After comedian Dave Chappelle released his final Netflix special to audience acclaim and critical pearl-clutching, the streaming giant did the unthinkable. Rather than cower to the mob incensed by Chappelle’s criticisms of transgender activism, Netflix stood by the star. The company’s chief executives not only publicly backed Chappelle, but they also temporarily suspended an employee who tweeted that the comedian “attacks the trans community.”
Netflix’s resolve in the face of toxic wokery is more than refreshing — it’s a signpost for a different era, namely Hollywood’s definitive return to the studio model of the 20th century.
The so-called studio system vertically integrated the film industry, with actors exclusively contracted to a single studio, which oversaw a film’s creation from production to premiere.
As the film industry transitioned from the silent era, it conglomerated into the “Big Five.” Coinciding with the market’s consolidation was the introduction of a de facto moral code of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” as encouraged by Will H. Hays, the former RNC chairman who became the head of the trade association we now know as the Motion Picture Association. These 1927 guidelines outright banned, among other things, the portrayal of “white slavery” and interracial marriage, and it mandated that “special care be exercised” when portraying men and women in bed together and the “seduction of girls.”
A version of these rules was codified in 1934 as what was colloquially known as the Hays Code, which was enforced by the newly created Production Code Administration.
As the Hays Code forced American art to give way to unconstrained foreign studios and the Supreme Court ruled the studio model a violation of antitrust law, the MPA was forced to abandon the increasingly unenforceable Hays Code and replace it with the rating system that governs most movies today — or rather, the rating system that governs most movies for now.
In 2019, Netflix became the first original streaming service to join the MPA (companies such as Disney joined the MPA long before creating streaming services or distributing movies on outside streaming services). But independent creators may begin to engage in vertical integration of their own, this time not to empower censorship as the Hays code did, but rather to subvert it.
The Daily Wire was launched in 2015 as a conservative news site bolstered by commentary podcasts on the side. It is now an entertainment studio closer to Netflix than the New York Post. The company, launched by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, abandoned its Los Angeles origins to move permanently to Nashville at the height of California’s coronavirus crackdowns. The news division still surely breaks stories, as evidenced by Luke Rosiak’s blockbuster report of an alleged rape in a Loudon County public school bathroom. Shapiro, the premier conservative political pundit among millennials, remains the company’s marquee star. But at the Daily Wire’s sold-out show at the Ryman Auditorium, the brand embraced its status as entertainers.
No, it’s not just the pizzazz — including the live music, a couture dress donned by Candace Owens, and the rock star reception — that would never be found at a live recording by, say, Pod Save America. It’s that the Daily Wire is investing probably the majority of its incoming capital to its new movie division, helmed by the since-canceled Disney star Gina Carano and stand-up series starring Adam Carolla.
The 20th-century studio system successfully censored political speech, so much so that it took Charlie Chaplin, one of the few stars famous enough in his own right to run his own studio independent of the MPA, to produce the industry’s first film openly lambasting Adolf Hitler in his satire The Great Dictator. But the new studio system is one that can achieve liberation from both the limited control of the MPA and the extensive de facto censorship of cancel culture and moral homogeneity thanks to modern technology.
Netflix, the board of which included Susan Rice until she joined the Biden administration, is hardly about to pivot to conservatism, but it doesn’t have to. It drew a line in the sand establishing itself as a studio willing to protect comedy from the mob. Woke comedians such as Hannah Gadsby, who lambasted Netflix for backing Chappelle, can join one of the other studios that choose to cower instead.
Thanks to vertical integration, the Daily Wire will have zero financial incentive to self-censor or cancel. If the glitz and glamour displayed in Nashville is any indication, the company can afford to add other Hollywood defectors to join Carano. Then, the very worst feature of the studio system — namely, studios able to exploit the actors contracted to them due to a lack of ideological differentiation between them — can become its best asset. It can protect actors with the promise of not firing them. Such differentiation is then as much a tool to attract contracted talent as it is to consolidate a dedicated audience, a pursuit already plaguing a media market increasingly saturated by streaming services.
As the Big Five cater to Chinese markets and auteurs go independent, the big screen has been increasingly dominated by foreign flicks over the past decade. With cancel culture killing comedy, a return to the studio system is then understood as an inevitability.
