About a century ago in the 1920s, the most thrilling place in the world for cinema was Weimar Germany. Sure, the United States and Hollywood had a far more robust and wide-ranging industry, a star system and concentrated studio infrastructure, but there weren't quite the same revolutionary leaps in style and tone and technique as what was going on in this part of Europe. Apart from perhaps the general filmographies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the German films of this era -Nosferatu, Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, The Last Laugh, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari- are the silent films most remembered today.
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In the 1930s however, the cinema of Germany began to change, and there was a great exodus of German filmmakers and actors. The Nazi Party came to power in 1933, and from very early on enforced a policy of propaganda on the film industry. Movies had to now subscribe to a certain image of the German culture and people; other subjects, themes, and criticisms were outright prohibited. Joseph Goebbels oversaw the ban of several movies including The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and when its director Fritz Lang was offered to head up a new propaganda studio, he responded by fleeing the country (his wife and writing partner Thea von Harbou stayed behind and enjoyed a successful career for the regime). Max Ophüls, Robert Wiene, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Otto Preminger, and a young writer by the name of Billy Wilder were among the other filmmakers to do the same. Most of them made a home in Hollywood while the German cinema deteriorated under the strict priorities and censorship of the Third Reich, not to be revitalized again until about the 1970s.
Hollywood, and the American entertainment industry more broadly, was happy to paint itself as a refuge for these artists, and a bastion for their free expression. It's never strictly been true, but it has also never had the government operating the levers of what could and could not be shown, what could and could not be said -as was the case in Germany in the 1930s. But on July 17th, 2025, the supposedly independent network CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert under direct pressure to do so by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump due to Colbert being an open and frequent critic of his. The network, which had previously settled an easily winnable lawsuit with the President over a 60 Minutes interview in which he wasn't even involved, gave an explanation that nobody could honestly buy -especially in lieu of Trump openly taking credit. It took place within a conversation on the gutting of 60 Minutes, a critical investigative journalism program, and the hiring on of conservative editorialist Bari Weiss as editor-and-chief of CBS News -moves nakedly designed to stamp out anti-Trump sentiment at the network. It was by no means the only flex of the current U.S. government towards the state censorship and propaganda initiatives that Goebbels succeeded at implementing in Nazi Germany -and nor is it potentially the most gravitational.
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A lot of it has been just bluster. Trump announced a trio of Hollywood Special Ambassadors -Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight- who would be tasked with somehow making Hollywood more conservative and bringing film production back to the States. Nothing has come of it yet because Trump doesn’t know that geriatric actors don’t hold real sway in Hollywood. And of course Trump has personally called to defund or demolish various news networks for being mean to him. Thus far, only PBS and NPR have borne real brunt from this. But the point has been also to scare media entities into submission preemptively, and that has worked. For a while now we have seen studios and networks pull back in both statements and products from what has been called ‘DEI’ practices. Bob Iger at Disney was one of the first to commit to less inclusiveness in Disney products going forward -unsurprisingly blaming that for the studio’s poor reception in recent years. Less and less LGBTQ shows and movies are being produced -according to GLAAD, there is going to be a steep drop of 46% less LGBTQ characters in popular media going into next year. And all without Trump having to force the hands of these companies. They have been either too scared of him or already in alignment with him that they are getting ahead of potential government interference and censorship by doing it themselves. Just as they did back in the 1930s when implementing the Hays Code.
Of course in some cases they have answered his demands. Following Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel was yanked off the air by Disney for the mildest of jokes about the Republican reaction to the death of one of their beloved fascist provocateurs. Once again, Trump took credit much as the company tried to pretend it was a coincidence. It was such a naked show of censorship that Disney did not expect the voracity of its backlash, and once again were forced by public pressure to do the right thing and reinstate Kimmel’s program after a week. It was taken as a win against Trump’s propaganda aims -but being so out in the open it was an easy win (and of course it hasn’t also applied to Colbert, whose network is much more comfortable being perceived licking the boot). there is still greater danger ahead and it’s not so blunt as a popular figure being unjustly dropped from their TV show. Because the aim of Trump, or at least his cronies, is a complete re-calibration of Hollywood’s political purpose. And we consumers have been making it easier for them.
