In the months before the election, it became clear that political films were tanking, no matter what attitude they adopted. Dinesh D’Souza’s right-wing Vindicating Trump died a grisly death, as did The Apprentice, a drama with a liberal perspective based on young Trump’s toxic relationship with his mentor, the notoriously corrupt attorney Roy Cohn.

Even when a film’s take on politics was quite general, audiences weren’t having any of it. Rumours, a bleak Guy Maddin horror-comedy about political ineptitude involving zombies overrunning the annual G7 meeting, hardly seemed to register with audiences and quickly disappeared from theaters.

One rare moviegoer who sought out Rumours, pursuing “levity” to counter her mounting preelection dread, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times titled “There’s No Escape at the Movies.” The reviewer, Pamela Paul, lamented that Rumours only aggravated her anxieties with its premise establishing the utter incompetence of world leaders “gathered to write the draft of a provisional statement addressing an unidentified global crisis, with the sort of weak-kneed indecision that surely created the crisis in the first place.” Needless to say, these bumbling and self-interested elites are no match for “an onslaught of immediate challenges, which include menacing, zombified bog bodies.”

In the same review, Paul mentions that she also tried out Conclave, thinking a mystery thriller set in the Vatican about cutthroat backroom machinations among cardinals selecting a new pope would make good escapist fare. Instead, she encountered a film tailor-made to remind audiences of the presidential election then underway: Conclave concerns vicious politicking on behalf of two candidates, one progressive and the other conservative. “You try to get away and what do you get?” Paul asked. “An acrimonious election between a liberal idealist and a conservative who wants to turn the clock back.”

Back in September, Ben Mankiewicz, host of Turner Classic Movies, wrote a think piece bemoaning the lack of political films being released in America. He wondered if Hollywood had permanently abandoned the genre, which had produced such major pictures as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), A Face in the Crowd (1957), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), All the President’s Men (1976), The American President (1995), and even the long-running television hit The West Wing (1999–2006).

There does seem to be a general sense that the American film industry is more averse to making political films than ever. Deadline recently cited as proof the way every major distribution company fled from the offer to release The Apprentice  — in the face of Trump’s furious screeds against the film — before Tom Ortenberg of Briarcliff Entertainment finally accepted. The Hollywood Reporter, in commenting on The Apprentice, took the occasion to lament the loss of a reliable financier of films with political content, Participant Media:

In April, Participant Media, Hollywood’s premier backer of socially conscious films, producer of Oscar winners Spotlight and Judas and the Black Messiah and such docs as An Inconvenient Truth and RBG, shut down altogether. Many studios fear a MAGA-led backlash to movies perceived as too “woke,” which can include anything from having a diverse cast to the mere mention of the LGBTQ+ community.

But whatever the trends now among both audiences and industry leaders, the political film has never exactly been a thriving genre. With an eye permanently fixed on box-office receipts, film executives have always been leery of movies that almost automatically alienate part of the mass audience with a political perspective. American films featuring overt political content tend to be one-off “prestige pictures” or event films that are offered with a self-congratulatory tone, their promotional materials announcing fearless, searing, “hard-hitting” fare that addresses pressing current issues. Mankiewicz’s list of films gives a good idea of the sampling of such movies over several decades, but he could also have included The Great Dictator (1940), The Last Hurrah (1958), Seven Days in May (1964), Fail Safe (1964, remade in 2000), The Candidate (1972), The Conversation (1974), Reds (1981), Wag the Dog (1997), Primary Colors (1998), Argo (2012), The Death of Stalin (2017), Don’t Look Up (2021), and Civil War (2024).

A few directors have managed to establish a creative identity consistently making mainstream political films, such as Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, State of the Union), Oliver Stone (Salvador, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, JFK, Nixon, W), George Clooney (Good Night and Good Luck, The Ides of March), and Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice, Don’t Look Up). But it’s a fairly rare career path for directors of mainstream films who aren’t consistently documentary filmmakers.

The safer way to present political content is through genre films, such as lighter or more raucously broad political comedies (The Farmer’s Daughter, Bananas, The American President, Dave, Dick, Idiocracy) and action films with generally cartoonish politics (Rambo, A Prayer for the Dying, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, In the Line of Fire, Clear and Present Danger, Air Force One). Dark comedies and satires are financially chancier and retain more serious political critiques (Dr. Strangelove, The Candidate, Shampoo, Nashville, Primary Colors, Wag the Dog, Election, Bulworth, In the Loop, The Death of Stalin).

The genre that’s found the greatest success while retaining serious political content is the political conspiracy thriller, which became a thriving part of 1970s cinema in particular. The 1960s and early ’70s featured the most overt political filmmaking in general. The “paranoid” political thriller became a notably popular genre with such titles as The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Torn Curtain (1966), The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Odessa File (1974), The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men (1976), Marathon Man (1976), and The Boys from Brazil (1978). But that “New Hollywood” era was a very peculiar time of political upheaval and ascendant countercultural rebellion — a time when young filmmakers from outside the system were given the keys to the film studios in an unprecedented way as a desperate move by bewildered executives overseeing an ossified, out of touch, and increasingly unprofitable industry.

In short, at that grisly point in film history, they’d try anything. Those days are gone, though the political thriller continues to hang onto its reputation as a serious genre with films such as Enemy of the State (1998), Syriana (2005), The Constant Gardener (2005), State of Play (2009), and Bridge of Spies (2015).

The current chilly atmosphere for filmmakers seeking producers and distributors of political films — and audiences, for that matter — is really an intensification of the Hollywood status quo. Of course, any film can be read ideologically in pursuit of political stances and implications. As Mankiewicz points out, quoting New Yorker critic Michael Schulman, the majority of mainstream films convey “robust political messaging” through subtext:

I think most of the time, politics comes through in movies through metaphor. Movies refract more than they reflect. . . . One of my favorite movies from the ’50s is “High Noon,” a western about a sheriff in a small town who has to face his enemy alone because all of his allies abandon him. This is a movie about the blacklist, about the cowardice of people in Hollywood during the Red Scare. . . . “Planet of the Apes” is, of course, about a planet of apes. But it’s really — surprise! — about how humanity is destroying itself and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

But just as you might be tempted to agree — though Schulman is being way too reductive about the savage critique of racism and contemporary social institutions in Planet of the Apes — he concludes that “deeply political ideas” are being conveyed in new movies like Joker (2019), with its portrait of “white male disaffection” in the Trump era, and the supposedly intense feminism of Barbie (2023).

And that comparison of older movies with strong and consistent political subtexts and new ones featuring broad but shallow “political messaging” makes you realize what a dismal time it really is for political films in America.