Why the entertainment industry cannot resist the moral lecture.
By: Frederick Alexander
Published: May 17, 2026
The last James Bond movie was five years ago. I remember nothing about it except that, in a first for 007, he dies at the end. This was the best part of the film because it signalled that it was over and I could drag my CGI-battered senses to the exit sign, which had been the most interesting visual in the cinema up to that point.
There was a lot of messaging in the film, of course (masculinity is bad, etc), but as I say, I don’t recall the details; nobody does. The next instalment, when it arrives, will likely ignite the usual media buzz, the sort that accompanies the England football team going into the World Cup before getting knocked out by Uzbekistan on penalties in the quarters. These two events, coming every few years, have tested the patience of an exhausted people who just want a few wins to punctuate the decades-long managed decline of their country – something that says “we can still pull our weight, make a splash, hit the target”.
I doubt the next Bond will deliver on that promise. There’s been speculation about a woman in the lead role, but the more likely move will be to make the next Bond black. Idris Elba’s name has popped up a few times. He would be a fine choice because he would fit the expectation that actually counts. He could inhabit that masculine, brutal, slightly cruel character of the Fleming novels if they let him. Because Bond is resolutely not a feminist. He’s not checking in with Moneypenny about her boundaries or filling out MI6’s inclusivity survey. He’s an assassin. True, Fleming imagined him as a Scots-Swiss product of the British establishment, but the franchise stopped treating that as binding decades ago. This is an action movie, first and foremost, with a recognisable character at its centre. The colour of his skin (it seems to me) is irrelevant.
I’m not sure I would say the same about the casting of Helen of Troy. We recently learned that Lupita Nyong’o will take the role in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The film, which opens in July, is Nolan’s most expensive and ambitious to date. Like Bond, Helen is a character in a work of fiction. But unlike Bond (a franchise character invented in 1953), she’s foundational in a 3,000-year-old text of Western civilisation. Hers is the face that launched a thousand ships. Homer’s stories are what the Ancient Greeks told themselves about who they were, and Helen of Troy is a pivotal figure in that account. Homer describes her as “leukōlenos” – white-armed.
To cast a black actress in the role is to make a statement, and Nolan knows it. The issue isn’t whether Nyong’o is beautiful (I’ve no argument there), nor that she’s black per se. It's that we're being spoonfed an anachronism that shoehorns modern sensibilities into the ancient world. Bond is a character in a franchise. Helen belongs to the Western canon. Casting them isn't the same kind of choice.
If you think it’s irrelevant who plays Helen, then imagine a film adaptation of the Bhagavad Gita – the most sacred text of Hinduism – starring Ben Affleck as Lord Krishna. Or a biopic of Confucius with Tom Cruise in the title role. Or Lady Gaga in the musical version. No Hollywood studio would dream of making these casting decisions today, so why does the same logic operate in reverse for the Odyssey?
Nolan might yet surprise us. He’s made a dozen films, and none that I remember were interested in identity politics, so maybe he’ll leave ideology at the door for his latest as well. But the early signs are not encouraging. There’s already a rumour that Elliot Page will take the role of Achilles, armoured with pronouns and a six-pack. Then there’s rapper Travis Scott. Nolan recently told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap” – the reasoning of a man who has just discovered both.
Even if all these speculations are just to create noise (as I’m doing here), there’s no escaping the broader trend. Hollywood, the BBC, and every other production company keep casting people in roles in ways that run counter to audience expectations. It’s designed to elicit a reaction that can then be filed as evidence of the racism or transphobia it sets itself up to combat. This is a feedback loop that has played on auto for years and shows no signs of wearing itself out. But what the cultural establishment fails to understand is that the pushback is not, for the most part, a protest about historical accuracy and rarely, if ever, actually racist in any literal sense. The actual complaint is more mundane.
At its best, great entertainment immerses you in the moment. All of the machinery that makes it possible disappears so the audience can sink into the world on screen. Cast Helen of Troy according to the text – according to your expectation of what the Queen of Sparta, the daughter of Zeus looks like – and you’re transported to the ancient Greek world of Homer’s imagination. Cast against it, and the machinery becomes the show. You’re no longer watching Helen of Troy but a Hollywood studio making a statement about Helen of Troy. In that moment, you leave the Aegean and enter a Californian HR department.
