Every now and then, a low-budget film emerges from outside the studio system and catches fire with the largely ignored right-leaning demographic, leaving mouths agape in Hollywood’s executive suites.
The Daily Wire hopes to add to the list of films that includes “The Passion of the Christ,” “I Can Only Imagine” and last year’s “Sound of Freedom” with the satire “Am I Racist?” — which marks the conservative media company’s first wide theatrical release. Starring comedian Matt Walsh, the “Borat”-style mockumentary takes aim at the DEI movement and is set to open in 1,510 theaters today, representing the most ambitious swing for the 9-year-old company founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing.
Related Stories
“They’re leaving plenty of money on the table, and we’re happy to come in and take some of it. Because, at a minimum, you are explicitly refusing to serve 50% of the audience,” Walsh says of Hollywood’s aversion to red-state sensibilities.
Popular on Variety
With its provocative conceit, “Am I Racist?” sees Walsh going undercover as a so-called beta male as he explores the world of high-paid DEI consultants, gets his DEI certification and captures wild on-camera interactions with big names in the anti-racist cottage industry — or “grifters, con artists and toxic influences,” as he dubs them — like “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. The result is either hilarious or offensive, depending on which side of the MAGA fence you sit on.
Still, there’s no denying the film’s studio-level production values. In fact, several of the principals hail from traditional Hollywood backgrounds. Producer Dallas Sonnier was a manager who broke the careers of Greta Gerwig and Leslye Headland before fleeing the mainstream industry because of its “politicized nature,” he says. Director Justin Folk worked on the visual effects teams of such films as “The Matrix Reloaded” before bailing to tackle stories “more about the war of ideas and what’s going on in our country,” as he describes it. And Boreing ran Coattails Entertainment with Zachary Levi before teaming up with Shapiro.
From the Daily Wire get-go, Boreing and Shapiro envisioned expanding into entertainment content “that wasn’t deliberately insulting to our core audience,” says the former. (Shapiro, who built his brand as an anti-woke social media firebrand, once went on a 43-minute video rant about the “Barbie” movie and has a history of embracing discriminatory views.) Still, Boreing was skeptical when he heard Walsh’s pitch for his doc “What Is a Woman?”
“I didn’t want to be in the 501(c)(3) space at all,” says Boreing of his initial interpretation of nonfiction films. “I wanted to make commercial entertainment. But as Matt expressed the vision for that project, I began to see that it really wasn’t a 501(c)(3)-style documentary. It was something else.”
“What Is a Woman?” — which explores gender ideology and was also directed by Folk and produced by Sonnier — was made on a budget of less than $1 million. Sonnier says it earned more than 30 times its budget via DailyWire+. Naturally, the film sparked heated debate — some dubbed it anti-trans — globally. “Am I Racist?,” which cost about $3 million, will get a prints-and-advertising spend comparable to a Neon or A24 movie. The Daily Wire is counting on Walsh’s fan base to show. (He is one of the biggest conservative podcasters in the country, and his daily show consistently ranks in the Apple top 15.)
And Sonnier sees a gaping void at the multiplex, which the “Am I Racist?” team is glad to fill.
“Hollywood is focused on its own problems internally and can’t even contemplate what would resonate with an audience in the South or the Midwest today,” he says. “Conservative audiences have simply checked out of what Hollywood is making outside of the tentpoles.”
As Walsh sees it, the once-fertile genre of low-budget comedy is a wide-open lane.
“The left was using satire to mock the views that they disagree with,” he says, noting Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” playbook. “Comedy died in Hollywood at some point. It just fell off a cliff. It got to a point where you can’t make jokes about anything anymore. There’s no one left that you can even poke fun at, except for white men, I suppose. But after a while, those jokes get pretty old too. So then, you know, everything’s stale, and I think it’s where we are now.”
