Is Hollywood Done Being Woke?

OCTOBER 3rd, 2026 | GRANT JOHNSON

“I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest,” Sonnenshine explained. “I know what I think it means, which is the definition of it being aware and alert to social injustice and prejudice, in particular racial prejudice. So, when people say, ‘I hope it’s not woke,’ I think, ‘Really? Oh, that’s interesting.’ But I don’t think people are using it in that manner; I think it’s just become a catch-all word for things that I don’t quite understand. If I had to sum it up, what people are afraid of is that something from their childhood will be portrayed in a way that scares them.” 

The above quote is from the showrunner for the Netflix reboot of Little House on the Prairie. The above quote is also pretty revealing from Woke folk that like to wear some condescending camouflage when Woking up whatever their latest desecration happens to be. 

As a fan of the original Little House on the Prairie I shrugged with resignation that taking a wholesome frontier drama about a family farming their way through life and turning it into some anti-White crap is just the way of things these days. Living in Canada, where Woke never ended, I’m used to it by now and have no expectations otherwise.

And then a funny thing happened.

The reviews were good. And not just good in the sense that other Woke reviewers were celebrating the Wokeness. The reviews read seriously well…like this was a series that captured something special. 

I decided to give it a chance and I’m glad I did.

The show is beautiful and fair and gritty and measured and heartfelt. There’s some modernity going on in it, but it is surprisingly…shockingly…decent in ways that matter. 

The depictions of Indians in the show are complicated and nuanced. There are good and bad elements to them that treat them like real people. They aren’t just White-man victims that we’d have seen from Woke Hollywood five years ago, and they aren’t alien-styled threats that we saw in the original series from the 1970s. 

This pattern holds throughout the show. The characters are nuanced and complex. The stories have real weight and human emotion. It feels real and refreshing. 

My kids ripped through the episodes and I finished the 10 set series as well. 

No Woke in the sense that we all know Woke to be. Either the showrunner is just playing the game or the liberal definition of Woke as “being nice and fair” actually stuck with Shonnenshine…although having worked on The Boys for Amazon should definitely have tipped off people that she knows what’s up more than the opening quote let’s on. Anyway you cut it, Little House on the Prairie fucking kills, and it’s non-Woke to the core.

This isn’t the only example.

“Of course, it's a big blockbuster, super fun, it's got all the heart and humor that you want from a Spider-Man movie, but at its core, it's a movie about relearning how to connect with people, and I'm really excited to put it out in the world right now."  - Destin Daniel Cretton

This summer kicked ass for non-Woke Hollywood. When Hollywood kicked off the Awokening with 2016’s feminist Ghostbusters reboot, those of us in conservative circles realized something was horribly wrong. It got bad fast.

When Covid hit, and Biden came in, it got almost unimaginably bad. When the box office receipts began to be too much…”Go Woke, Go Broke”...and the cultural zeitgeist moved on from the excess of radical Wokeness…Hollywood finally began to change. 

This marked the year that Woke is officially over for Hollywood.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day: A movie in which the director is aiming for a theme about relearning how to connect with people. He succeeded. The movie was devoid of Woke. There were even pointedly non-Woke choices, like making the main villain a Black guy and the nominal villain a young White woman. 

Race and sex aside, I couldn’t find any overt agenda in this movie. It worked on a human level as movies are supposed to, and it is now the biggest movie of the year and one of the biggest movies of all time.

Toy Story 5: In 2022, the Toy Story spin-off Buzz Lightyear hit theatres and the main thing I remember hearing about it was that there was a gay kissing scene in it. That was enough at the time for parents to know that the whole movie was going to be compromised. It’s not necessarily JUST about that scene, but you know what the makers are thinking if a scene like that is in it.

It bombed.

Flash forward to this year and Toy Story 5 is about getting children to reconnect with playing IRL instead of iPads and screens.

Wonderful theme.

It made a fortune.

Masters of the Universe: This movie kicked off early in the summer season and it bombed, but it was likely due to the fact that unless you were born between 1975 and 1980 you likely didn’t know or care about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. It’s a very specific property, and the crowd I saw it with was almost all Gen X. 

Having said that…it wasn’t just non-Woke or post-Woke…it was bordering on anti-Woke.

Prince Adam…the guy who turns into He-Man…lives on Earth and has an office job in HR. The scenes involving this office lifestyle are caustically anti-Woke. They are hilarious. The whole movie is hilarious…bordering on parody…like Thor: Love and Thunder but with more 80s flavour. 

By the time the villain Skeletor shows up in the HR department (and is completely baffled by it), the movie has completely gone bonkers. 

A good sword and sorcery flick on its own, but the anti-Woke vibe makes it very much in the now.

Obsession and Backrooms: Finally some fresh fresh fresh stuff from Gen Z filmmakers. These movies were breakout hits, and I had to check out the hype. The director of Backrooms was 20 years old, and the director of Obsession was 26. 

These movies are new wave in every sense. The vibes, the acting styles, the documentary feel, the pacing, the look, and the messages that are both ancient and modern transcend any goofy political issues that Woke brought to the table.

Both of these movies are pushing forward in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with Woke. 

The Odyssey: I almost missed this movie because of allegations of Wokeness amongst the usual conservatard online crowd. 

I went to this movie with a big group and was skeptical going in. When “Elliot” Page gets instantly killed within the first five minutes…for believing a political lie pushed forward by leadership needing the character to believe it…I realized that Christopher Nolan was being ultra-subversive as usual.

Christopher Nolan is a hardcore conservative. We all should have realized this when he did the Batman trilogy. 

Batman Begins is classical masculinity Hero’s Journey stuff. “It’s not who you are on the inside; it’s what you do that defines you”.

The Dark Knight - A love letter to bending the rules in pursuit of justice. Apologetics for Bush-era security choices. 

The Dark Knight Rises - Batman versus Communism. 

I remember watching Interstellar by myself in the theatre and when Matt Damon shows up as “Dr. Mann” and is willing to lie and kill due to selfishness and ego, I realized it was all too on the nose to be anything other than a “Climate Change” metaphor.

Anyway…The Odyssey kicks ass and the subtle anti-Woke stuff is all there. How much you want to read into it is up to you, but the themes and messages do present if you’re watching carefully. The death scene of Agamemnon is especially interesting. 

Ultimately though…this is classic cinema and mythology on screen in the truest sense. The casting is almost absurdly Netflix-style diverse and I believe that to be the point. What we’re watching is not history…it’s myth.

Conservatards raging aren’t sophisticated enough to see what’s really going on here. 

There were a slew of other wonderful movies this summer…I took my kids to see The Sheep Detectives with Hugh Jackman…not Woke in the slightest.

Disclosure Day was Steven Spielberg’s return to big summer movie-making. It was a thriller with alien conspiracies attached. Not Woke in the slightest.

I didn’t see them all, and I’m sure there are some sensibilities that snuck into a few of the films. Supergirl maybe? 

But seriously…the days of Woke Hollywood are over, and going to the movies is finally exciting again.