Executives at Walt Disney Studios are reportedly pressing Hollywood creatives for movie ideas that will bring young men back to the theaters. According to Variety, Disney is hoping to get Gen Z men, which it defines as ages 13 to 28, interested in original films.
“The sources say Disney has been seeking new IP and pitches such as splashy global adventures and treasure hunts, as well as seasonal fare like films for the Halloween corridor,” Variety reports. “The calls come as the Star Wars machine struggles to produce any film project and the superhero genre sheds audiences by the minute.”
Disney of course made a fortune churning out forgettable Marvel superhero films and much-maligned Star Wars entries over the last two decades. But thanks largely to Disney’s mismanagement, those wells have run dry. So the studio is looking for something to draw young men back to the cinema.
No one asked me, but I have a few ideas — and some advice — that I’ll throw out there all the same.
First the advice. You know what doesn’t appeal to young men? Girlboss BIPOC heroines who beat up men twice their size. Villains who are all straight white men. Everything being gay. Constantly being lectured to and propagandized about DEI and LGBT stuff. Young men hate that. As Jesse Kelly aptly put it on X, “You cannot appeal to young men with ‘girl power’ crap. You cannot appeal to young men by gaying everything up as much as possible. Those two things are central pillars of the cultural Marxist worldview. Therefore, young men will continue to reject them.”
And they’ll reject them for the same reason they rejected the Democrat Party in the last election and military recruitment fell off a cliff during the Biden administration. When you make the military as gay and effeminate as possible, you’re going to turn off young men. It’s not rocket science. It’s a similar dynamic to the Cracker Barrel rebrand that resulted in $2 billion of that company’s value being destroyed over the last five years because woke executives wanted to shove gay race communism down the throats of people who just wanted to enjoy a meal in a folksy old country diner setting.
Cracker Barrel patrons aren’t generally interested in gay race communism, and neither are young men. What young men are interested in is what they have always been interested in: adventure, adversity, heroism, and manly virtue. They want stories that appeal to their sense of nobility, their yearning for sacrifice and glory, their desire to persevere through hardship, punish evildoers, rescue the girl, and save the town.
Rather than list a catalogue of old films that do this, let’s take a recent example from U.S. politics. Why did a majority of men under 30 vote for Trump, swinging 28 points from 2020 to 2024? Maybe it was because they saw that Biden and the Democrats had nothing but contempt for them and nothing to offer but victimhood and effeminate grievance culture. Maybe they also saw Trump get shot in the face, stand up bloodied and yell “Fight!” with a raised fist, and in that moment they recognized real courage in the face of mortal danger.
If you understand that this is what appeals to young men, then the movie scripts pretty much write themselves. Make movies with masculine heroes — not necessarily muscle-bound meatheads or ridiculous superheroes, but real men who are heroes because they’re willing to suffer and deny themselves for a greater good, detach from their own desires to pursue justice, and lay down their lives to protect those under their charge.
Smart filmmakers understand this intuitively. Christopher Nolan is reportedly working on an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, due out next summer. It’s probably going to be a blockbuster. Mel Gibson is now finally filming “The Resurrection of the Christ,” a two-part follow-up to his 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed nearly $610 million worldwide. Gibson is also working on a limited TV series about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, when a small contingent of knights and Maltese citizens repelled a vastly superior Ottoman force.
These are the kinds of films and TV shows young men want to see. If Disney, or any other production company, wants to appeal to young men and not just lecture at them, then make films that are unapologetically American and Christian. Make films about crusaders in which the crusaders are the heroes (unlike Ridley Scott’s botched effort in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven). Make films about the American Revolution (there are precious few good ones). Make sympathetic films and TV series about the great European explorers and conquistadors, the pioneers who settled the American continent, and the soldiers who fought in the Civil War — on both sides. Revive the great tradition of the American western that gave us the catalogues of Sam Peckinpah and John Ford. Make a TV series based on the Hardy Boys — one that actually resembles the original books. Make sci-fi action films about America competing against China to colonize the moon or Mars — in which China is the villain, just like in real life.
And don’t worry about the Chinese market at all, or any international markets. Just make films for American audiences that are pro-American. One of the reason’s Tom Cruise’s 2022 film Maverick was so successful is that it wasn’t preaching woke nonsense. It was just a fun, patriotic action film with awesome stunts, a great cast, and a compelling storyline. Just do that.
If Disney wanted to — and it doesn’t, not really — it could make countless films and TV shows that deeply appeal to young men. It would be the easiest thing in the world to do. But to do that, Disney would have to repudiate its woke ideology and quit trying to lecture young men about how masculinity is toxic, America is bad, Christianity is oppressive, and everything should be gay. And let’s be honest: Disney is incapable of doing that.
But that’s okay. These movies and shows are just waiting to be made, and whoever decides to make them is going to be glad they did. So will the rest of us, especially the young men.