Wokeness blared into their ears and shoved into their eyes! Give us another remake where the villain is actually the misunderstood hero because of their intersectionality! Give us more live action “Snow White,” along with Rachel Zegler’s very-important opinions on Gaza! More, more, more!
Said literally no one ever.
Or at least the numbers seem to be stacking up that way.
Wokeness may be on the advance again after the vibe-shift retreat of 2024, but that doesn’t hold true for the movies. “Reacher” star Alan Ritchson is finding that out the hard way — after he decided to spend most of 2026 speechifying about how President Donald Trump was a “rapist” who had deliberately tried to hide the Jeffrey Epstein files, he told an audience that the studios had told him to be quiet about his stupid political grievances.
“You know how many phone calls I get from studios like, ‘Would you shut the f*** up, please? Stop talking in public,’” Ritchson said earlier this month at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto, The Christian Post reported.
“I mean, but it’s not chaos I’m after,” he added.
“It’s actually the opposite of chaos. I’d like a little — I’m not going to get into it. You don’t want to see my rants start these g******n f***ing politicians everywhere.”
“I’m not going to do it. Sony told me not to. And I’m not going to say anything,” he added with a smirk.
Ahahaha yeah, great, you have two bombs in a row on your hands, my dude.
“Reacher” has been a success for Amazon, at least relative to what else is on its platform. His July film “Motor City,” which had decent enough reviews — but which was also plagued by a media tour where he decided everyone needed to hear his opinions on Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, because clearly nobody else has ever talked about that for a second — made $3 million against a $30 million budget.
“Runner,” which came out earlier this month, has garnered $15.7 million as of Saturday against a budget of somewhere between $35 million and $45 million.
This is before so-called “Hollywood math” features into things, which says that the break-even point of a picture is double the stated budget once you factor in promotion and distribution. This is more a general rule than a highly specific formula, but the point is that neither film even came close to making its raw budget, and neither film was simply dumped into theaters without press because they knew it was a bomb.
Both films were actually picked off the so-called “Black List” — which may sound bad, but is actually an annual list of the best finished screenplays going around Hollywood that haven’t been picked up for production. Everything from “The Bucket List” to “Charlie Wilson’s War” to “I, Tonya” has come off of there. (Also: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” So they can’t all be awards-bait.)
Both films qualified as action flicks, just like “Reacher” is on Amazon. “Motor City” was the more challenging of the two, with deliberately sparse dialogue to illustrate the revenge-on-a-gangster story.
“Runner” seems to have been a more traditional action-comedy popcorn-muncher, with Owen Wilson as Ritchson’s sidekick. It hasn’t done a whole lot better.
So, these films have three things in common. First, they’re both action films with modest budgets, which should mean that they ought to at least recoup raw costs if the reviews aren’t terrible. Two, the reviews weren’t terrible. Three, the one star they have in common is Alan Ritchson, who’s basically made his fear and loathing of Donald J. Trump the centerpiece of his support for the films.
And then he wonders why the studios tell him to shut the heck up — in stronger language, apparently — about his dumb opinions.
Is it the wokeness? Assume that you’re alienating half of America if you become known for screeching your views into their faces at every opportunity.
Going to the movies is an inherently social experience for most of us. Rarely do any of us go alone, and usually then it’s because we so love the subject of or the crew involved in making the film that even if our friends or family won’t come along, we’ll actively seek it out.
I don’t know anyone who is so in love with Ritchson or the directors of these movies so much that they’d seek them out — but I know enough that, if a friend suggests we go see either one, I’d demur unless the alternative is a Tom Green film festival.
But therein lies the glorious part: We could not spend the money instead. And if there’s one part of that half of America you’ve alienated in every group potentially going to the movies, people are going to avoid the film, even if it means avoiding the multiplex, period. Do the math, Alan.
People like Ritchson get the chance to live everyone’s dream. And he’s flushed it down the drain, in part because he can’t control his obsessive need not just to moralize, but also to trash those he disagrees with. Nice work. Hope these flicks do okay on streaming, and maybe everyone can forget why they didn’t see them in the first place if you take the studio’s advice for once.
