Conservatives have long pitched their project as a return to normalcy, a way to set right a world that’s gone off its axis. In theory, it’s an understandable goal. Who doesn’t react to getting older and more removed from the engine of culture with an initial feeling that the next generation is doing it wrong? 

In practice, the right’s message is more of a respectable veil covering the fact that they want the power to beat up on minorities and buy anything they want. But there’s one arena where the right might actually be bringing back an honest-to-goodness return to tradition: the multiplex.

The lines between television and the movies used to be rather rigid. There were movie stars and there were television actors, and rarely did the twain meet. Actors without matinee idol looks or sufficient draw could make a living as character actors. Faded stars could scrape out a second act in B-movies and lesser studio offerings without losing the prestige of the silver screen. Television actors traded that type of cachet for steady work and wider audiences. A movie star appearing on television was a sign of terminal decline.

The rise of prestige television and streaming shook up the established hierarchy. If television could hit something approaching the same cinematic highs and emotional depths as a Hollywood movie, even if rarely, then the stigma of going episodic couldn’t last. The prestige TV gold rush inspired plenty of marquee stars to jump ship, taking roles from deep-pocketed streamers for niche audiences. (Somebody must be watching Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them.) The old order and the connotations of each medium had gone post-modern and topsy-turvy. 

Enter Ben Shapiro.

The Daily Wire co-founder and conservative political commentator has made several attempts to break into Hollywood. Over the years, he has repeatedly alluded to a script he wrote as a young man at the behest of the late ABC executive Leonard Goldberg, while his dramedy about a conservative student at Harvard never got off the ground. But that hasn’t deterred Shapiro. He’s used his political commentary outlet as a springboard to produce a series of execrable comedies and thrillers, from 2023’s irredeemable and laughless “Lady Ballers,” which centers on a group of former high school basketball players reuniting to compete in women’s basketball by posing as transgender women, to the semi-competent and bloody hatefest “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.” 

Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”

Written by Shapiro, “Confession” follows an academic in Moscow under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He’s brought in for questioning after allegedly conspiring with a dissident priest, only to find that his interrogator is a former student. In less ideological hands, the film could be an interesting examination of loyalty and state overreach. Coming from the man who accused Baron Harkonnen, the villain in the “Dune” science-fiction franchise, of being a communist, we aren’t holding our breath. 

Still, the announcement of “Confession” made a splash, less for its logline than its topline. The cast is chock full of former Oscar nominees and one-time A-listers. The participation of James Franco, Rob Lowe, Brad Dourif and Emile Hirsch make this the most star-studded production Shapiro has ever produced. Beyond the musty Cold War paranoia and production design straight out of the “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” video game, the film is small-c conservative in its appeal to a bygone tradition: giving disgraced actors a mid-budget springboard from which to launch their career revivals. 

Franco was once a megawatt star, but his career faltered shortly after several women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In the late aughts, with a Screen Actors Guild-nominated turn in “Into the Wild,” Hirsch was positioned to be the next big thing. But the belly flop of “Speed Racer” and a 2015 assault of a female Paramount Pictures executive at the Sundance Film Festival put his career on ice. Lowe’s scandal-plagued days are long behind him, but he’d settled into a career as a reliable network television star. Most recently, the star of “The West Wing” has been a mainstay on Fox’s campy disaster series “9-1-1.” “Confession” sees him trying out long atrophied dramatic acting muscles, taking a tentative step into Hollywood. Dourif has never generated any significant controversies to our knowledge, but his appearance is notable because it contradicts his 2024 retirement announcement. 

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Taken with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it starring turn from Jonathan Majors in “Infidels,” The Daily Wire’s gambit becomes clear. In reaching out to disgraced or out-of-fashion actors, the company is getting notable names for their bargain-basement productions. The actors, in turn, can add a few performances for their sizzle reels that post-date whatever controversy pushed them out of the limelight. 

It’s not a bad deal for either party. From the actors’ perspective, they’re just following the B-list trails blazed by actors like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, stars who spent decades cranking out direct-to-video duds while seeking the right role to catapult them back into notoriety. What’s new is the ideological bent of a studio like Shapiro’s. Typically, appearing in outwardly conservative fare was the mark of an inwardly conservative star. Think Kirk Cameron’s Christian schlock or Kevin Sorbo’s post-Hercules output. When a name like Jim Caviezel shows up in QAnon-adjacent thrillers, it’s a bit of a “fork found in kitchen” situation.

Shapiro’s comeback machine is something slightly different. Given what we’ve seen from the films he has worked on in the past, the machine is likely to be clunky — but that won’t matter to either party if it works. 

Conservatives’ belief that “cancel culture” has gone too far, that men chastised for behaving badly are really victims of a radical mob run amok, allows them to take on names that are not welcome in Hollywood. If the ploy works, it’s proof that they were right all along — that cooler heads prevailed and the initial controversy was an overreaction. 

With the Daily Wire’s film arm, Shapiro is bringing back the B-list for a cancel culture age, offering dimmed stars the chance to bide their time until the unistudio of Paramount/Warner Bros. comes calling.

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Do me a favor: Picture Charles Bronson. Black moptop over a face lined like a well-traveled map, and a jacket with the collar turned up against the perennial winter of cinematic 1970s New York City. His hand’s in the coat pocket, resting on the only argument anyone he encounters will listen to. He turns to the camera and gives a rapid-fire lecture on the declining birth rates of white Americans and the need to read classical philosophers and reject post-modern thought. 

Ridiculous, right? Bronson’s aggrieved architect in the classic “Death Wish” films didn’t have a guiding philosophy. All he had was a gun and the bad luck to run into nearly every petty criminal on the island of Manhattan, and he sure wasn’t trying to convince the audience of the correctness of his conservative worldview. He wasn’t a debate club member. He was a hammer meeting a nail, traveling to the run down parts of towns all over America to shore things up — to entertain rather than win over audiences. If moviegoers came away thinking that cities were hellholes full of criminals who need to be tried by 12 or carried by six, so much the better.

