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The past few months have not been good for left-wing entertainment, with self-inflicted injuries tearing down successful and prominent figures and shows in the public consciousness.
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One such self-inflicted wound involved Amazon’s hit show The Boys, a cynical take on superheroes that quickly became one of the biggest shows in popular culture. Early on, the show satirized politics, corporations, celebrities, and, yes, social justice movements. It was clever, graphic, and undoubtedly a hit.
The average episode rating on IMDb for the first three seasons of The Boys was 8.6, 8.5, and 8.6, respectively. However, season four dropped to 7.9, and the final season dropped further to 7.3. The eight lowest-rated episodes come from the final two seasons, with the lowest two (a pair of abysmal 5.7 and 5.6-rated episodes) being the final two episodes of the series. So how did this happen?
With then-former President Donald Trump coming back onto the political scene, showrunner Eric Kripke decided to turn the show into a more expensive Saturday Night Live-style parody of Trump and American politics. This meant turning Homelander, the compelling main villain that viewers loved to hate because of his complexity (and the superb acting of Anthony Starr) into an increasingly childish imitation of Trump. The final season (shot and released after Trump won the 2024 election) ended with Trumplander having taken over the country and trying to turn himself into a god. In the finale, he is stripped of his superpowers, begs for his life and promises to eat feces or perform oral sex before having his head caved in by a crowbar in the Oval Office.
The fan disappointment at the show’s collapse didn’t sour Kripke on the finished product, though. Kripke wanted every bit of the show to turn into a reference to American politics with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Firecracker’s death was inspired by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), “these Trump spawn that are trying to outdo each other for how outrageous and sexualized and gun-toting and slavishly obedient they can be.”
In the finale, Kripke had Homelander kill a space-obsessed racist billionaire clearly designed to be a parody of Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk. When Musk criticized the show’s ending (as other fans had done), Kripke took a victory lap, because making the political Right mad was all he was going for in that final season.
Just one day after the much-maligned finale for The Boys, another left-wing entertainment vehicle concluded its television run. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired its final show after CBS announced back in July 2025 that the show would end when Colbert’s contract expired.
Colbert had turned The Late Show into a vehicle to promote the Democratic Party. Monologues were stripped of any real jokes in favor of insult-laden rants, such as the one where Colbert called Trump the “cock holster” of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. He turned his monologues into rants about how “this is not normal,” the kind of thing you would see from your distressed, politically-obsessed liberal aunt at a “No Kings” rally. When his guests weren’t celebrities promoting new projects, fans got to witness interviews with random liberal journalists or Democratic politicians, such as Jake Tapper or New York City comptroller Brad Lander.
Colbert supporters (almost all of whom worked in media or Democratic politics) pointed to his ratings as proof that his show was a success, claiming CBS/Paramount only cancelled his show to pander to the Trump administration.
In reality, Colbert’s show was costing the network $40 million per year. For a show where a man sits at a desk and talks for an hour, Colbert needed a staff of more than 200 people, including 22 writers. Colbert himself was being paid $15 million per year on his most recent contract. The show was such a money pit that CBS didn’t even bother taking it in a new direction with a new host, instead killing the 33-year-old Late Show franchise that had once been a staple of American media culture.
The progressive mindset behind the decline in Colbert’s show has so infiltrated Hollywood that it predominates within grand projects that should otherwise be layups. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey should be easy money at the box office, and it still may be. But the film has since fallen into controversy for casting decisions, including black actress Lupita Nyong’o being cast as the historically white Helen of Troy and Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page) reportedly being cast as a male character despite being a woman. It appears to most critics that Nolan is DEI-washing the film, possibly to hit DEI quotas for awards — or simply to get Hollywood’s DEI-obsessives off his back.
The woes in left-wing entertainment are not limited to individuals or even fledgling franchises like The Boys. Disney, the juggernaut entertainment company, has turned Star Wars, one of the most beloved franchises in American culture, into a dying brand. In the years since Disney has taken over, Star Wars actors have accused fans of the franchise of being racist, actors with mainstream conservative views were fired while actors with progressive views were made the stars of the brand, and Disney turned Star Wars content into identity politics-ridden mediocrities. The best example of the latter was The Acolyte, the show where the lesbian witch cult was the good guys and the Jedi were the bad guys.
The latest Star Wars entry for Disney shows just how far the franchise has fallen. The Mandalorian had been one of the few gems for Disney when it first aired in 2019. The television series, starring progressive actor Pedro Pascal, was so popular that Disney decided to turn it into a movie, given that the company butchered the cinematic Star Wars brand with its terrible “Rey Skywalker” trilogy.
The film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, saw a 70% box office drop in its second weekend, and has thus far made just $243 million globally during its theatrical run. Stateside, the film is losing the box office battle with independent horror films Backrooms and Obsession, the latter of which was made with a budget of under $1 million. Most notably, the film has been met with a reaction that amounts to ‘who cares?’ from fans and casual audiences alike, despite being the first Star Wars film to hit theaters in the past seven years. This level of brand decay would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
Despite all of this, the influence of left-wing politics over the entertainment industry will remain. “Woke” is not, in fact, dead, sadly. But there is no denying that the cultural shift that we have seen just this year shows that lazy political content is no longer a blind success the way companies such as CBS or Disney have considered it in the past, and the financial, critical, and political failures of left-wing entertainment and entertainers are piling up quickly.
