Muted: Hollywood & Streaming

What does it mean when the industry that reflects our experience is a victim of the collapse of creative independence?

After the collapse of the network, public, print, and cable media, we now turn to America’s most powerful cultural export: film and streaming.

For decades, Hollywood has told America’s stories, challenged power, and shaped the nation's imagination. It exported American ideals and contradictions to the world. However, under mounting political, corporate, and technological pressures, the film and entertainment industry has retreated, shelving riskier stories, embracing propaganda-aligned projects, and controlling audiences’ choices ever more tightly.

Streaming, once hailed as a democratizing force, has concentrated power even further in the hands of a few cautious corporations and algorithms.

The question is no longer whether Hollywood can still tell the truth. It is whether it even dares to try.

Personal Retaliation & the Bully Pulpit

Trump hasn’t just targeted studios; he has weaponized his social platform to publicly humiliate artists who speak truth to power. In March 2025, after George Clooney criticized his administration’s attacks on press freedom and called out intimidation of media outlets on 60 Minutes, Trump lashed back on Truth Social, calling Clooney a “second‑rate movie star” and “failed political pundit.”

This is far from Trump’s first targeted criticism of actors. In addition to his war of words with Meryl Streep, he has maintained decades‑long feuds with Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg, among others. These aren’t righteous critiques. They’re public bullying campaigns designed to shame dissenters and pressure creatives into silence.

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Hollywood: From Storyteller to Servant

Hollywood has always been a political battleground. From the McCarthy blacklists of the 1950s to decades of fights over obscenity, race, and war, the industry has swung between telling truth and serving power. Today, that balance has shifted decisively in favor of servitude.

In March 2025, Trump appointed Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight as “Special Ambassadors to Hollywood,” tasked with promoting “patriotic” narratives and influencing federal tax subsidies and distribution policies. Studios quickly fell in line, rewriting scripts, shelving projects, and quietly altering content to avoid political retaliation and preserve lucrative incentives.

Foreign markets, particularly China, also exert pressure, prompting studios to sanitize scenes and dialogue to avoid offending authoritarian governments. The result is a creative class trapped between nationalist demands at home and censorship abroad.

Some projects have borne the brunt of this climate. When Superman (2025) revived the hero’s immigrant‑roots origin story, making explicit his status as a refugee from a destroyed planet, who fights for a better life in America, the backlash from right‑wing media was swift. Once a classic metaphor of immigration and assimilation, Superman was suddenly denounced as “woke” propaganda, and the studio quietly toned down some of its more overt messaging.

Similarly, the satirical thriller The Hunt (2019) was pulled entirely after MAGA outrage painted its plot — wealthy elites hunting rural Americans — as an attack on conservatives, despite the filmmakers’ insistence that it was meant as a critique of class and division.

Even stories that speak truth about political figures have been stifled. The Apprentice (2024), a sharp portrayal of Trump’s early career in New York, struggled to find a U.S. distributor despite international acclaim. In contrast, Amazon paid $40 million for a flattering biopic of Melania Trump. That purchase underscored how wealth and access, in this case, through Jeff Bezos’ ownership of Amazon, shape which narratives reach audiences.

At its best, Hollywood dared to challenge the powerful and reflect the complexities of society. Increasingly, it tells only the stories that power wants to hear.

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Reverse Case: Propaganda Thrives

While critical voices struggle, propaganda-aligned content often flourishes unchecked. A prime example is 2000 Mules, a conspiracy documentary alleging widespread Democrat-led election fraud in 2022. Promoted at rural theaters and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, it gained traction despite being pulled by major distributors over serious factual concerns.

Indeed, key sources later admitted the film was deeply flawed. Salem Media Group, which co-produced 2000 Mules, apologized and retracted it in 2024, acknowledging they had misnamed Georgia voter Mark Andrews. Andrews was later cleared by state investigators and even sued for defamation. Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza later conceded the surveillance video they relied upon “may not have actually been correlated with the geolocation data.”

Despite these retractions, the film’s impact lingered. MAGA groups treated it as gospel, organizing sold-out showings, screenings, and events, showing how factual errors matter less than the emotional or political utility of the content. In practical effect, 2000 Mules amplified a myth, while dissenting voices faced censorship and cancellations. As long as propaganda pays and truth disrupts, this asymmetry will only grow more entrenched.

See the previous articles in this series here:

Muted: The Death of Dissent on Network TV

Muted: The Silencing of Public Media

Muted: The Decline of Print Media

Muted: The Collapse of Independence on Cable News

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Trump’s Tariffs on Foreign Films

The administration’s cultural nationalism has not stopped at what gets made. It also dictates what audiences are allowed to see.

In May 2025, Trump proposed a 100 percent tariff on all foreign films, claiming it would “protect American cinema.” The immediate effect was to freeze or cancel international distribution deals and deter studios from pursuing projects with global creative partners.

Yet the logic of such a tariff has little to do with protecting art and everything to do with restricting audiences’ exposure to alternative stories. When South Korea’s Parasite won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2020, Trump mocked the decision at a rally: “A movie from South Korea? What the hell was that about?” He longed aloud for the days of Gone With the Wind, as though honoring foreign excellence somehow insulted American identity.

