Sound of Freedom was a good movie, with a compelling hero and horrifying criminality at its center. It deserves its box office success and prompts the question: why can’t Hollywood make more movies like that? From Sasha Stone at sashastone.substack.com:
By giving us what we wanted.
Sound of Freedom is sailing toward $100 mil without breaking a sweat. It topped all Hollywood blockbusters, from Disney’s catastrophe, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, to Insidious, to Jennifer Lawrence’s middling sex comedy, No Hard Feelings. Only Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning could top it.
For a film that cost just $14.5 million, Sound of Freedom is rounding the bases and humiliating Hollywood by the minute, as if to say – what, like it’s hard?
They have one job in Hollywood: tell a great story. Why would they expect people to turn out if they can’t even do that?
Hollywood and those who cover Hollywood have lost the trust of the American public, who have begun to rely more on audience ratings at Rotten Tomatoes and word of mouth rather than critics. They’ve been burned too many times: mindless franchise movies or agonizing navel-gazing narcissism about identity – going to the movies has become a chore most would rather skip.
The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.
Friedrich Nietzsche