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Perhaps not consciously, but still palpably. I may be repeating myself, but Hollywood has become much safer and more risk-averse in the past decade and a half, and audiences have been trained to its parameters, learning to accept them and not demand much more. As far as the kinds of stories that get the greatest proportion of resources, they are fundamentally escapist -especially in cinema, but to a lesser degree too on television. In particular brands and franchises -often based in millennial nostalgia- have become broadly the only movies the industry cares about, and though their power has started to wane, an apathy towards the capitalism of Hollywood sunk in -especially if the movements of those power-brokers came with what appeared to be a benefit to a particular populist sector. Most pertinent was the buyout of 20th Century Fox by Disney, a horrible decision that essentially shuttered one of the oldest and most significant movie studios (the output from the Fox wing of Disney has been abysmal the last five years), but the story that seemed to dominate that acquisition was the X-Men and Fantastic Four being able to join the MCU. That perhaps was a mere testing ground for what we may be about to see go down with Warner Bros. and a possible sale to Paramount.
What does that have to do with the censorship conversation? Well, Paramount is the parent company of CBS and there is perhaps an additional reason beyond intimidation that that network has been so willing to cower often preemptively to Trump’s wishes. Paramount Studios previously merged with Skydance Media (the conglomerate is now called Paramount Skydance), and much like when Warner Bros. merged with Discovery, the CEO of the lesser party somehow transitioned to the commanding role of the new monstrosity. In this case it was David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison -one of the most exorbitantly wealthy men in the world, a hard-line Trump supporter and avowed Zionist who has personally pumped millions into supporting the IDF and their genocidal war crimes in Palestine. The Ellisons are bad and corrupt people with bad and corrupt designs for the media empire they control. They have already shown their hand on the Zionism front, having initially circulated that response (with the disgraced Debra Messing the biggest name signatory) to the celebrity open letter vowing divestment from Israeli film companies and propagandistic interests. And they put out the statement that they monitor the people they work with for alleged “anti-Semitism” -as well as supposedly racism, misogyny, and homophobia, but almost certainly they don’t care about keeping tabs on any of that. It’s no coincidence that the appointment of Bari Weiss was one of David Ellison’s first actions as head of the studio, and there are worrying signs that Paramount’s output is about to change drastically due to the personal politics of those in control of it.
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And now they have their sights set on Warner Bros., a studio that in spite of CEO David Zaslav’s best efforts, has remained successful and valuable this past year, boasting Sinners, Superman, Weapons, One Battle After Another, and The Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros has a gargantuan amount of assets under its umbrella, brands as varying as Cartoon Network and HBO (not to mention TCM and of course its hefty catalogue of cinema history). The notion of all of that being in the hands of figures like the Ellisons, and by proxy the Trump administration, is very concerning; powerful properties like DC under the auspices of fascist enablers -I suppose that is one way to bring the Snyderverse back. And this isn’t about the contents of the films and series themselves being ruined, but what might be put into them and what might be taken out in terms of messaging and political theme. Already these calls to dismantle DEI and “woke” -whatever the right has decided it means this month- has manifested in conservative or “apolitical” initiatives from various industry heavies. A Warner Bros. under the Ellisons could be guaranteed to at best never skirt the status quo in their movies (and scrub out any critiques that could be applied to Zionism specifically), at worst it could be the most powerful propaganda arm of the state we’ve yet seen. Trump’s influence with Paramount is there in the open. They’ve announced production on a Rush Hour 4 at Trump’s request, likely to do at least in part with franchise director Brett Ratner having recently directed a documentary about Melania (though I’m sure the infamous racism and sexism in those movies also plays a part). In the modern Hollywood landscape it’s rare enough already to find studio bigwigs who actually like or care about art. Considerations of art may never come out of Warner Bros. again, and I don’t want to imagine what they might do to the work already made -if it isn’t consistently making a profit.
This situation has been a long time coming, as conservative interests have shored up more and more power in media corporations and entities. All of the major social media platforms are run by such ghouls, as are the tech companies -they are in control of our sources of information, and they strive to have just as much power in our art as well. The push of A.I by tech conglomerates., especially when it comes to works of media, is a part of this. It delineates art and purposefully so. There is an image of a dystopian media landscape through which political nuance can be filtered into merely the messaging of the powerful, and it extends well beyond Trump, who is really just a figurehead when it comes to these matters to folks like the Ellisons and Peter Thiel.
