Холливудын одууд Бен Шапирогийн кино төслүүдэд нэгдэж байгаа нь шүүмжлэл дагуулж байна

Danny Trejo may be wishing he read the small print. The beloved Machete star found himself in the unlikely position of having to clarify that he’s not “pro-ICE” earlier this month after it emerged that he’s agreed to star in a new movie produced by the decidedly pro-ICE conservative media group,The Daily Wire.

In fairness to Trejo, he’s not the only one surprised to learn that the outlet, co-founded by MAGA podcaster Ben Shapiro in 2015, is making a serious play to seize the means of Hollywood production.

Days after Trejo’s statement, The Daily Wire announced its most high-profile movie yet. Confession, set to be released on their DailyWire+ streaming service in November, features an impressively star-studded cast including James Franco, Rob Lowe, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nick Nolte.

Franco, who has largely been exiled from Hollywood since a series of sexual misconduct allegations against him in 2018, joins the ranks of “canceled” actors who have attempted to revive their careers with the studio. Earlier this year, Jonathan Majors starred in their anti-Islam action thriller Run Hide Fight: Infidels, his first film role since being found guilty of assaulting his ex-girlfriend in 2023. Daily Wire producer Dallas Sonnier has called himself “the patron saint of canceled actors.”

For other stars, their motivation for working with the controversial, upstart production company is less clear.

Although best known for their podcast network and Trump-favoring news commentary, The Daily Wire first moved into the movie business back in 2021 when they acquired the rights to the Thomas Jane-starring school shooter thriller Run Hide Fight.

Right from the start, the company found its opening as a direct result of “cancel culture.” In an interview with Patrick Bet-David, filmmaker and Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing explained that Sonnier, who produced Run Hide Fight prior to his work with the company, “kinda got canceled in Hollywood.” Sonnier’s production company Cinestate had closed in 2020 following a string of sexual misconduct and rape allegations against line producer Adam Donaghey.

For the Daily Wire, movie distribution had long been an ambition as part of a broader goal to transform popular discourse. As Boreing put it: “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture… The Daily Wire was saying to our audience: There is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”

The following year, The Daily Wire produced its first original movie, Shut In, which starred Rainey Qualley as a woman protecting her children from a pedophile played by Vincent Gallo, the French film star who has also been accused of sexual misconduct.

Watch Apple TV free for 7 day

New subscribers only. £9.99/mo. after free trial.
Plan auto-renews until cancelled.

Try for free

ADVERTISEMENT. If you sign up to this service we will earn commission. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

In 2023, The Daily Wire went into production on its most ambitious project yet. While it didn’t boast A-list actors, The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin was an epic television retelling of the legend of King Arthur that ended up costing a reported $50 million to film but wound up being dismissed by some critics as a “discount Game of Thrones.”

Less overtly political than most Daily Wire productions, the show was made available on Prime Video as well as their own streaming service but struggled to make a return on its huge budget. Boreing, who served as showrunner and has since left The Daily Wire, told Bet-David: “I don’t think it was as successful as we hoped it would be.”

Much more profitable was the provocative Matt Walsh documentary Am I Racist?, which took aim at DEI and made over $12 million (against a budget of $3 million) to become the highest-grossing documentary of 2024.

This year, Daily Wire have redoubled their efforts to create controversy-baiting movies with headline-grabbing stars. First came the decision to cast Marvel outcast Majors in a sequel to Run Hide Fight, a production which generated headlines of its own after Majors suffered an on-set fall through a window and the union, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), called a strike citing safety concerns and other labor issues.

Next comes Confession, which marks Shapiro’s first credit as a screenwriter. The 42-year-old, who worked for Breitbart News before founding The Daily Wire, has long been mocked online for his (until now) failed ambition to write movies. After graduating from Harvard Law School at the age of 23, Shapiro reportedly wrote a pilot for a comedy-drama set at Harvard that he claims was passed over because of Hollywood’s bias against those with conservative political views.

He attempts to get the last laugh with his new film, which is set in 1938 in Stalin’s Moscow. Shapiro has stated that he wrote the script “because it feels like we, as a civilization, have forgotten what matters,” specifically: “the evils of communism, the temptation of the materialist worldview” and “the necessity of God in our lives.”

After tilting at a more mainstream audience with The Pendragon Cycle, films like Run Hide Fight: Infidels and Confession appear to be more squarely aimed at the core audience of DailyWire+ who are passionate about the outlet’s partisan political messaging.

The same seems to go for Pawn Shop, which is reportedly set in Minneapolis in the immediate aftermath of ICE’s killing of Renée Good, even if that information wasn’t apparent to Trejo when he signed on to star.

On Thursday, Trejo’s son Gilbert told The Independent that his father had no idea who Shapiro was when he took the part, and had been mislead about the nature of the film. He also said his father was unable to walk away from the film, or even to “come out and say how he feels about any of this in any real way.”

Legal experts, who are not familiar with the specifics of Trejo’s deal, have confirmed to The Independent that such restrictions are regularly inserted into entertainment contracts. Alex Kagianaris, an attorney at The Lew Firm, said that “non-disparagement and publicity-approval clauses are increasingly common. That’s especially true when, as with the Daily Wire, the producer is also the distributor and marketer, because an actor’s public comments hit its business directly.”

Entertainment lawyer Gordon Firemark added that “talent typically sign exclusive contracts for a period of time” which may stipulate “no publicity without the permission of the producers, basically.”

That may explain why so few of the actors involved in Daily Wire productions have spoken publicly about their work with the company. Representatives for James Franco, Rob Lowe, Nick Nolte, Jonathan Majors, Rainey Qualley and Vincent Gallo did not respond to The Independent’s request for comment, while a representative for Jennifer Jason Leigh stated that she is not currently speaking to press.

Lowe did issue a brief statement to the press when Confession was announced, saying simply: “This is an incredible story of the human spirit and its survival against those who would crush it.”

For “canceled” stars, clearly the Daily Wire is offering them work when Hollywood has turned its back on them. Others may have simply been hoping to fly under the radar: DailyWire+ has a reported 850,000 subscribers, making it a minnow compared to mainstream streaming services that count their viewers in the tens or hundreds of millions.

However, the recent furore around Trejo proves fans will indeed sit up and take notice, and the angry reaction to his decision to act in Pawn Shop may well deter some actors in the future from choosing to follow the same path.

It’s likely that Shapiro, who also did not reply to an invitation to be interviewed for this article, will see the controversy as good publicity. He may still have some way to go to prove that conservative media can wield the same “cultural power” as mainstream Hollywood, but as the traditional entertainment industry falters he has latched onto the opportunity to convince a handful of big names to lend his project the legitimacy it sorely craves.

Maybe more to the point, after years of online mockery every time he offered up film criticism, he finally gets to call himself a screenwriter.