It’s hard not to see the parallels with authoritarian regimes like China, which tightly controls which foreign films reach domestic audiences. In both cases, the purpose of such restrictions is the same: to wall off audiences from inconvenient perspectives. The fear is not that American cinema cannot compete but rather that American audiences might discover they’ve been kept in the dark.

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Streaming: The New Gatekeepers

When Disney+ quietly deleted the Willow sequel series from its platform in May 2023, Warwick Davis, the star of both the original and the reboot, expressed his heartbreak:

“I meet lovely people on a daily basis who are fans of Willow, who are the reason the Disney+ series was made. Please tell me there’s a chance we can keep this story alive.”

But there wasn’t. Despite critical praise and a passionate audience, Willow — notable for its inclusive cast and groundbreaking queer love story — was first canceled, then erased entirely as part of Disney’s “cost‑cutting.” Writer John Bickerstaff called the move “cruel,” noting that it erased not just a show but an important step forward in representation.

Willow’s fate is emblematic of how streaming platforms have become the new gatekeepers, controlling what survives, what vanishes, and what narratives audiences even get to remember. Studios plead poverty by hiding streaming revenue figures, while quietly profiting off subscriptions. Driven by shareholder caution and opaque algorithms, these platforms prioritize safe, mass-market stories over those that are risky or challenging.

Netflix’s cancellation of Warrior Nun, a show celebrated for its queer love story and critique of religious orthodoxy, revealed how fragile bold storytelling has become. Although officially justified as a business decision, the show’s subversive themes almost certainly made it a target at a time when Christian nationalism is exerting a growing influence over American culture. The fervent campaign by fans to revive the series, which ultimately succeeded in securing a continuation, demonstrates that audiences are not passive; however, their influence remains tenuous.

To its credit, streaming has occasionally succeeded where Hollywood has failed, championing literary gems that have long been ignored by studios. Amazon’s Wheel of Time, Netflix’s The Witcher, and others have introduced whole generations to stories traditional Hollywood deemed too risky or niche. These series proved that audiences are hungry for fresh, imaginative worlds when given the chance.

Yet even these victories feel fragile. Streaming platforms, hungry for subscribers yet terrified of controversy, have already begun to pull back on such daring adaptations, shelving series, cutting budgets, and deleting content for tax write‑offs. Like Hollywood before it, streaming is retreating from risk, and with it, from truth.

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The Fight to Remain Human: AI & IP Battles

If studios see creators as costs to minimize, then the rise of artificial intelligence has only sharpened that view.

The 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes exposed how deeply the industry planned to replace human labor with automation. Studios proposed using generative AI to draft scripts and scan actors’ likenesses for indefinite reuse, eliminating the need to pay for creativity or consent.

Writers and actors fought back, framing the struggle not just as an economic dispute, but as a fight for the soul of storytelling. WGA negotiating committee member John August warned of “a fundamental nightmare scenario,” in which studios would hand off AI-generated scripts to underpaid writers to polish, thereby hollowing out the profession. Meredith Stiehm, WGA-West president, put it even more bluntly:

“AI does not have lived experience … Anything that AI generates that tries to offer that is based on actual human work. In writing, that’s called plagiarism. … It’s intellectual property theft.”

Actors faced an equally chilling threat. Studios proposed scanning background performers and using their digital likenesses in perpetuity, all for a single day’s pay. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher called it out plainly:

“We are all going to be in jeopardy of being replaced by machines and big business, who cares more about Wall Street than you and your family.”

For performers like background actor Sam Russell, the implications were existential:

“It closes the door for people like me in the future trying to break in … that closes the door for people like me.”

The final contracts imposed some limits on these practices but left loopholes, leaving creators anxious that their identities and ideas would remain at risk. The strikes revealed an industry increasingly comfortable treating artists not as partners, but as disposable raw material, and underscored how fragile humanity’s hold on its own stories has become.

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Physical Media & Resistance to Change

If streaming has made culture more ephemeral, the collapse of physical media has left it more vulnerable than ever.

Since 2005, sales of DVDs and Blu‑rays have plummeted by nearly 90 percent, leaving physical copies of films and television shows a niche collectible rather than a mainstream way to watch. For most audiences, content lives entirely on the cloud at the mercy of corporate decisions, licensing agreements, and shifting algorithms.

As with the erasure of Willow and other “cost‑cut” series, streaming platforms can now make entire works vanish overnight, with no public record and no physical alternative to rescue them. Unlike the revival of vinyl in music, there has been no meaningful resurgence of physical media in film, and the theatrical window remains short and is shrinking.

Hollywood, meanwhile, still clings to the prestige of box office numbers, even as audiences migrate to streaming and as the studios themselves obscure streaming viewership data. Rather than embracing transparency or permanence, the industry has leaned into opacity, making it harder for creators to know who sees their work, and easier for studios to quietly bury what they no longer want remembered.

The disappearance of physical media isn’t just an inconvenience. It is a loss of cultural memory, a surrender of permanence in favor of profit and control, leaving art as transient as a trending topic.

