When “The Mandalorian” star Gina Carano posted to social media that being a Republican is not dissimilar to being Jewish during the Holocaust in February 2021, Disney decided to fire her. Swooping in to rescue the newly unemployed Carano, conservative media company The Daily Wire signed her on to produce and star in a new action Western, “Terror on the Prairie.”
“I have only just begun using my voice which is now freer than ever before,” she said in an interview with Deadline shortly after announcing her new partnership. “They can’t cancel us if we don’t let them.”
The film was released in 2022, and in its one-day limited theatrical run, it grossed a total of $804.
Though conservative filmmakers remain determined to become a prominent force in Hollywood, audiences and critics shrug with every new release. In both marketing and substance, many of these films are framed by their creators as takedowns of liberal politics, and this fatal error ensures their failure. Movies — or art in general — cannot succeed when contempt takes precedence over craft.
The Daily Wire, founded by online personality Ben Shapiro and producer Jeremy Boreing, announced its foray into the entertainment industry in January 2021. This decision, Shapiro explained, was born out of fatigue with the liberal-dominated status quo of show business. By making movies and TV of their own, conservatives could create a safe haven for their own values and “blow up the Death Star that is the Left-wing monopoly on entertainment.”
To learn why the genesis of this venture is one of spite, one only needs to look at the career trajectories of those involved. Prior to founding The Daily Wire, Shapiro endeavored to become a screenwriter, enlisting the help of producer Lenny Goldberg to write a dramedy set at Harvard Law School, which Shapiro attended. But before the pilot episode saw the light of day, a TV agent supposedly called Shapiro and let him know that had been “blacklisted” from Hollywood for holding incompatible views.
It stands to reason that an outcast like Shapiro would hire other outcasts. For their film “Shut In,” The Daily Wire would cast the likes of Vincent Gallo, who had not been in a film since 2013, partly because of online tirades where he would say things such as, “Granting women the right to vote was a mistake.” For the entertainment division president position, the company would hire Mike Richards, the former “Jeopardy!” host who was fired after one day when his offensive comments about Asian women resurfaced and sexual assault allegations were uncovered.
And of course, there was Gina Carano. Though “Terror on the Prairie” would become the only released collaboration between Carano and The Daily Wire, it was not the only one planned. Announced six months after she was dropped by Disney, the action film “White Knuckle” was set to be her first project since her firing. However, because she refused to comply with Hollywood’s vaccine mandate, the film was ultimately scrapped.
Production problems would prove to be a leitmotif in The Daily Wire films. In response to Disney’s upcoming Snow White remake, the film company announced in October 2023 that they were making their own. To play the titular princess, they would cast online conservative personality Brett Cooper, host of the news review show “The Comment Section.” In December 2024, Cooper would announce her departure from The Daily Wire, and the Snow White film would never see the light of day.
However, this does not mean that conservative films never see success. In August 2024, a biopic about the 40th president, “Reagan,” was released to relative acclaim. Despite being panned by critics at the outset, enough tickets were sold to make the film one of the highest grossing presidential biopics.
The producer of the film, Mark Joseph, is another openly conservative filmmaker bent on disrupting the liberal status quo. The goal of the film was not to assess the presidency of Reagan from any impartial point of view, but to elevate the Republican president to a mythological status. The narrative centers around the widely believed and heavily disputed idea that he was crucial to the fall of the Soviet Union, while the largely ignored AIDS epidemic, which killed an estimated 89,343 during the Reagan administration, is relegated to a brief mention.
Whether the success of “Reagan” was a flash in the pan or the beginning of a new paradigm is unclear. But the patterns of history have a tendency to hold, and time will likely resolidify that art cannot thrive when it is built upon a foundation of contempt.
Nicholas Sherwood is an Opinion Intern for the spring 2025 quarter. He can be reached at nesherwo@uci.edu.
Edited by Rebecca Do and Joshua Gonzales.