disney. They were grossly overestimating the power of their reach and how compelling their ideas are, and now it looks like they are in some trouble."
Boering’s departure from the company, I suspect, has something to do with all these massive investments and their limited or non-existent returns. The Pendragon Cycle in particular looks to be a massive money sink. The show would need to be a breakout hit to be in any way profitable—and I suspect that simply isn’t going to happen. It shows us The Daily Wire hasn’t learned the lesson from Lady Ballers: their audience doesn’t want mainstream entertainment. They want conservative-coded movies that speak to their biases."
One thing he gets wrong here—judging from the reactions on social media, Lady Ballers was a huge hit, as it was one of the hottest topics on Twitter when it released.
The underlying issue seems to be two fold:
A). Making movies and TV is hard….schedules and budgets are VERY tricky to get right. And these are not skills that a group of podcasters can pick up on the fly. DW frequently loses high profile talent from their platform (Candace Owens, Brett Cooper—a botched offer with Steven Crowder), so they don’t seem to manage their own budgets and people very well.
B). DW’s foray into this world was, in many ways, a reaction to just how agenda-driven entertainment became in the first half of the 2020’s. Now, that has changed. Creators like Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, Landman) are creating huge hits with shows that show, rather than preach, conservative values.
Turns out, Hollywood will produce conservative-leaning content…as that’s where the country has shifted right now, and it’s selling well.
We subscribed to DW+ for a year, mostly for the kids content. It turns out…there just wasn’t much there. The flagship show Chip Chilla, was just an Aldi brand of Bluey that our kids never really grabbed onto, and I can’t even remember what else the DW Kids network was offering. There’s so much good stuff on the large streaming networks that I haven’t seen yet, I wasn’t likely to tune back into any original movies after Terror on the Prairie (starring Carano and former UFC fighter Donald Cerone) was just…really bad.
Henry Ford famously said “"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Political conservatives may have SAID they wanted more conservative entertainment…but they really just meant “we want to watch good stuff that doesn’t offend us.”
And the big streamers are all doing that now. Unless DW can somehow make Pendragon as big as the HBO shows set in Westeros, we have reached the end of the “Conservative Movie and TV” experiment.
The Daily Wire saw how the political and social messaging was hurting Disney circa 2020, and thought they could win by pushing a message on the other side of the political spectrum.
Turns out, people don’t to be force fed politics in TV and movies at all.
[three]
“Turns out people don’t like to be force fed politics in TV and movies at all.”
Parks and Rec alum Nick Offerman (who’s a top notch actor) is having a really bad week, not because he got political, but because he has no understanding of the Streisand effect. The name comes from Barbara Streisand suing a photographer in the 90’s for taking a photo of her house. Nobody had really seen the photo. Until the lawsuit became national news…printing the photo everywhere.
The original meme, which is edited to portray Offerman’s character Ron throwing a PRIDE flag in the dumpster…didn’t have much traction. Until Offerman retweeted it with an insult.
Which triggered nearly 50,000 retweets and 15 million views on the meme. Plus, national coverage in outlets like Yahoo.
Meanwhile, another alum of Parks & Rec (and King of the Hill, and several other notable IP’s), Jonathan Joss, died from a gunshot wound outside of his home in a dispute with a neighbor that is…incredibly strange. The incident that led to Joss’s death started when Joss returned to the site of his recently burned down home, and discovered the distasteful display of his dog’s remains.
Other neighbors, however, told WOAI that Joss and his husband were harassed for their sexuality, but also agreed with numerous reports that they were “erratic” neighbors — and even shared that cops had once been called after Joss was seen walking around the street with a rifle while screaming.
Officers were called to the home at least 40 times for welfare checks and disputes with neighbors since January 2024, according to police.
Joss had stopped by the remains of his home Sunday to pick up a victim’s fire fund check from his mailbox, when his husband said they found the bones of one of their dogs hung on display. The actor started arguing with a neighbor over the sight, and was gunned down, Gonzales said.
Neighbor Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja, 56, was arrested blocks away shortly after — and reportedly told police “I shot him” with a rifle, according to court documents obtained by The Post.
It’s worth noting that Offerman, who’s net worth is $25 million (according to the internet—could be off, but he’s not broke) is super concerned that gay people might be “hurt” by a meme (that they only saw because Offerman retweeted).
But when a flesh and blood former coworker, who’s gay, was in distress, Offerman and his co-stars did not reach out or comment until after Jonathan’s murder. Joss had been running a GoFundMe after losing all his money (probably due to very poor decisions, based on his erratic behavior). That’s not to say that rich people should throw cash at the mentally ill (which often just increases the underlying issues by funding drug use), but Joss’s troubles had been apparent on social media for some time. From what we can tell, he got no help from Hollywood, one of the most narcissistic places on the planet.
There’s been a lot of buzz about PRIDE Month “dying” this year, with the main signals being less corporate sponsorship and attended events. Perhaps people are catching onto the fact that the “celebration” was mainly for the benefit of upper crust, coastal heterosexual liberals the whole time.
[four]
The kids are…sober, according to an article reporting on a new National Institute of Health study:
Alcohol use among high school seniors has dropped to 42%. For comparison, in 1997, the number was 75%. For 10th graders, the number has dropped from 65% to 26%, while 8th graders’ drinking has had an even steeper decline from 46%, to just 13%.