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Why It Matters

Hollywood and streaming don’t just entertain. They shape how we see ourselves, each other, and the possible futures we imagine.

When these industries retreat into nostalgia, propaganda, and corporate safety, they don’t merely fail to challenge power; they help entrench it. When art flatters authority instead of questioning it, democracy itself weakens.

Critics often dismiss inclusive stories as “woke,” but what they’re really rejecting is reality. America has always been multiracial, immigrant‑rich, queer, and complex, and audiences flock to stories that reflect that truth. Hollywood’s willingness — however imperfect — to tell those stories has made it a target for those who feel threatened by the inclusion of diverse perspectives. But representation is not radical; it is recognition. The popularity of these narratives proves that audiences don’t just tolerate diversity — they identify with it.

Jordan Peele’s films (Get Out, Us, Nope) illustrate this vividly. By centering Black characters and experiences in the horror genre, which had long ignored or caricatured them, he made the familiar terrifying again. Get Out grossed over $250 million on a microbudget, won an Oscar, and brought a whole new audience to a genre that had long excluded them. This isn’t charity or ideology; it’s brilliant, resonant storytelling.

Imagine how fragile a culture must be to feel threatened when excellence emerges beyond its borders or outside its traditional narratives. Art is not diminished by openness; it is diminished by fear.

Song of the South, Disney’s 1946 film, epitomizes what happens when art flatters power instead of challenging it. By presenting Reconstruction‑era plantation life as idyllic and benign, the film taught generations of Americans a mythologized version of history, one in which slavery’s cruelties were erased and the power dynamics of the South romanticized. Its lasting influence shows that art is not neutral: it can sustain injustice as easily as it can illuminate truth. The fear today is not just that brave stories will disappear, but that they will be replaced by comforting lies.

The stories we lose — the books never adapted, the scripts never produced, the filmmakers never given a chance — leave a hole in our cultural memory. Hollywood’s addiction to “safe” nostalgia denies exposure to countless talented writers and filmmakers who could redefine what cinema means. Art dies not only when it is censored, but also when it is reduced to a product line.

The question isn’t whether audiences want these stories. They do. The question is whether the gatekeepers will allow them to reach us.

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Call to Action

Hollywood and streaming are not beyond saving, but they cannot save themselves without pressure from audiences and creators alike.

• Support independent filmmakers and platforms whenever you can.

• Demand transparency about streaming revenue and AI use.

• Buy physical media when possible, so stories cannot simply vanish.

• And seek out creative work that challenges power, not just entertains.

Our culture reflects the choices we make as much as the ones we allow to be made on our behalf. Choose curiosity over comfort. Choose stories that disrupt nostalgia rather than indulge it. Choose truth over propaganda.

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If even Hollywood and streaming have been muted, what remains? In the final chapter, we turn to the precarious world of independent creators — YouTubers, podcasters, Substack writers, bloggers, and citizen journalists — and explore how their fragile platforms both empower and endanger them.

Bibliography:

• “Hollywood’s Screenwriters Are Right to Fear AI.” (Wired, July 2023)

• “Meredith Stiehm: President, Writers Guild of America West.” (Time, September 5, 2024)

• “Inside the actors' strike: Why Netflix, Max, and Paramount+ series stars are bringing their 'war' over pay and AI to Hollywood companies that are 'trying to kill our industry'.” (Business Insider, July 18, 2023)

• “Why Do DVDs Still Exist?” (Wired, November 27, 2021)

• “US DVD sales plummet 20%.” (The Guardian, May 3, 2011)

• WGA (PDF, December 11, 2024)

• “Willow star Warwick Davis calls Disney+ removal ‘embarrassing,’” (Entertainment Weekly, October 16, 2023)

• “Warwick Davis Calls Out Disney+ for Deleting Beloved Sapphic Series Willow,” (Them, October 18, 2023)

• “'Willow' Writer Lambasts Disney for "Absolutely Cruel" Removal of Series,” (Collider, May 19, 2023)

• “‘Absolutely cruel’: Willow Writer Brutally Responds,” (Screenrant, May 19, 2023)

• “Warrior Nun Fans Are Asking Netflix to ‘Correct Its Mistake’” (Them, January 17, 2023)

• “Why Netflix’s Cancellation of Warrior Nun Sparked Widespread Protests Online,” (Time, January 17, 2023)

• “Warrior Nun will return as a movie trilogy after Netflix cancellation,” (Entertainment Weekly, August 16, 2023)

• “A Belated Apology for ‘2000 Mules’: Salem Media settles a defamation lawsuit for a ‘significant’ amount.” (Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2024)

• “Creator of ‘2000 Mules’ apologizes to Georgia man falsely accused of ballot fraud in the film,” (AP News, December 2, 2024)

• “Why Superman became right-wing kryptonite,” (Axios, July 10,  2025)

• “Lights, camera, inaction? Trump’s film tariff confuses Hollywood,” (Politico, May 5, 2025)

• “‘A second-rate movie star and failed political pundit’: Donald Trump criticises George Clooney after comments on press freedom,” (The Guardian, March 24, 2025)

• “Trump calls Clooney second-rate after actor slams government,” (San Francisco Chronicle, March 25, 2025)