"The American Brand Is Broken": Palantir Execs Go Hollywood With 'Founders Films'

Conservative tech leaders are taking direct aim at Hollywood's woke propaganda machine with an ambitious new film studio that promises to celebrate American values and reject the liberal indoctrination plaguing modern cinema.

Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar is spearheading the charge alongside early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky and venture capitalist Christian Garrett to launch Founders Films, a patriotic production company that will set up shop in Dallas, Texas—far from the coastal elite bubble of Los Angeles, according to Semafor.

The company's mission is clear: produce films that honor America instead of tearing it down. Their pitch deck outlines a set of principles that puts America first: "Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America's enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”

The founders don't mince words about the sorry state of modern entertainment. "The American Brand is broken. Hollywood is AWOL," their confidential pitch deck declares. "Movies have become more ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining. Large segments of American and international viewers are underserved.”

Not everyone is convinced the approach will work. Media mogul and Daily Beast owner Barry Diller expressed skepticism to Semafor, claiming "either right or left oriented production ideology is a good business model." But Diller's pessimism ignores the massive underserved market of Americans hungry for content that reflects their values rather than attacking them.

While conservatives have traditionally struggled to break through Hollywood's liberal gatekeeping, several bright spots in recent years prove there is a massive appetite for patriotic content when it's actually produced.

Angel Studios caught Hollywood off guard with their 2023 thriller "Sound of Freedom" which became a blockbuster sensation. The film about child trafficking grossed $180 million domestically on just a $15 million budget, making it one of the most successful independent films ever made. Angel Studios has appealed to conservative and faith-based audiences through crowdfunding and "pay it forward" models. The company's distribution of "The Chosen," a crowdfunded series about Jesus, has reportedly reached 250 million viewers.

The Daily Wire, co-founded by Ben Shapiro, has also proven the market exists for right-leaning content. Their 2024 documentary "Am I Racist?" starring Matt Walsh earned over $12 million, becoming the year's highest-grossing documentary despite being completely ignored by mainstream media.

In December Sankar detailed the rot in American cinema (via shyamsankar.com);

Today I want to talk about a different sort of production. Not munitions, but movies.

We know that countries have “industrial bases,” or networks of factories, warehouses, engineers, etc. involved in bending metal. We spend so much time thinking about the embarrassing state of America’s defense industrial base because that’s what backstops American security. The industrial base puts the “hard” in hard power.

Nations also have what could be called, for lack of a better term, “culture bases,” or networks that make art and culture. These networks may or may not be influenced or controlled by the government, but they nonetheless perform an important political function by spreading a nation’s ideas, influencing other people, and hopefully raking in cold hard cash along the way.

Governments around the world take a serious interest in art because they understand that, whatever else it is, art is useful. It can promote as well as subvert. It can cause revolutions of the mind, which can lead in short order to revolutions in the street. That’s why the Soviets and, yes, the CIA funded their own artists colonies during the Cold War.

For more mundane reasons, nearly all governments try to export their culture, both to make money and to build the “national brand.” That’s why places like Japan and Korea have promotion strategies for things like manga and k-pop, why European countries are so territorial about their terroir, and why countries compete every two years to host the Olympics, despite the fact that it costs a fortune.

America’s biggest “culture base” is obviously Hollywood. The big studios are struggling in the wake of Covid and the streaming revolution, but America is still a heavyweight at the global box office. In 2023, eight of the top 10 grossing films in the world were American (one, the Super Mario Bros. Movie, was a U.S.-Japan joint venture).

That’s power. Whenever people go to the theater to watch a movie, anywhere in the world, it’s likely an American movie. And the messages of those movies set the tone for how our country and its cause are perceived.

Case in point: I remember growing up as an immigrant kid at the end of the Cold War, watching movies like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. These movies were the pump-up material of Peak America. They were awesome, and they instilled a healthy aversion to ushanka-wearing commies, for good measures.

I call this the American Cinematic Universe.

Movies in this universe were a soft power tool that helped lift the Iron Curtain and accelerate the collapse of the Soviet Union. They branded the Soviets in the eyes of the world as icy-eyed tyrants with designs to destabilize and take over the rest of the world for Communism. They were also a window into the American character: scrappy, swaggering, gun-slinging, and with a zeal for liberty. These depictions were obviously caricatures, but they spoke to fundamental truths about the two sides in the Cold War.

They also continue to inspire audiences to this day—and not just American audiences. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian guerillas trained in the Hollywood way of war started tagging disabled Russian tanks with the Red Dawn rallying cry: “Wolverines!”

John Milius, the movie’s late director, was a genius and a patriot. Years ago, he explained better than I ever could why foreign and domestic audiences alike fell for these fundamentally American films: “The only thing [foreign audiences] like about us is that we used to be innocent butt-kickers," he said. "It was a part of American society that was just pure energy.”

But my choice of example, Red Dawn, speaks to a problem. Those Ukrainian fighters were referencing a 40-year-old movie to rally the troops. It’s hard to think of more recent films that could do the same job.

I bring this up not just out of nostalgia but because we need the American Cinematic Universe today. America is in the middle of Cold War II against a communist enemy with more people, more money, and more military might than the Soviets ever had. The CCP is playing a more careful game than the Kremlin, but as the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Taiwanese know, it’s no less tyrannical, even genocidal.

What is Hollywood doing to expose this new villain and inspire Americans? When was the last time you saw the CCP presented as a bad guy in a major motion picture, like the USSR? Cold War II is heating up, yet the American Cinematic Universe is AWOL. Worse than that, it’s compromised by Chinese influence.

As in other industries, the allure of the China market has been so great for so long that Hollywood studios have done a deal with the Devil for a piece of the action. Beijing limits access to its market to strengthen its negotiating position. So, for example, the CCP has a quota on the number of foreign films that can screen in China; it ruthlessly culls and censors films for “subversive” material and perceived slights; it forces studios into co-production with Chinese counterparts to steal American technology and know-how; and it imposes capital controls that make it difficult to repatriate proceeds from the box office. If studios want in, they have to play ball with Beijing.

This toxic trading relationship leads to censorship and content decisions. A few of the most egregious examples:

• The Red Dawn sequel changed the invading bad guy from the PLA to the far-less-plausible Norks “to be more sensitive to one of our world partners,” in the words of one actor.

• The Top Gun reboot initially removed a Taiwanese flag patch from the back of Maverick’s flight jacket (it was restored after an outcry).

• Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan was filmed in China’s Xinjiang region. In the credits, Disney thanked Chinese government agencies that are sanctioned by the United States for human-rights abuses in that area.

• The CCP demanded changes to Men in Black 3 because it thought a scene about erasing peoples’ memory too closely resembled Chinese censorship. The studio caved.

• My personal favorite: the 2013 film adaptation of World War Z took creative liberties on the book to avoid mentioning that a fictional zombie outbreak started in China. Because of course, it would be outrageous to suggest a pandemic could start in China!

Those are just the examples we know about. Hollywood also self-censors. What movies never got greenlit because studios knew they would jeopardize their relationship with Beijing? What scripts never got written because screenwriters knew they wouldn’t get past the censors? What truths have gone unspoken? It speaks volumes about the climate of fear Beijing has created that when then-Congressman (and current Palantirian) Mike Gallagher asked Hollywood studio heads if they would answer truthfully if asked “is China committing genocide in Xinjiang?,” more than a few said they would hesitate.

Hollywood’s capture by a foreign adversary is discouraging, obviously, but we should take heart because it has happened before. Eventually Hollywood came around. It still can.

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