One of the unintended — but providential — side effects of America’s anti-woke wave isn’t just that companies are walking away from LGBT extremism, but that entertainment is. In a market pivot that’s gone somewhat under the radar, key Hollywood players seem to be quietly turning away from the wokeism that’s financially punished the industry for years.
Families in this country want more wholesome options — and, in a surprising twist, producers seem much more willing to provide them.
The sex, violence, profanity, gay and trans themes, and other vices that have characterized modern entertainment have started to give way to more decent and uncontroversial fare. And audiences are eating it up. While other movies continue to tank at the box office, PG-rated films made up a whopping third of ticket sales in the U.S. in 2024, the highest percentage, Axios points out, since 1995. A quarter of those profits went to animated films, four of which topped the charts as last year’s highest-grossing movies.
Even industry titans like Disney — who, not so long ago, bragged about intentionally “queering” content to indoctrinate kids — have taken some modest steps back from their personal Pride parades, reining in recent projects and internal goals. Although the signs of impending doom were all around them (the Mouse House lost a jaw-dropping 700,000 streaming subscribers in the last three months of 2024), very little about CEO Bob Iger’s social agenda changed. After Donald Trump’s landslide election in November, however, alarm bells finally went off.
Suddenly, Disney began rethinking a transgender storyline in its new Pixar series about a middle school softball team, “Win or Lose.” By December, writers of the show had scrapped the idea from their character development altogether. A spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter, “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
In its place, Iger’s team leaned into explicitly Christian content for the series. To the astonishment of most Americans, one of the team’s girls is shown bowing her head and praying. “Dear Heavenly Father, please give me strength. I have faith, but sometimes the doubt creeps in. I promise I’ll be good, and I uh, won’t do that thing again. I’m not sure where you stand on it, but I WON’T do it. I just want to catch a ball. Or get a hit. For my team, of course.”
It was the first time in 30 years that a Disney character openly embraced prayer, a move producers hadn’t made since the 1996 classic, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Ian Giatti noted. That’s not to say Iger’s brand is completely quitting its Human Rights Campaign pals. At another point in the same series, there’s a “love-charged same-sex scene” between the umpire and janitor, Breitbart warns.
In some pockets of the industry, executives who are more reluctant to pare down sexually-deviant themes are losing audiences to other networks. Hallmark, which, at one time, had cornered the Christmas market, is watching viewers walk toward the exits. Alternatives like Great American Family (GAF), whose leaders pride themselves on sticking to the winning recipe its Gold Crown competitor partially abandoned, is rocketing up the ratings chart.
Last year, while Hallmark stubbornly stuck to same-sex themes in movies The Holiday Exchange, The Groomsmen Trilogy, The Holiday Sitter, The Christmas House, and Notes of Autumn, GAF was busy becoming a Top 25 channel — just three years after it launched.
As one of his most prominent stars, Candace Cameron Bure, put it, “Most networks are not trying to be all things to all people. What really differentiates our channel from some of the other ones out there is that we’re not afraid to talk about God and God’s hand in our lives instead of fate or providence.”
PureFlix, a streaming service is “relentlessly faith-focused.” Their movies tell stories that “are uplifting, positive, and ultimately make you feel good. More than a million people are already subscribed — another sign that there’s a booming market for clean and inspiring options.
Just as they’ve done in the corporate world, Americans are rewriting the future of entertainment, breaking the chokehold of woke, offensive, and provocative content with their demand for less edgy, uncomfortable, and divisive themes. Embrace the trend, recent history shows, and be rewarded. Ignore it, and wildfires won’t be the only thing threatening Hollywood.