Donald Trump on the set of The Apprentice.
Photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When Donald Trump emerged with raised fist from 2024’s never-ending cortisol blast of an election last year, liberal-leaning Hollywood responded to the news with questions. Following a wave of predictably anguished celebrity tweets, the first was: What does this mean for our bottom line? The second: How do we make Trump 2.0 work in our favor? “Cable cowboy” John Malone, the Liberty Media billionaire who once owned stakes in Starz Entertainment and the Weinstein Company, began agitating for a wave of new merger activity that would have been unimaginable under the Biden administration’s regulatory anvil. Warner Bros. Discovery’s much-hated CEO, David Zaslav, rejoiced at the impending regime change, pondering Trump redux as a crucial antidote to Federal Trade Commission hostility toward acquisitions, opening the door to ever-greater corporate gigantism in media. “It may offer an opportunity for consolidation that would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry,” Zaslav said on an earnings call.

Within weeks, industry speculation turned inward. Hollywood’s corridors of power are uniquely vulnerable to blowback from a notoriously vindictive president (who in 2018 lobbied the postmaster general to double postal rates for Amazon shipments to retaliate against Jeff Bezos for critical coverage in the Washington Post). A third question arose: Who will Trump put on blast first? Disney Entertainment co-chair Dana Walden — overseer of ABC news, among other divisions, and a front-runner to replace soon-retiring Disney CEO Bob Iger — became a prime suspect due to her long friendship with, and strenuous campaign fundraising efforts for, Kamala Harris. (“Her best friend is the head of the network!” Trump groused ahead of the September 10 presidential debate on ABC, baselessly accusing Walden of giving Harris the questions in advance.) Iger’s stewardship has also been subject to no small amount of MAGA backbiting, with Trump castigating Disney on social media as a “woke and disgusting shadow of its former self,” even taking time to criticize the studio’s diverse casting practices in movies such as 2023’s live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid. “Clearly, Trump’s gonna come after Iger,” says a consultant with a privileged view of the executive C-suite. “Whatever he can do to fuck with him and Disney based on the stuff with DeSantis and Florida.”

Now, with the arrival of the 45th president’s re-inauguration as POTUS 47, most movie-business insiders are hunched in a crash position alongside Disney executives. After facing a pandemic and twin Hollywood strikes, the inhabitants of the Thirty-Mile Zone know sweeping change is coming, even if the precise shape and scope is uncertain. Sources I consulted, ranging from studio executives to hitmaking producers and high-level talent managers as well as on-set crew members (most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity), predict Hollywood will generally become more self-censoring and less capable of critiquing the current political moment, if not less influential overall.

“Hollywood doesn’t matter as much as it thinks it matters,” says a talent manager with A-list clients. “You had the biggest stars in the world support Kamala Harris. She couldn’t have drawn more powerful advocates. And it didn’t move the needle. What does that tell you? It’s unsettling because the people and things you hold in high esteem don’t drive the culture. As much as I love movies, they aren’t the driver anymore.”

Will any “culture of resistance” (as when United Talent Agency organized a celeb-packed rally to protest the so-called Muslim ban in 2017) persist? One corporate strategist with interests across film and television described the feeling around town as “preemptive exhaustion.” Hollywood is plagued by a sense of doom precipitated not just by financial anxieties but a feeling that a pervasive “woke is broke” mindset will affect what we see on our screens in the coming years. In this sense, they see film as more of a bellwether than a trailblazer: reflective of the culture at large more than predictive or dictative.

“The movement away from ‘woke’ was already in motion even before Trump got re-elected,” says a blockbuster producer, who points to two of the three movies in the last Star Wars trilogy (The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker) and several recent Marvel movies (Eternals, The Marvels), all of which underperformed at the box office, backdropped by a din of fanboy complaints about “forced diversity.” “We’ve been seeing the departure of executives at the studios that had been hired to promote DEI in film and TV. Hollywood had swung too far left over the past few years and there was bound to be a reckoning.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump’s reelection comes at the tail end of a year when the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion–bashing Am I Racist?, produced by the Daily Wire, prevailed as 2024’s highest-grossing documentary. (Shortly after Participant Media — the production company known for tough-minded, issue-driven docs like The Cove and An Inconvenient Truth — abruptly shuttered.) 2024 was also the year Twisters achieved blockbusterdom with a pronounced red-state aesthetic breaking through with audiences in the middle and southern portions of the U.S. Yet it would be a mistake to expect a right-wing reboot entirely. To hear it from several studio and production-company bosses, overt politics simply don’t sell. “There isn’t a strong desire for rhetorical storytelling in Hollywood,” says one production exec. “In certain corners of the entertainment world, there’s suddenly this opportunity for conservative-minded viewers to see a bit of their world represented. But I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to be a flip to the other side of the equation.”

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice.
Photo: Mongrel Media/Everett Collection

Although Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice may be a fairly extreme example — insofar as the movie specifically dramatizes the future president’s early career and political awakening — its reception provides a road map for the kind of self-policing industry insiders expect more of during Trump 2. The fact-based independent film features scenes in which Sebastian Stan, portraying DJT, experiences erectile dysfunction, receives liposuction, and gets castigated for eating “totally disgusting” cheeseballs. Most controversially, he is depicted raping his wife Ivana. Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May, The Apprentice was hit with a one-two MAGA punch: denigrated in a withering statement by Trump spokesman Steven Cheung and stung by a cease-and-desist letter from Trump’s lawyers, who threatened to a lawsuit if the filmmakers sought a North American distribution deal. Fearing reprisal, almost every major and art-house distributor passed on the film. “They said, ‘Our hands are tied because we’ve got corporate boards we have to answer to,’” Apprentice producer Amy Baer tells me. “It was more about, Is it worth the potential hassle?” (The Apprentice was eventually released by small-potatoes indie start-up Briarcliff Entertainment and has grossed a mere $4 million domestically.)

