Was Hollywood Still "Woke" in 2025?

Recently considering the claims for the "death of wokeness," which I must admit I consider overblown among both those mourning and those celebrating the event, it seemed to me reasonable to check out pop culture as an indicator, going specifically by what people saw (or declined to see) at the movies in 2025. Granted, art has a way of lagging culture generally, and the movies especially do so, as a result of the years-long delay between the initiation of a film project and a movie's actually hitting theaters (with this all the more the case because of the caution those handling the vast resources required to make and distribute major films naturally exercise). Even so we have already been hearing of the death of wokeness for a couple of years now, long enough that if such claims have any substance at all to them there should have been some sign of it in what we saw at the movies this past year.

In writing of wokeness in movies I would like to reiterate here that I do not use the term "woke" to mean "anything the right finds objectionable" the way some do, only the narrower identity politics-focused conception of social justice identifiable with the term that is quite distinct from a "universalist" consideration for human equality and human rights, instead drawing on postmodernist theories of knowledge, gender and race, prone to being narrowly nationalistic in a way that does not balk at being selfish or even mean-spirited toward other groups, and preoccupied with status anxieties and symbolism (i.e. representation). The result is that Superman's empathy toward immigrants may be something that offends right-wing commentators (have we really got to the point where human empathy is cause for opening another front in the culture war?), but still seems to me to align with a much wider range of attitudes, concerns, values than mere "wokeness." (Those who read the Bible rather than just thumping it may recall Exodus 23:9, rendered in the original King James translation thusly: "thou shalt not oppresse a stranger: for yee know the heart of a stranger, seeing yee were strangers in the land of Egypt.") Similarly I would argue for One Battle After Another, if drawing on woke ideas, still doing so in response to larger concerns relevant to an audience far beyond the woke.

Judged by that standard there does not seem to have been anything that combined conspicuousness with provocativeness in the manner of, for example, 2019's Captain Marvel or 2022's Lightyear or 2023's Barbie. Still, there were quite a number of films that sparked some such comment. Those films more obviously qualifying as such would seem to include the second half of last year's hit Wicked with its application of the "feminist revisionist" approach to yet another classic female villain, and LGBTQ+-friendliness (among other things); the reteaming of Black Panther's Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan in Sinners as the fashion for racialist horror Jordan Peele began with Get Out continues; Captain America 4: Brave New World, with Sam Wilson the new Captain America; the female-led John Wick spin-off Ballerina; and the "diverse" remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Below that level one may argue for a good deal else that could seem to reflect Hollywood wokeness, as with the "reboot" of The Naked Gun (certainly when one compares the new film with the original).

To be honest it seems on the basis of this that wokeness was still alive and well at the movies in 2025, all as I foresee no change. After all--simply to name a few of those things that most quickly set off alarm bells among the anti-woke--do you see Hollywood suddenly ceasing to produce films with feminist revisionism and gender-switching and #Girlboss characters and action movies with female leads? The absolute disappearance of racialism and race-lifting? The return of Hollywood's readiness to indulge the "male gaze" in many a film (and refrain from doing instead what we see so often, tauntingly thwart it, even punish it)? That the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will scrap its requirements for a certain minimum of "diversity" as a precondition "For your consideration . . ."? It certainly didn't happen in 2025, and (for better or worse) I don't see much evidence as yet that it'll happen in 2026 or 2027 either, not least because all of this began long before the current clash of woke and anti-woke, reflecting an identity politics that long preceded it and if the present is anything to go by seems likely to long survive it barring changes in the world unlikely to emanate from mere anti-woke sentiment.