The film industry is desperate for theatrical hits.
Executives need consumers to head back to movie theaters rather than simply relying on streaming.
And Hollywood may rethink its “woke” agenda after this movie absolutely tanked at the box office.
American audiences are beginning to reject woke extremism.
Disney has been finding that out the hard way with one box office disappointment after another.
The company even had to push back its release of the live-action Snow White remake because of backlash to leaked screencaps.
Box office failure
And another woke movie just sank without a trace at the box office.
The American Society of Magical Negroes netted a measly $1.3 million at the box office in its opening weekend despite much fanfare at the Sundance Film Festival.
U.S. Distributor Focus Features described the film as “A fresh, satirical comedy about a young man, Aren, who is recruited into a secret society of magical Black people who dedicate their lives to a cause of utmost importance: making white people’s lives easier.”
The woke premise and trope go back to the Matt Damon and Will Smith film The Legend of Bagger Vance, which came out in 2000.
To give a flavor of the film’s message, one character tells the protagonist that a white person is “the most dangerous animal on the planet” when uncomfortable.
The movie might have performed better only a few short years ago, but the country has moved past peak woke extremism.
People have begun rolling their eyes at stories that pander to the woke left-wing outrage mob at the expense of everyone else.
Critical failure
In addition to audiences, critics were not too fond of the film, either.
The film only scored 31% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
“Though it’s clear that first-time director [Kobi] Libii was intending for the joke to be on white people, the Black characters are drawn with so much misery and self-loathing that the humor rarely lands,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote.
“The movie’s predictably speechified resolution, with Aren literally taking the stage to speak his truth, finally renders the sociopolitical critique mild and inconsequential, a disappointing outcome for a premise that had the potential to be truly incendiary,” The Los Angeles Times added.
Director Kobi Libii explained his far-left worldview in a recent interview.
“There is a real American self-mythology around our own greatness and perfection as a nation, and that makes it incredibly hard to reckon with our sins,” he said. “There’s an idea, especially in a lot of white people’s minds, that America is the greatest country on Earth. I think that contributes to some of the broken dialogue around this.”
This ideology is not at all unique in elitist circles — Libii studied theater at Yale — but working-class Americans have grown tired of the insanity.
