Movies That Love America Still Sell Tickets, and Hollywood Keeps Forgetting

Every few years the same thing happens. A movie about a soldier, or a pilot, or a believer, or a small-town family opens in theatres, the industry's experts shrug, and then the audience shows up in numbers that make the experts check their spreadsheets. The trade papers run a story with a headline that reads like a mild medical emergency: Nobody saw this coming. Then comes the explanation, which is always the same. It was a fluke. It was nostalgia. It was a particular star, or a particular summer, or an unusual alignment of the planets. Anything, in other words, except the obvious thing, which is that a great many Americans are willing to pay good money to see a movie that likes them.

Let me tell you what is going on, and I will do it with a few numbers, stated carefully, as they were reported at the time. I am not going to throw current figures at you. I do not need them. The record from the past century says it plainly enough.

The pattern, in the record

I will give you five examples, and then we can talk about what they mean.

Sergeant York, 1941. The film told the story of Alvin York, the Tennessee farmer and devout Christian who became one of the most decorated American soldiers of the First World War. It came out in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, and it was the highest-grossing American film of that year. The actor who played York, Gary Cooper, won the Academy Award for best actor. The film was about faith, reluctant courage and duty, and the public lined up.

Saving Private Ryan, 1998. Steven Spielberg's story of a squad ordered to find a single soldier behind enemy lines after the D-Day landings was the top domestic film of 1998. It was an unflinching depiction of the cost of the war, and it also treated the men who fought it with plain reverence. Veterans came, and their children and grandchildren came with them. The picture did not preach. It did not need to.

The Passion of the Christ, 2004. Mel Gibson's film about the last hours of Jesus was released with no major studio behind it and with subtitles throughout, in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, and by every conventional prediction it should have failed. Instead it earned more than three hundred million dollars at the domestic box office, as reported at the time. Churches organised group outings. The industry, which had all but ignored a vast audience of believers, discovered it had been looking the other way.

American Sniper, 2014. Clint Eastwood's film of the life of the Navy SEAL Chris Kyle opened in limited release at the end of 2014 and wide in January 2015. By the reckoning of the box-office trackers, it was the top-grossing domestic film of 2014 releases, earning in the neighbourhood of three hundred and fifty million dollars in the United States, as reported at the time. That put it ahead of the big-budget superhero and science-fiction pictures of the year. It was a war film about a man who served, and it was a hit with people who do not usually fill theatres in the dead of winter.

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022. The sequel, delayed several times by the pandemic, opened in May 2022 and earned more than seven hundred million dollars domestically, as reported, which made it the top domestic film of the year. It was a story about a Navy pilot, flying and teaching, who believed in service, in skill and in coming home. The studio had been told by the market to take no chances with such a film. It took a chance and the audience rewarded it.

Those are five films from five different decades, with five different directors, in three genres. What they share is simple: they take the country's military, its faith and its ordinary virtues at face value, and they treat their audience as the kind of people who admire those things.

How the industry explains it away

Now watch what happens after each success. The explanation industry kicks in. I have a short guide to the standard excuses, because you will hear them again.

1. "It's a nostalgia play." Nostalgia, in this telling, is a kind of cheating. A film that makes money by making people feel good about their country is accused of exploiting a mood. Strangely, nobody calls a superhero sequel a nostalgia play, though the thirty-fifth entry in a franchise is nothing else.
2. "It's the star." One actor, one director, one lucky charm. The movie succeeded in spite of its subject matter, not because of it. This explanation is available for every hit that does not fit the preferred theory, and it has the advantage that it cannot be tested.
3. "It's a niche." A hit film with a conservative or patriotic audience is called a niche film. Never mind that the niche in question is the size of a small country. The word is a way of saying that the audience does not count.
4. "It's a one-off." A fluke can happen once. It can happen five times in a century and then you start to think the pattern is the explanation.
5. "The politics are subtext." Some in the press discover, after a film's release, that its message was dangerous or naive, and that the audience was being manipulated. The audience, of course, has the right to like what it likes.

I have to confess a certain affection for the whole routine. It takes real discipline to keep explaining the same result with a new excuse every time. If an economist did that with a market that rewarded the same product again and again, we would say he had a theory problem. In Hollywood, the habit is called taste.

The argument

Let me make the case in order.

1. An audience is a market, and markets reward service. People pay for stories that reflect what they value. A large share of Americans value military service, faith, family and the country itself. A film that respects those values is selling to a hungry customer.

1. Ignoring a customer is expensive. Every time the industry treats this audience as a niche, it leaves money on the table. A studio that makes a film for a small audience of insiders and then discovers a much larger audience was waiting elsewhere has made an error that its own accountants will eventually notice.

1. Respect is the product. Most of these films do not succeed because they contain a political argument. They succeed because they take their characters seriously. A soldier is not a victim or a villain in them, and a believer is not a punch line. The audience feels that it is being addressed as adults.