What jars is the implication that audiences need educating; that, despite decades of this sort of thing, our education is not yet complete, our moral and intellectual superiors not done with us yet. But nobody who’s not already aligned with progressive ideology wants to see a film that’s been hijacked to deliver a message about itself, especially when the message is that the rest of us need correcting.
A lot of this can be explained by a particular set of incentives. Since 2024, films are no longer eligible for Best Picture at the Oscars unless they meet specific “representation and inclusion” standards covering things like casting choices and the makeup of the creative team. Producers chasing awards now factor these into their calculations. Audiences have made their feelings known about this, leading to box-office failures, but that’s incidental to a conversation Hollywood is having with itself.
Closer to home, the BBC has been playing this game for years. Take Horrible Histories – a children’s programme often used as classroom-friendly edutainment. In 2021, it produced a song called “Been Here From The Start,” part of a British Black History special, set variously at Hadrian’s Wall, a Georgian country house, and a prehistoric landscape. The education here was of an unmistakable kind: to instruct children that their grasp of British history (if they had much of one to begin with) was wrong. The lesson reaches back ten thousand years to Cheddar Man, whose DNA suggests dark skin, in order to deliver a message about contemporary Britain – Cheddar Man having been conscripted, posthumously and presumably without consent, as the BBC’s diversity adviser. Whether or not the history and science hold up is beside the point. The point is the lesson, delivered through song, to primary-school children via the public broadcaster on the assumption that children need to be set straight. That this came out in the wake of George Floyd is not an irrelevant detail.
Worse, parts of the so-called woke right have learned this game in reverse and discovered there are enormous financial rewards to be gained from bolting to the other extreme. This is how we get Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes resuscitating the kind of racism that was on life support just a decade ago, because doing so elicits a strong reaction from people who have grown to despise progressive sermonising and embrace anything that cuts against it, including, at the margins, undisguised bigotry. It's a grisly form of entertainment for a highly politicised age, appealing to the types of people who have already been written off as deplorable.
As for the rest of us, which is most of us, we just want to be entertained; to go to a film about a man trying to get home to his wife and son, and have an enjoyable three hours without being finger-wagged about our moral failings, and without having to decide whether objecting to the sermon is worth the bad-faith reading we’ll get for our trouble.
The lectures will keep coming, but the auditorium is only half-full, and half of those who bought the ticket have one eye on their TikTok feed while the rest wearily toggle on the ideological filter – a habit formed somewhere between the third Star Wars reboot and the all-female Ghostbusters. It’s hard to imagine any director of worth actually wants this from an audience, and would only have assented to it under studio pressure, or out of some misplaced desire for “cultural relevance”.
I only wish Nolan had committed fully to the ideological ask. If Helen must get us thinking about “issues”, then at least cast Morgan Freeman in the role. That would be making a statement worth talking about. As for Odysseus’s twenty-year journey home, why not reframe it as a coming-out narrative, the struggle with his own sexuality and gender? After all those battles with monsters, gods and men, we learn that the real struggle was with the demands of Bronze Age masculinity. He returns to his wife Penelope exhausted but free and on his own terms – or rather her terms, because Odysseus is now the woman she was always meant to be.
Working title: The Odyssey: She's Coming Home.
This is the Nolan film we need, the honest one, unafraid of its own implications – the epic that finally maps onto the strange odyssey we've actually all been on for two decades and more.
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Hollywood has ruined literally every franchise they've laid their dirty activist fingers on: James Bond, Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Predator, Alien, everything in Marvel, everything in DC, the so-called "live action" Disney remakes, Terminator, Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, Willow, The Witcher, TRON… the list of vandalized properties is endless.
They don't see these franchises as tales to be honored, they see them as vehicles for their ideology. Opportunities to pull the franchise's fans in and reeducate them about the right way to think. They see the ability to take someone else's work, which they're not talented enough to make from scratch, and put their own stamp on it by changing it to suit a non-existent "modern audience" when they don't understand – and don't care to understand – why it worked and why it's loved.
They don't deserve any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. None.
Your attitude to Hollywood should be hostility, scorn and derision by default, until proven otherwise.
