An incendiary film is shelved
“For once, a major Hollywood film studio was about to release a movie sympathetic to Trump voters,” said Kyle Smith in NationalReview.com. Then, “our film-critic-in-chief got it canceled.” Universal Pictures’ The Hunt— originally scheduled to be released Sept. 27—is a withering satire depicting a pack of “private jet–loving Davos globalists” who kidnap and hunt a group of red-state “deplorables.” The targets are chosen because they express anti-choice positions or are deemed racists. “War is war,” says one coastal elite as she shoves “a stiletto heel through the eye of a denim-clad hillbilly.” But President Trump and the Fox News pundits who “egged each other into a frenzy about the film” lack any sense of irony, and failed to understand that the “posh urban TED Talk–goers” are the bad guys; their haughty cruelty makes audiences sympathize with the hunted red staters. “The Right ought to make it clear that we are not only not offended by the premise of The Hunt, we’re delighted.”
It wasn’t just the Right that put The Hunt on the shelf, said Kim Masters and Tatiana Siegel in The Hollywood Reporter. In a “fraught political climate” made even worse by several mass shootings, Universal got queasy about the R-rated film’s explicit violence, and some ads for the film were pulled. The studio even reshot some scenes. When and whether the film will be released is now unknown. No one, liberal or conservative, should be happy about that, said Caspar Salmon in The Guardian. Universal officials canceled a satirical film the president denounced as “racist.” This is an “overt act of censorship.” Universal should be “standing up for artists’ liberty of expression.”
This was “a perfect storm of disastrous timing,” not censorship, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety.com. Releasing The Hunt in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings would have been “sheer folly.” In this supercharged climate, a movie about “Americans ritually shooting other Americans” over politics would not feel like “megaplex escapism.” But I suspect that the movie will not stay on the shelf forever. Universal spent a lot of money to make it and will wait for a better moment to put it in theaters. Indeed, a movie that was originally titled Red State vs. Blue State might seem more “ideally timed for the presidential civil war of 2020.”