It’s a lesson that the team of writers, directors and producers at The Daily Wire failed to learn. The film studio arm of the conservative commentary empire created in 2015 by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, who left the company in 2025, is pushing out films that double as lectures on how America went wrong by going woke. The latest offering, a campus action film titled “Run Hide Fight: Infidels,” delivers on the hectoring and little else.

From its first original film in 2016, the studio made clear its political orientation — and intentions. “Shut In” features a protagonist, who was a recovering addict and single mother, fighting off a home invasion from a crazed pedophile, and it heavily implies that her former drug use is to blame for the current trouble. She escapes her fate by forcing her ex-boyfriend to overdose and lives happily ever after as an apple-butter-making tradwife. The Daily Wire kept the hits coming in 2020 by making director-writer Kyle Rankin’s “Run Hide Fight,” a paper-thin good-guy-with-a-gun parable that follows a 17-year-old girl whose school is under attack from a squadron of active shooters. (The title comes from a common safety protocol for everyday citizens who find themselves being shot at.) Two years later, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh fronted “What Is a Woman?”, a street harassment documentary centered on attacking non-traditional gender identities and transgender issues.

“Infidels,” though, sees the studio outdoing itself in centering  reactionary politics. Starring disgraced Marvel star Jonathan Majors, the film takes the school-shooting premise and injects it into the campus culture wars. Under the guise of pro-Palestinian protests, terrorists take over a small liberal arts college, and a group of college students, with the help of  Majors’ “protect Western civilization”-spouting veteran, fight to take back their campus. 

“Infidels” spouts arguments familiar to any Daily Wire watcher at a blistering pace. College students are either misinformed about the reality of Israel’s war on Gaza, or they are completely oblivious to it. The campus protest organizer, a literal blue-haired college student in a keffiyeh, is unwittingly working for a splinter cell of murderous terrorists. In contrast to the actual police crackdown on campus protests across the country, the college’s trustees and president sit on their hands for fear of causing offense. The town’s mayor refuses to call in the SWAT team because of bad optics. Graffiti primes right-wing watchers to fume with a laundry list of leftist slogans. Land acknowledgements statements, agnosticism, the utility of college education and mixed-race families in commercials all get a moment in the over-stuffed script by Kyle Rankin.

If hearing the arguments of Shapiro, who acts as a producer, in the mouths of supposed twentysomethings doesn’t give the game away, the baffling characterizations in the film do. The students’ tastes veer almost embarrassingly close to those of suburban middle-aged men. They drink (unaged) whiskey that one student distills in his dorm room while listening to ‘90s butt-rockers Seven Mary Three. One character is introduced swinging a sword in his pajamas while chomping a cigar and quoting Rudyard Kipling. If you have been unfortunate to see a Daily Wire hang session, then you will know  that Shapiro and Company aren’t setting up a spate of undergraduate methanol blindness. They genuinely think these kids are cool. 

Focusing on the cast of college kids uncovers the core problem of the film. You’re meant to root against villains who, outside of their devotion to a radical strain of Islam, believe everything The Daily Wire’s average opinionator believes. For the logic of this siege thriller to make any sense, you have to want those college kids, who spend the first hour taking over quads and discussing polyamory, to get away unscathed. Rankin clearly doesn’t; he luxuriates in the deaths of the blue-haired activist and her gay right-hand man. The former has her throat slit in a startlingly graphic manner, and the latter is thrown from a roof in a literal interpretation of a common counterargument against LGBTQ+ supporters of Palestine. The shot of the student falling from a roof to his death is drawn out and examined from several gleeful angles. 

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On the opposite side, the audience is meant to root for Majors’ character, who warns that Islam is coming for “the wombs of our women” and that the U.S. will be undermined by a strict devotion to the rights of citizens. That sword-swinging cigar chomper calls a dying Egyptian dorm neighbor a common ethnic epithet before rushing off to save the day, which in turn serves to highlight a larger issue that The Daily Wire runs into each time they sit down to hammer out a script. When they try to sneak their liberal bogeymen into a film, their debate team muscles kick in. Soon, the film is more “well, actually” than action.

In a vacuum, Bronson’s “Death Wish” vigilante was just as unlikeable. For four films, the actor played a grief-crazed man looking for trouble and shooting anyone who looked at him crossways. But Bronson wasn’t one for speechifying; he never turned to the camera and explained how the big-city carnage was all Jimmy Carter’s fault. He certainly never decided that his late wife, who had been killed by gang members, deserved her fate because of his household’s liberal views at the series’ outset. In the hands of The Daily Wire’s would-be auteurs, the criminals would have spent the opening hour of “Death Wish” hopping subway turnstiles and taking free classes at City University of New York.

The problem of unlikeable heroes is also evident in the leaked script of the studio’s upcoming pro-ICE thriller. With a working title of “Pawn Shop,” the film is set to follow a pair of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents facing down a mob of supposed antifa counterprotestors and members of the gang MS-13 as they attempt to take a suspect into custody. There is even a showdown with a Renee Good stand-in, who is shot by one of the film’s hero agents. From a draft script shared by The Bulwark: 

The first shot takes the [sic] Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask.

The inclusion of the mask might make The Daily Wire’s supposedly small-government audience feel less sympathy for an unarmed woman who was killed. But asking audiences who haven’t already bought into Shapiro’s schtick to root for her killer across the next few hours of action and culture war arguments is a heavy load no Daily Wire film has shown they can lift. 

UPDATE: This column has been updated to clarify the departure of Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing from the company in 2025.

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