This Fall, Hollywood tries to balance box office with the ballot box

Three weeks after the U.S. presidential election in November, Ridley Scott will present his latest big-screen opus. “Gladiator II” returns the prodigious filmmaker to ancient Rome for a story about a power, the survival of Rome and the fate of democracy.

“Hopefully,” Scott says, “it will be a good omen.”

This fall, Hollywood will be trying — with everything from swaggering historical epics like “Gladiator II” to the high-seas adventure of “Moana 2” — to capture the nation’s attention at a time when much of it will be directed at the polls.

Already, Hollywood has played a co-starring role in the election. The Democratic Convention in August was packed with stars like Oprah Winfrey. Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, was first introduced to many by the 2020 big-screen adaptation of his “Hillbilly Elegy.” And it was George Clooney, who this month stars in the Apple Studios film “Wolfs” alongside Brad Pitt, who was one of the most prominent voices to urge President Joe Biden to step down from the race.

Hollywood, famously progressive, has always had to strike a balance between the liberal leanings of the majority of its creatives with the big-tent demands of pop culture. In recent years, that’s grown increasingly tricky.

At the same time, the movie industry, after several years hobbled by pandemic and strikes, is striving to recapture its all-audiences populism — and all the billions that can come with it. Disney chief Robert A. Iger last year signaled the need “to entertain first,” adding “it’s not about messages.”

This past summer, Disney led Hollywood out of a box-office slump with a pair of billion-earners in “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool vs. Wolverine.” Ticket sales for the summer rose to $3.7 billion, according to Comscore — less than the traditional $4 billion benchmark but significantly better than initially feared after a painfully slow start.

One of the fall’s likeliest candidates to continue the trend is “Moana 2.” Dwayne Johnson, who returns as the voice of Maui, earlier this year said he wouldn’t endorse a candidate in the election out of concern for the division it would cause.

Like many of the films opening this fall, “Moana 2” (opening Nov. 27), as a story about a strong female protagonist and a celebration of Pacific Islander culture, could resonate very differently, depending on the outcome of the election.

“If it resonates for people in a different way, I can’t control that,” says Dana Ledoux Miller, who directed “Moana 2” with David Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand. “I’m so excited about what this story is and what it means to be a person in a community who wants something more for the world they live in and for the future. We’ll see what happens, but the movie is what it is.”

Movies this year have largely only approached political themes from a distance. “Civil War,” by Alex Garland, imagined the U.S. in all-out warfare. “War Game,” directed by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, gathered real political figures for an insurrection simulation.

But “The Apprentice ” will offer the movie version of an October surprise. The film, the release of which was announced just last week, stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.” Its director, Ali Abbasi, argues filmmakers have a responsibility to face current politics head-on.

“I’ve been hearing a lot: Let’s make a movie about the Second World War or the Civil War — just go back in time,” says Abbasi. “They say a Civil War movie is a good metaphor for the way our society is now. I’m like: Our society is extremely exciting, complex, complicated, has huge problems and opportunities. Why not address them? We have a (expletive) responsibility.”

As usual this fall, studios will trot out a new wave of awards contenders. Unlike last year, when Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” came into the season the clear favorite, no such frontrunner has yet emerged. At the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals, notable premieres include Todd Phillips’ anticipated sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch,” Malcolm Washington’s “The Piano Lesson,” Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” and LaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys.”

Standouts from earlier festivals will also mix in, like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” and Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez.” But, at least for now, the Oscar race appears wide open.

“Emilia Pérez,” about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman, is just one of the many musicals landing in theaters. Some studios have recently run from the label of “musical”; last December’s “Wonka” wasn’t advertised as such. But this fall, no matter what’s happening on the news, it won’t be hard to find song and dance on the big screen.

That includes “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Moana 2” and the two-part adaptation of the Broadway show “Wicked!” — not to mention biopics on Robbie Williams (“Better Man") and Bob Dylan (“A Complete Unknown,” with Timothée Chalamet).

“Wicked” director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt were confident enough in their film, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, that they opted to split it into two. (Part two will release in November 2025.) “Wicked,” opening Nov. 22, will open against “Gladiator II” in the fall’s most “Barbeheimer” -like weekend matchup.

“I love at this time, at this moment, we can root for all movies, all the time,” says Chu. “It’s getting to tell people: Come to the movies. Everyone come.”

In “Wicked,” which imagines the story behind the opposing witches of “The Wizard of Oz,” Platt sees a story with plenty of relevance to the current political climate.

“It’s a significant election for both of us," says Platt. “But our story aspires to be about the distance people travel to connect with each other, about seeing the other as not the other, about living in a world where sometimes the truth is not real.”

Some films are taking some novel approaches to storytelling. Morgan Neville’s “Piece by Piece” tells Pharrell Williams’ story with Lego bricks. Robert Zemeckis’ “Here,” starring Tom Hanks, has the appearance of a film shot in one take. In “Better Man,” Williams is portrayed by computer-generated monkey.

In festival screenings of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” midway through the movie a man has walked on stage and addressed a question to the screen. Coppola, who financed the film himself, spent years steadily building “Megalopolis,” a future-set epic about a visionary (Adam Driver). In cynical times, it’s brashly optimistic, even utopian.

“You never turn on CNN or open the newspaper to: ‘Human Being Is an Unbelievable Genius.’ But it’s true. How can you deny it?” Coppola said after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. “Think of what we can do. A hundred years ago they said man will never fly. Now we’re zooming around. So I ask myself: Why is it that no one dare say how great we are? There’s no problem that we’re facing that we’re not ingenious enough to solve.”

While Coppola was making his conception of a modern-day Roman epic, Scott was a making the genuine article. During the making of “Gladiator II,” Scott — a self-professed news junkie — continually felt that his film was far from ancient history. Russia's war in Ukraine unspooled during the film's making, the director noted.

“You are living during what I call democracy against tyrants, tyranny,” says Scott. “We’re looking in this film as about tyrannical leadership against people who try to rectify that. When is history not about that?”