Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Hollywood is recalibrating as woke films bomb at the box office and family-friendly fare gains ground, driven by parent-led demand for wholesome cinema.

Family-friendly films may be making a comeback in Hollywood as younger parents get involved in the filmmaking process and as woke films fail at the box office. One example is the latest film from Pixar, Hoppers, which grossed $87 million at the worldwide box office as of 8 March, becoming the ninth-highest-grossing film of the year so far.

Last year’s Pixar offering, Elio, was a box office failure, suffering the lowest opening weekend earnings of any Pixar in the famed animation studio’s 40-year history.

Pixar Pivots Away From LGBT Content After Box Office Struggles

Originally, Elio was slated to include a prominent LGBT storyline, despite growing concerns that Pixar and its parent company, Disney, have increasingly injected LGBT ideology into children’s media. Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter explained this year that the studio’s decision to axe the same-sex-relationship storyline had to do with concerns raised by parents.

“We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” Docter said, noting that most parents don’t want to have to explain same-sex relationships to their children after a family trip to the cinema. “As time’s gone on, I realised my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody.”

Animator Adrian Molina was initially chosen to direct Elio and played a large role in developing the film’s story, which he based in part on his own experiences of alienation growing up on a military base before finding his place at the California Institute of the Arts. Molina, who identifies as gay and is in a same-sex marriage, planned to portray the Pixar film’s title character as gay.

Docter hosted a meeting with Pixar employees and advised filmmakers to make less autobiographical films and focus more on broadly relatable, commercially successful concepts. Molina left the project, citing creative differences, and the LGBT content was scrapped, with Docter’s approval.

A 2022 Pixar venture, Lightyear, based on the exploits of space ranger Buzz Lightyear from the 1995 classic Toy Story, also featured LGBT content and was also a box office failure, with Deadline Hollywood calculating that the film lost Pixar over $100 million.

The 2020 Pixar film Onward featured references to same-sex relationships and achieved the third-lowest opening weekend box office haul of any Pixar release, before plunging to the lowest-ever second weekend for a Pixar release, although the film’s failure was linked to COVID-19 lockdowns as opposed to problematic content.

A Pixar series, Win or Lose, made for streaming service Disney+ and launched in early 2025, also included an LGBT-centred episode, which was axed prior to release. A Disney spokesman said at the time, “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognise that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”

Pixar appears to be one of the Hollywood staple studios that gets the message: Woke is on its way out.

“The Bride!” Joins the Growing List of Woke Flops

Actress-turned-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has yet to get the memo, but Warner Bros. Pictures likely will after losing a projected $90 million on Gyllenhaal’s hyper-feminist restyling of The Bride of Frankenstein.

Despite the attachment of prestige names like Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Penélope Cruz, and the writer-director’s brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, The Bride! has grossed a total of only $13.4 million worldwide, against a budget of $85 million (not including nearly $100 million spent on advertising and promotion), and is on track to lose Warner Bros. upwards of $90 million. Breitbart‘s John Nolte anticipated that “the movie will enter the pantheon of iconic flops like Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck.”

Chock full of explicit sexual content, including sexual assault and attempted rape, and graphic feminist revenge violence, The Bride! pales in comparison to 2024’s Nosferatu, another dark, atmospheric, horror-romance period film, which grossed $182 million worldwide and became Focus Features’s second-highest-grossing domestic release and third-highest-worldwide, netting an estimated $70 million in profit.

While far from family-friendly fare (featuring vampire violence, sexual content, and disturbing occult imagery), Nosferatu was a fairly faithful adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, without the injection of woke content.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein, a period horror film billed as a faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and also devoid of woke content, was not released in theatres (it debuted on Netflix instead) but received much praise from critics, while The Bride! did not.

Film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 85 per cent of critics gave Frankenstein a positive review, while The Bride! has achieved a paltry 57 per cent rating from critics, which the website classifies as “rotten”.

Ryan Gosling Bets Big on Family-Friendly Sci-Fi

Meanwhile, some Hollywood power players are not only avoiding woke content but actively working on family-friendly films. Superstar Ryan Gosling — noted for romantic blockbusters like The Notebook, dramatic roles in films like Drive and Blade Runner 2049, and more comic roles in films like The Big Short, The Nice Guys, and The Fall Guy — is starring in and producing the science fiction film Project Hail Mary, set to hit theatres starting 20 March.

Based on the 2021 novel of the same name, Project Hail Mary is not only produced by Gosling, but is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and its sequel, The Lego Movie and its sequel, and both Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

In an interview with Movieguide, an organisation dedicated to tracking and promoting Christian and conservative values in films, Gosling explained that his own children are his inspiration for making the science fiction adventure film. “We look for films that we can bring our family to, that we can go to the theatre to see and kind of recreate some of those experiences that I had as a kid, and I felt like I had an opportunity with this one to do that,” he said.

Gosling explained that he and his wife, actress Eva Mendes, have found family-friendly films “hard to find,” prompting him to make a film that both parents and kids can enjoy. “Obviously, this is the family business, making movies, but we want to go to the cinema, too. And it’s hard to find something for all of us, especially if it’s not animated.”

The Data Is Clear: Wholesome Films Win at the Box Office

Pixar and Project Hail Mary are just a few examples of family-friendly content gaining ground. In its 2026 annual Report to the Movie Industry, shared with The Washington Stand, Movieguide recorded an increase in family-friendly films succeeding at the box office.

“Our analysis of the Top 10 and Top 25 Grossing Movies in 2025 proves at least three things,” wrote Movieguide publisher and editor-in-chief Ted Baehr and Movieguide vice president and editor Tom Snyder. First of all, filmmakers have a greater chance of achieving success at the domestic box office and producing a Top 10 film by including Christian morality and themes. The same goes for filmmakers who want to break into the Top 25.

“Third, filmmakers have a better chance of reaching the Top 10 and Top 25 if they keep strong and very strong negative, non-Christian, anti-Christian, amoral, immoral, or false content out of their movie,” Baehr and Snyder observed. “In fact, filmmakers and movie studios are twice to four times more likely to reach the Top 10 or Top 25 at the Domestic Box Office if they eliminate these negatives and accentuate the positives. Especially if they eliminate graphic sex, nudity, violence, foul language, and substance abuse.”

Wholesome films released last year included “Paddington in Peru,” “Lilo and Stitch,” and “The Last Rodeo,” in addition to others, while all of the Top 10 films of the year featured strong biblical themes and morality. Numerous other films featured strong wholesome content, while most films with negative content performed poorly at the box office, demonstrating that the American public has largely moved on from woke films and is hungry for family-friendly movies.

___

Republished with thanks to The Washington Stand. Image courtesy of Adobe.