After Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, Hollywood got angry. Then it got organised. “It was a total shock, and then it released a huge burst of energy,” a longtime Hollywood executive says of Trump’s first election win. “People talked about the ‘resistance’, how we’re going to fight and stand up for what we believe in.”
That was then. Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris — who lives in Los Angeles’ posh Brentwood neighbourhood with her entertainment lawyer husband, Doug Emhoff — the mood is stunned, deflated. “We formed protest groups in 2016,” the executive continued. “This time there’s none of that.”
Even in liberal LA, Trump’s share of the vote rose 5 per cent from 2020. He beat Harris in Beverly Hills, proof that politics in the city are “not monolithic,” says a veteran agent. “There are pockets of folks who are quietly happier about the result than they would want anyone to know.”
Another veteran Hollywood executive who spent months working for the Harris campaign acknowledges that some people may be opting out of politics right now. But she believes this will change once Trump takes office and begins enacting policies that are antithetical to liberal values. “Once some of these things start happening, like mass deportations or a ban on contraception or a national ban on abortion, you’ll see a lot of activity in Hollywood,” she says.
Trump’s victory landed at a fraught moment in Hollywood, which has faced one hardship after another in the past four years. The pandemic closed down cinemas and halted TV and film production. Netflix’s streaming revolution has completely upended the traditional movie and TV business. Strikes shut down Hollywood for much of 2023, and waves of cost cuts and restructurings have washed over studios such as Paramount and Warner Bros. “Survive til ’25” became 2024’s motto.
“There’s such a malaise in Hollywood,” says the longtime executive. “The whole business is recessed, even depressed. People are worried about their careers, their jobs, their future.”
This is a far different Hollywood than in 2016, when the worldwide box office raked in $36bn, a whopping $10bn higher than the best year so far this decade. It is hard to keep up the old Hollywood swagger when revenues are shrinking — and when cultural and political narratives are increasingly driven by online influencers. Harris had two of the world’s biggest celebrities in her corner — Beyoncé and Taylor Swift — but they proved to be less effective at mobilising voters than podcasters such as Joe Rogan and Theo Von.
Against these forces, there are natural questions about how much of a fight Hollywood will be willing — or able — to put up against Trump. There have already been test cases, with Disney’s “Don’t Say Gay” confrontation with Florida governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 being the most glaring example. The “woke Disney” label still sticks to the company, despite efforts by Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, to turn the page. “Our number one goal is to entertain,” he said on CNBC last year. “Infusing messaging as a sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to.”
But Iger, a reliable Democratic donor for years, made headlines during the election for not giving any money to a candidate or party — a sign, many believed, that he wanted to avoid painting another political target on Disney, or himself.
The question becomes whether a weakened Hollywood will pull its punches when it comes to controversial or boundary-pushing content during a second Trump administration. The saga of The Apprentice, a film about the young Trump’s close relationship with the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, felt like a trial run. After it received a positive response at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the Trump team threatened legal action and the film struggled for months to find a US distributor. It was finally released in October.
However large the cultural and political chasm between Hollywood and Trump may be, some believe the incoming administration could help ease some of the industry’s problems — namely by replacing Biden regulators who are sceptical of M&A deals. Trump is widely expected to replace Lina Khan, firebrand 35-year-old head of the Federal Trade Commission, and Jonathan Kanter, head of antitrust at the Department of Justice. Besides suing Big Tech companies, they have accused Live Nation, the concert and ticket group, of being a monopoly.
David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros Discovery, recently said he expected to see a better dealmaking environment under Trump, which “would provide a real positive and accelerated impact” on companies like his. Zaslav’s view is “consistent with all the CEOs in the business now,” says another Hollywood agent. “If we don’t have [deals], then companies are just going to go out of business.”
There is also a lively post-election discussion about whether Hollywood needs to adjust its movie and TV offerings to reflect better the mood of the country. “This [election] is a culture-moving event, and we both programme to and reflect the culture,” says the veteran agent. “Hollywood wakes up over and over and over again to the audiences that it’s not paying attention to.”
The object of many of the traditional Hollywood studios’ ire — Netflix — may have positioned itself, wittingly or not, perfectly for the Trump 2.0 moment. In January 2024, the streaming service signed a 10-year deal with the WWE, the professional wrestling league with long ties to Trump.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, is a former chief executive of the company, and perma-tanned former wrestler Hulk Hogan spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Netflix will launch WWE’s Raw, the long-running weekly wrestling show, on the streaming service on January 6.
“I always felt Hollywood just sells to itself,” said Nick Khan, WWE’s president, in a presentation with Netflix in December. “We at WWE try to appeal to all 50 states.”
There could be a lesson in this for Hollywood — and the Democrats.
Christopher Grimes is the FT’s LA bureau chief
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