In a more pressing example of what’s to come in 2025, there is Marvel’s Captain: America: Brave New World, which before June 2023 was titled Captain America: New World Order. (The change was taken as an implicit response to the IRL “New World Order” conspiracy theory gaining traction in right-wing extremist corners of the internet; it posits the existence of a secret global elite conspiring to implement a totalitarian one-world government.) Early test screenings of Brave New World, which hits theaters February 14, were reportedly disastrous, prompting expensive reshoots with major sequences cut from the film. According to a technical crew member on the film with knowledge of both the screenings and the reshoot process (which also took place last year), the character portrayed by Harrison Ford — Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a demagogic military leader who morphs into an irrational, orange-hued superhuman — created unforeseen political resonances for the studio in an inaugural year.

“He’s this very powerful general who becomes kind of a fascist and turns into a raging Red Hulk. That was seen as an allusion to Trump,” this source explains. “Disney was realizing, Hey, we’ve been bleeding for a while. Let’s try not to piss off our core base anymore than we have been over the past couple of years.”

Even for movies not plotted around characters with shades of the president, Trump’s reelection is expected to have a dampening effect on liberal viewpoints, as evidenced by Disney’s decision earlier this month to pull a transgender storyline from its Pixar animated series Win or Lose. “I DO know Hollywood will indeed self censor,” an awards-campaign publicist with experience campaigning for left-leaning Oscars movies told me via email. “Less critical stuff. LOTS more of that.”

Marvel’s Captain America: New World Order changed its name to Captain: America: Brave New World. The movie is set to come out in February 2025.
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

On a personal level, Hollywood stars seemed to have learned a lesson around the airing of Trump grievances from Rachel Zegler, star of Disney’s upcoming live-action remake Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. In November, a few days after the election, the 23-year-old singer-actress loudly broadcast her anguish on Instagram. “i find myself speechless in the midst of this. another four years of hatred, leaning us toward a world I do not want to live in,” Zegler wrote on her stories. “may trump supporters and trump voters and trump himself never know peace.” (The posting concluded: “fuck donald trump.”) Backlash came immediately, with commenters announcing plans to boycott the $200 million fairy-tale remake. “Not taking my kids to see this trash after the statement you put out,” said one. “I hope you get no peace when this film BOMBS at the box office and on streaming,” said another. Former Fox News and NBC commentator Megyn Kelly chimed in on the Ruthless podcast, remarking of Zegler: “There’s something wrong with this person. Hello, Disney? You’re going to have to redo your film again because this woman is a pig and you fired Gina Carano for far less than this nonsense.”

The upshot? Zegler issued an apology: “I let my emotions get the best of me,” she wrote on Instagram. The takeaway? “It creates a reticence among famous people to take a stand unless they want to deal with the repercussions,” an indie production-company executive says. “There’s a big difference between explaining what side of the aisle you sit on and speaking negatively about a large swath of people you might be depending on to see your movie.”

As for whether or not the industry is in for a grand unmasking, in which formerly leftish-appearing actors come out as Trump supporters, it’s too soon to tell. Nicole Scherzinger offered her own apology days removed from the 2024 election, after posting a seemingly positive comment on an Instagram post by Russell Brand, in which he flashes a red hat reading “Make Jesus First Again.” “I deeply apologize for the hurt caused by my recent engagement,” the Sunset Blvd. lead said in a statement. “When I commented on these posts, I made the mistake of not realizing that they could be easily interpreted as being politically related and I apologize to anyone who understandably reached that conclusion.” Big screen stars like Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg made public appearances alongside Trump prior to the election. (The latter will be starring in the former’s 2025 movie Flight Risk, which marks Gibson’s return to filmmaking after a nine-year hiatus.) On January 16, Trump announced in a Truth Social posting he will appoint Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight “Special Ambassadors” to Hollywood to serve as the president’s “eyes and ears” in the entertainment world.

Over the last few weeks, a source close to Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel says the Endeavor CEO has been privately fretting his own friend-of-Kamala status — having hosted multiple Democratic fundraisers this election cycle and donating $1 million toward Harris’s campaign and political-action committee. Emanuel also happens to be Trump’s former agent, making the president regard Emanuel’s campaign contributions as an even greater magnitude of disloyalty, this source says. (Further complicating his standing with the 47th president, Emanuel and Trump’s trusted kitchen-cabinet member Elon Musk are said to have recently quarreled over one of the agent’s most cherished causes, U.S. support for Israel.)

With film production in post-strike, post-pandemic Hollywood estimated to be down by as much as 40 percent and widespread anxiety over dwindling revenues and audience interest, many industry machers remain more concerned with surviving another financial quarter than thriving under Trump 2. “We’re just doing triage on the patients that are coming off the battlefield,” says a marketing executive, “not thinking about how we resupply the troops.”

That survivalist mentality is all but sure to result in fewer creative big swings onscreen. “There’s more fear in the executive suites now than there ever has been in the 26 years that I’ve been doing this,” says a veteran talent manager and producer. “What I see internally and with my friends all over the business, whether they’re at studios or producers or creatives or their agents, it’s that right now we’re in an acute period of scarcity. The volume is way down. Everybody from the buyers on down are afraid to be bold and to make decisions that put them in harm’s way.”