Many other experts have commented on Gen Z’s increasing turn to sobriety. Sybil Marsh, a physician specializing in family medicine and addiction, told TIME Magazine that drinking alcohol was once seen as “a badge of maturity,” but young people no longer feel that way — and take seriously the long-term health risks drinking can have on themselves.
“It is becoming clear that, for whatever reasons, today’s younger generations are just less interested in alcohol and are more likely than older generations to see it as risky for their health and to participate in periods of abstinence like Dry January,” George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said in a statement.
Drug use has also dropped. The NIH’s study says marijuana use among high school seniors has decreased from 39% to 26%. Vaping took a hit, too — in 2020, 35% of 12th graders reported they were using vapes. Today, that number stands at 21%.
While I tend to lean moderately towards decriminalization/legalization (for adults) as a way to prevent overdoses and accidental Fentanyl poisoning, and I realize that the vast majority of the readership of The Five probably experienced some combination of alcohol/tobacco/marijuana in high school…teenagers are still minors, and should not have access to substances. Their brains are developing, and heavy doses of THC can cause irreversible schizophrenia in teenagers.
That being said, I’m not sure that we should be celebrating this. Teen mental illness rates (specifically depression, anxiety and Borderline Personality Disorder) have doubled since the 90’s. It’s not that teens are “making better choices,” they’re just not making any choices at all except to stay home and constantly on screens.
I don’t exactly long for the days when we saw more high school kids die in drunk driving accidents…but I’m also not naive to think we’re better off as a society because teenagers have swapped mood-altering substances for crippling depression.
[five]
As always, let’s head into the weekend with a pop culture roundup:
[movies] Clint Eastwood just entered production on the latest movie he’s directing. He is 95. I incorrectly assumed last year’s release, Juror #2, would be Eastwood’s final film. Nope. He’s back in the saddle again. || Cillian Murphy isn’t in this summer’s zombie sequel 28 Years Later, but will appear in the next two sequels in the franchise.
[shows] UFC champ Valentina “The Bullet” Shevchenko has joined the cast for season 2 of the Chris Pratt Navy SEAL thriller The Terminal List.
[music] Long running alt outfit Collective Soul is getting a documentary (trailer). || The next album from Americana standout Tyler Childers will be produced by music legend Rick Rubin (Johnny Cash, Jay-Z, Linkin Park, Dixie Chicks, Ed Sheeran).
[gaming] The first footage of The Witcher 4 running at 60FPS in 4K on Playstation is out, and it looks amazing—but it’s not releasing until 2027. || The Nintendo Switch 2 is out in the world—with a steep $500 price tag, if you want the bundle that comes with a Mario game.
It’s the final season of Stranger Things, so either you’re REALLY into it, or you’ll probably never tune into the tale of the paranormal in Hawkins, IN.
The big news is that Netflix is forgoing their standard procedure (drop the whole season in one shot) in favor of releasing three “volumes” on Thanksgiving, Christmas an New Year’s Eve.
Given all the crazy technological advances (i.e. Elon Musk’s brain chip, the attempt to de-extinct Direwolves), we’re probably due for an update on Frankenstein, the story that’s considered to be the first sci-fi novel.
The cast here is pretty great, including Oscar Isaac (Ex Machina, Star Wars VII-IX), Mia Goth (Emma, X) and Chrisoph Walz (No Time to Die, Inglorious Bastards).
To confuse the matter a bit more, Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight, Crazy Heart) is directing The Bride, a Bride of Frankenstein movie set in 1930’s Chicago as a “punk rock take” on the tale. Gyllenhaal reunited with her Batman co-star Christian Bale as the famed monster. The Bride release in 2026, so we’ll see who makes the better monster film.
Every few years, Hollywood feels the need to re-tell the story of It’s a Wonderful Life. In this case, it feels like it’s going to work. Colin Farrell (S.W.A.T., The Batman), Margot Robbie (Barbie, Suicide Squad) and Phoebe-Waller Bridge (Fleabag, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) are all good reasons to watch this time traveling tear-jerker. In theaters in September.
[new music]
And just like that…Lil Wayne threw his hat back in the ring for title of best rapper alive. This one has a lot of unexpected features, including Bono from U2, opera star Andrea Bocelli and Jelly Roll. There’s also a notable influence from classic 60’s Motown and Stax records in a good chunk of the production.
Well, “Lynyrd Skynyrd” finally released a video for their mega hit from 1973, and one of the most iconic songs in American history.
The band title is in scare quotes because all the original members are dead. The band name lives on with people who purchased the rights to the IP, and tour as Lynyrd Skynyrd. But they’re not. Because, again, all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd are dead.
It’s a cool video…but also, the entire original band is dead.
I reached out to the original members to comment on the Lynyrd Skynyrd name being taken over by imposters, but nobody responded. Probably because they’re all dead.
A quarter of a century is a heck of a long time to be in a pop punk band, but Yellowcard sounds as good as ever, thanks to Travis Barker (Blink 182, Transplants, Boxcar Racer) serving a dual role as producer and also jumping behind the drum kit as session player.
Similar to the unlikely resurgence of All American Rejects (read about that here), Yellowcard is poised for 2025 to be their biggest year ever as a band. The first two singles are certainly top notch. Look for them on (a likely sold out) tour this fall.
Until the next one,
-sth