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In film though, if it is a precipice of censorship that we are on the verge of, we’ve been moving there for a while -long before Trump started openly flirting with the notion of silencing dissenting voices and his acolytes started carrying it out. We as audiences can in part be blamed. For at least a decade now, the output of Hollywood, at least as far as the studios and their priorities are, have been increasingly conservative compared to decades past. The franchise blockbusters are homogeneous, sometimes in craft and sometimes in theme, and even in guises of challenging the status quo do so on a surface level only. Rarely do you see a real political statement that means something -the big studios have long been afraid of not only creative risk, but ideological risk. And of course sex and intimacy is being scrubbed out, to say nothing of sexual diversity, one of the most tangible things a major studio film is afraid of, offering only crumbs of representation they’re now all too eager to take away while pretending they were anything more than tokenism in the first place.
In light of all of this we have largely accepted it, some of us enthusiastically so. There is less curiosity in general moviegoers than ever to see something outside of the generic and empty populist entertainments foisted on them by a Hollywood that wants to keep them satiated by such products -because they can relatively predict and control it. And the lack of any real political bite or complexity in these movies has subtly trained our expectations. I've discussed this at length before in essays on the hazards of Disney's market dominance and the prudish backlash by young audiences most startlingly to the mere presence of sex in cinema, but it is all relevant to the power moneyed conservative interests have over the future of mainstream art and entertainment, at least in the United States and the broader West. Our complacency and desire for broad escapism in our art has presaged this, and it is more important than ever to uplift those works that do stand genuinely in opposition to fascism and the machinations of Trump, the Ellisons, and others who would dictate what stories and messages we are allowed to absorb. If the right makes a fuss about it enough, or wants it censored, that is usually a good sign.
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At the very least we must maintain and bolster our media literacy, take greater stock of what is going on when it comes to the business of major media entities. Because the effect they have is not unlike their politician cousins. Being able to access and process information and viewpoints that aren’t filtered through the dictates of governmental dogma is vital. It is a freedom we see is very easily taken away. And on top of everything else it tarnishes the reputation of long-standing institutions. Paramount was once one of the great Hollywood studios; what its legacy will be put to in the coming years, I can’t imagine will be flattering given its cinematic history. Bear in mind for an example that Paramount owns Star Trek -one of the few ubiquitous brands at its disposal for profit. But what will a Star Trek -always a deeply progressive franchise- look like under the eye of Trump’s propagandists?
There is little we can do at this time but be vigilant and hope that better heads prevail. Awful though it is, Netflix buying out Warner Bros., a heinous, unthinkable notion itself in other circumstances, is preferable to that massive trove of art and media properties falling into the orbit of the Ellisons’ control. None of the options it should be stressed are anywhere close to good, until anti-trust laws are reinstated and these hideous media monopolies broken up. But there is a very clear way the American media landscape could get much worse. Film productions should not be put into motion because Trump or one of his goons personally asks for it. Works with messages or even just simple representation that goes against fascist hegemony should not be quietly dismissed and shuttered, or sabotaged so that they are easier to get rid of. And even if nothing comes of these talks of mergers, the film and television industries should not be bowing in advance, as the executives have indicated a desire to do. Rather they should be getting bolder, more defiant and more outspoken. Art is a worthy bastion against a hateful world -we can’t simply make it a mindless thing to escape that world into. Because the nature of escapism is important and means something.
One of the best movies of the year would not under any circumstances be allowed to be made if its studio Warner Bros. were owned by the vultures at Paramount, and it has of course been severely criticized by influencers of the American populist right. One Battle After Another should be a blueprint -movies like it at one time were, but now it is an anomaly. We are living through scary, turbulent times and the risks of even our movies being under threat is only going to make everything worse. Propaganda is a conditioning tool -it worked on the Germans and it can work anywhere. All I can ask is care about the business of the media entities you consume, and watch carefully -both if that deal happens and if it doesn’t. Because with censorship it’s not just about what is lost, but what comes in its place.
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