Roy Price can’t directly cheer on the success of “Project Hail Mary.”
Price stepped aside as head and founder of Amazon Studios, the company behind the Ryan Gosling smash, before it conquered Hollywood.
Price can still appreciate both the film and the message it hopes to share with major movie studios.
Audiences want to be entertained, not lectured. “Project Hail Mary” does the former oh, so well.
Price shared a jaw-dropping op-ed in, of all places, The New York Times, slamming Hollywood for losing the plot. It’s why the film industry is in big trouble, he argues. The only hope may be more movies like “Project Hail Mary.”
Smart. Uplifting. Original. Human.
Fun.
“Movies are starting to feel fun again,” he writes in the op-ed. And that wasn’t the case for the past decade.
But the most recent era, which started in the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and went into overdrive after 2020, was one in which political and social messaging were what seemed to matter most in Hollywood.
Sexually charged thrillers went out of style. So did bawdy, R-rated comedies and rom-coms. And, yes, audiences noticed. And many started staying home instead of going out on date nights.
The Dionysian elements of popular entertainment — irreverence, sexual frankness and broad, even scatological humor — were cast aside as the industry sought to correct historic wrongs and resist current ones. An unmistakable censoriousness and fear of saying or doing the wrong thing [emphasis added] seemed to settle over the creative process.
He’s right, even if he shrewdly didn’t use the “W” word – “woke.” Yet few people within the industry were willing to vocalize this truth, let alone do something about it.
Blame the Hollywood “resistance” against President Donald Trump, the wild over-reaction to George Floyd’s death or the mishandling of the MeToo revolution. Artists chose to self-censor instead of fighting back.
The biggest stars in the country stood down rather than stand up to woke scolds.
Either way, films often felt like a chore to watch, not a pleasure. Awards show galas dripped with Virtue Signaling, not entertainment.
Audiences began to look elsewhere for their entertainment. TikTok. YouTube. Pluto TV. Tubi.
It’s shocking to see Price’s dead-on observations in The New York Times, a far-Left outlet that cheered on many of the elements Price calls out. It’s not the first time, though. A NYT essay published in 2024 suggested the woke film era was dimming and already looks moldy in retrospect.
Give credit where it’s due. Someone at The New York Times understood Price’s essay needed to be shared. Now, it’s up to Hollywood executives to read it and take serious notes.
