For me, movies at the theater have always been measurements of social and political life. What films are made and what people vote on at the box office to see are often accurate predictors of what life will be three or four years away. For instance, I pointed out many of the woke problems that Hollywood would have in the pre-pandemic period where they got caught playing along with liberal politics only to nearly destroy their entire industry. As leftists, they were suckered and played to the future aims of Larry Fink and the Desecrators of Davos goals of global domination through the back door of finance. It was so bad that it has damaged the Disney Company in profound ways that will likely never recover. So it’s not enough for me to just say that the new Top Gun: Maverick movie is good, which it is. I’ve listened to all the reviews at this point, and I haven’t heard one yet that didn’t think the movie wasn’t spectacular. It was great, spectacular, wonderful, fun, and energetic; it was all kinds of great things. But there’s a bigger story here that everyone seems to miss, which is really the most critical factor. Top Gun in 2022 was noticeably, almost unapologetically, not “woke,” and that declaration was rewarded in huge ways at the box office. The film made $160 million domestically over Memorial Day weekend. It brought in an additional $139 million globally in all the other markets, giving it a roughly $300 million total in its first weekend. What does that mean? Well, people who don’t usually go to movies went to see this film, and it reveals the nature of an untapped market that Hollywood has ignored as they attempted to trade dollars for ESG scores. But this movie was tossing that measure out the window and going back to what worked, which is a significant decision.
Hey, I come from the 80s, where Hollywood used to make movies like Top Gun every week, and there was a new top 40s song released every Friday, or so it seemed. It was a rich culture where Ronald Reagan was president, and everything we saw and heard wasn’t tied to some political or social message like things are now. I had been looking forward to this new Top Gun movie since 2019 when it was supposed to come out in the summer of 2020. But that was interrupted obviously by the “pandemic,” which shut down movie theaters all across the country, and it looked for a while as if movie theaters would not survive to ever allow Top Gun the sequel to release. Once they missed their 2020 release window, they might not have ever recovered it, so the movie has been held up for release for over two years, and a lot has changed over that period. Hollywood obviously was targeted by radical leftist globalists early in the process, going back to the 1960s. However, film executives still measured their success in dollars and cents, so that impact didn’t really hit the industry hard until Larry Fink and the gang started putting ESG scores to the film industry to secure financing for projects that would be the early formula for all corporate America after the 2008 housing bubble collapse and the start of the Obama presidency. After that, movies made a transition to hide the fact that they were pushing away domestic audiences and hiding the new numbers in global markets that were hoping to trade China for America, the way most corporations have been assuming would be the reality in every industry, from steel production to microchip manufacturing.
Many have come to understand what I have been saying about the pandemic from the beginning, that it was always a fake crisis created by world governments in service to the Desecrators of Davos at the World Economic Forum, who wanted to push an economic change state that would give them control over the money flow of the world. Movies like Top Gun, which Paramount Pictures had already produced, were already done, and they were trying to adjust to this new market economy. They weren’t sure where their future audience would be and what kind of movies they would want to see. To appeal to the China movie market, the filmmakers had even taken off Maverick’s flight jacket the Taiwanese flag so as not to make the Chinese upset with the recognition. But fans of the movie noticed this in the previews and lashed out. So by the time the film was released, Paramount had put the flag of Taiwan back on Maverick’s jacket and pretty much threw caution to the wind. And what ended up on screen by release day in 2022 was an unapologetically American film, and it paid off big time for Paramount Studios. A bluff had been called in the world, and ironically, Paramount Studios was rejecting the premise of the World Economic Forum. They will go down in history as one of the first American companies to do so. The money for most economic activity is in the United States. Here was a studio essentially rejecting globalism and all its illusions for the gold of a domestic audience, and that is the biggest story of Top Gun: Maverick. And because of it, many other American companies are going to follow.
I call it the American Sniper market, which Clint Eastwood obviously revealed in the popular movie, the hidden Trump voters, the MAGA movement that people see on television waiting for President Trump to show up in Nebraska for a speech six hours ahead of time. Paramount Studios had obviously learned something from their popular streaming show, Yellowstone, that the actual money to be made in movies was from traditional American audiences. And they allowed Tom Cruise and Jerry Bruckheimer to make the movie that was pro-America the way they wanted. So what Top Gun: Maverick became was not just a throwback to the 1980s but an American flag-wrapped sentimental journey into the glories of American life that communicated to the world all the elements of American exceptionalism that the Desecrators of Davos wanted to destroy. And it put it on full display, which was remarkable. The last 15 minutes of the movie were quite audacious, especially to the way the world’s sensibilities are, especially in markets like London, Paris, and the Middle East. It was the kind of exceptionalism that only Americans would understand, and they certainly supported it by flocking to the movies in mass numbers to see it. And boy, was it worth it. I have not seen a better ending in film since the 1980s. Those last 15 minutes were the best since then and were quite remarkable. And it wasn’t by accident. Tom Cruise and the filmmakers knew what they were doing, and they put it all on film. Top Gun: Maverick was a special movie, not just in what ended up on the screen, but in what it says about the strength of American culture after one of the darkest periods the human race has ever experienced, a global takeover by the technocrats for world domination, starting with arts and entertainment. And Hollywood oddly chose the American people, the Trump-voting public, which was a bit of a surprise. Shockingly at the start of the movie, before the story even happened, Tom Cruise thanked the audience for coming back to the movie theater and the proclamation that they made this movie for them. And that he hoped they’d enjoy it. In other words, it was Tom Cruise asking for forgiveness on behalf of Hollywood. Which, based on the box office numbers, they were willing to do. And in that effort, we have just had a glimpse of the future, and it says many great things that are about to unfold.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 