1. The industry's habit of treating each case as a surprise is a revealing mistake. It means the industry is not paying attention to who is buying. If the box office is a conversation between a studio and a public, the studio is forgetting what the public said the last time.

1. The gap is larger than the industry admits, and it is an opportunity. Any studio, producer or writer willing to make good films for this audience will find it. That is not a political point. It is a business point, with the added advantage of being true.

The steelman, and the answer

I should treat the other side fairly. The industry's best defence runs like this.

Hollywood is a global business. A big share of a film's revenue now comes from foreign markets, and a film that celebrates American military power may not travel well. A studio is entitled to make the films that return the most money across the whole world, and that may mean a different kind of story. Furthermore, the successes I named are a handful of films, and the industry makes hundreds. Plenty of other kinds of film do well, and plenty of patriotic films fail. You cannot build a strategy on five data points.

Some of that is right. Not every patriotic film is good, and a bad film does not become good by waving a flag. The box office rewards craft first. A clumsy, preachy picture with the right politics will fail, as it should.

But the answer is in the very argument. The global-market logic has led the industry into the troubles I described in Made for Beijing, How the Chinese Market Changed Hollywood Scripts, where studios altered stories to fit a foreign censor. If the price of the global market is giving up your home audience, you have to ask whether the trade is a good one. And the five-data-points objection is too modest. These are the famous ones. There are many more films, smaller and less noticed, that found loyal audiences without the benefit of a studio's marketing budget, and the pattern has held in every era I have looked at. Many of the best-loved American films of all time share the same features. I made a version of this case about the most beloved Christmas picture in the language in It's a Wonderful Life Is the Most Conservative Film Hollywood Ever Made, and I would say the evidence there fits the argument here.

A worked example, labelled as a hypothetical

Here is a back-of-the-envelope exercise, and I label it as invented. Suppose a studio executive has two scripts on the desk. One is a safe, formula picture aimed at the audience the studio already believes it understands. The other is a story about a small-town fire crew, written with affection for the town. The executive scores the first at a certain odds of success and the second at a lower one, because nobody in the building knows anyone who lives in such a town.

Now suppose the second picture simply costs less to make, because it needs no enormous effects budget and no star who commands a fortune. Its break-even point is lower. If it draws even a modest share of the audience that turned out for the five films above, it clears its costs comfortably. The executive does not have to be a patriot to green-light it. He only has to do the arithmetic. That is the whole point: the industry does not need a change of heart to fix this, only a change of attention. The heart can come later, and in my experience it usually does, once people discover that the folks in the cheaper seats are good company.

What the Founding has to do with it

You might wonder what the Constitution has to say about movies. Not a great deal, directly. The First Amendment protects the studio's right to make whatever film it likes, and it protects the audience's right to stay home. That is exactly how it should be. I have no appetite for a federal bureau that decides which stories are patriotic enough.

But the Founders did care a good deal about the habits of a free people, and they thought a republic depended on citizens who loved it. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, wrote that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. A people who can see their own country in stories, who find in those stories characters worth admiring, is a people with a share of what the Founders called public virtue. A culture that tells that people, again and again, that its country is a villain is making a different bet.

That is why I think the matter is worth taking seriously, even though it is only entertainment. The stories a country tells itself are not trivial. In 1942 the industry decided it was part of the nation and went to war, as I told in When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942. The audiences that filled the theatres then are the grandparents of the audiences that filled them for American Sniper and Maverick. They have not changed their minds.

What a studio should do about it

I do not have a mandate to tell anyone how to make movies, but if a producer asked for advice, I would give three pieces.

• Make the film for the audience that exists. Do not wait for permission. Find the story of a firefighter, a farmer, a chaplain, a Coast Guard rescue crew, a small-town coach, and tell it well.
• Treat the subject as serious. Respect is not the same as flattery. A film can show a hero's flaws and still love him.
• Skip the lecture. The successes I named did not stop for a speech. They told a story and trusted the audience to feel what it felt.

And I would give a word of advice to the rest of us. Vote with your ticket. If you want more of the films you like, buy them, and tell your friends, and bring your kids. Box-office numbers are the only language the industry reliably understands. A studio that sees a hit in its sights will make another.

The case in brief

1. Films that honour service, faith and country have repeatedly found huge audiences, from Sergeant York in 1941 to Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, with American Sniper leading the 2014 domestic box office.
2. The industry's habit of explaining each hit away as a fluke, a niche or a nostalgia play avoids the simple point that the audience wanted it.
3. Respect for the subject, not a political argument, is what these films have in common.
4. The global-market logic that makes studios cautious has costs of its own, including the edits made for foreign censors.
5. Anyone willing to serve this audience honestly will find it waiting.

What you can do: pick one of these films you have not seen, watch it with your family this month, and then write a one-line review on a public site to tell other families it is worth their time.