Hollywood Shoots Itself in the Left Foot

[Charlie T Waite]

Hollywood has long had a confusing, contradictory and hypocritical relationship with guns, but green-lighting a thriller featuring liberals hunting down “deplorable” conservatives with guns is so smug, elitist and disgusting it is actually unintentionally revealing.

The film is called “The Hunt.” It was due to be released Sept. 27. Universal Pictures pulled back on pre-release publicity when two mass-murderers struck in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. Those horrific events sobered Universal. But why would they produce such a divisive and disgusting film in the first place?

When Variety broke the story that Universal was at least delaying the release of “The Hunt,” people noticed. Even President Donald J. Trump tweeted: “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level, and with great Anger and Hate!”

An early teaser of the film showed a fake advertisement for a resort called “The Manor” that allowed the rich to hunt less-well-off people from “Red States.” A trailer later explained that, in the film, a group of wealthy individuals kidnap people from all over America for game in their hunting adventures. At some point a woman named Crystal (Betty Gilpin) fights back against the villain (Hilary Swank). We aren’t sure if there is a happy ending.

If the plot is supposed to be satirical, then it really is an unwitting satire of the bubble so many in Hollywood live in. They are becoming so out-of-touch and elitist that they look down on much of their audience. To them, all of those people in “flyover country” (what the Parisian elites would call “the provinces”) who own guns for sport and self-defense are backward, racist, unenlightened denizens living monotonous existences relieved only by the art beamed into their living rooms by the distant and much-more-evolved citizens in certain upper-class circles, such as in Hollywood.

The concept isn’t even novel. “The Most Dangerous Game” was a short story by Richard Connell published in Collier’s in 1924. It featured an American hunter who was hunted by a Russian aristocrat on a Caribbean island. A 1932 film by the same title, starring Joel McCrae, brought the story to the masses.

More recently, the film “Predators” (2010) used the plotline by placing humans who have backgrounds in fighting on an alien planet where they are hunted by predators.

Universal simply grabbed the old concept and decided to be controversial and appallingly divisive by having urban elites hunting “deplorables.”

Universal, to be clear, also hasn’t said it will never release the film. Universal said, “We stand by our filmmakers and will continue to distribute films in partnership with bold and visionary creators, like those associated with this satirical social thriller, but we understand that now is not the right time to release this film.”

This film was originally titled “Red State vs. Blue State,” so it’s clear what they had in mind. Some press reports (quoting the film’s screenplay) said the “Red State” residents are often referred to as “deplorables.”

The Atlantic reported that the “creative team behind The Hunt has made plenty of twisty genre films with topical or satirical edges. Zobel was one of the creators of the famed web cartoon Homestar Runner, while the writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse worked on the heady apocalyptic series The Leftovers together. Lindelof is the co-creator of Lost and has written many big Hollywood scripts; he’s also an avowed liberal who says that his upcoming HBO adaptation of Watchmen is about confronting white supremacy in America.”

Perhaps the people behind “The Hunt” simply went too far this time as they tried to be edgy enough to grab attention. It is easy to see how a brainstorming session in a Hollywood studio filled with those who have liberal-progressives views could go so far in this direction.

What is strange is that no one in management said, “Wait a second. That’s way too far.” Then again, maybe it isn’t surprising given that management at Universal is probably of the same mindset as those who created this film.

Interestingly, Variety’s Owen Gleiberman said the film had to be kept from theaters to avoid helping gun-rights advocates. He wrote: “For the first time in maybe forever, the right seems not just on the defensive about this issue. The right seems on the run.”

Gleiberman, it seems, is guilty of the same anti-gun-rights groupthink as those who made this film.

Ironically, they are the ones who are out-of-touch with America and our individual freedom. 

(Frank Miniter’s latest book is The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide to the Workplace.)

Most-Revealing Anti-Freedom Quote of the Week

“It’s time to boycott Walmart. It’s time to stop putting money in the hands of a company that puts out on the streets [guns] that kill innocent people.” –New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said after a mass-murderer killed people in a Walmart.

Pro-Freedom Quote of the Week

“This is like Groundhog Day, we have a shooting and Democrats want to take away your guns. They don’t want to solve problems, they want to take away your guns. That’s what totalitarian governments do.” –U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in an appearance on Fox News “America’s Newsroom”