William Bibbiani, film critic at The Wrap, wants you to know that the new George Washington movie is so offensive to his sensibilities that "you'll be forgiven for yelling curse words at the screen, or even for throwing up." The film earned $33 million in its first ten days.
Apparently vomiting and profanity are the appropriate responses to a movie about the founding of America according to woke movie critics.
Angel Studios released "Young Washington" over the July 4th weekend, directed by Jon Erwin, and the audience response has been exactly what the professional film class feared most — enthusiastic. The movie pulled a 92% viewer score on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a straight A from CinemaScore, which polls actual moviegoers on their way out of theaters. The kind of people who buy tickets with their own money, in other words, rather than getting screener links from publicists.
The Chicago Tribune gave it 1.5 out of 4 stars, calling Angel Studios a "faith-based movie studio that churns out films" and dismissing the entire project as "propaganda in the form of a history lesson." Propaganda. A movie about George Washington. The man on the dollar bill is now considered subversive content to Hollywood.
Variety's review waved it off as one of those "great-man biographies you read in grade school," then conceded the film was "just competent enough to create that crisp tug of schoolkid patriotism." That's supposed to be an insult. They accidentally described exactly why millions of people bought tickets.
Bibbiani at The Wrap went further, calling the film "jingoistic" — a word critics dust off whenever someone makes a movie that doesn't apologize for America — and complaining that "by the film's own admission, he owns ten slaves." The film apparently addresses Washington's slave ownership directly, which is the kind of historical complexity you'd think critics would appreciate. But the complaint isn't really about nuance. The complaint is that the movie still treats Washington as a great leader despite his flaws, and that's the part that's unforgivable.
Chris Pratt, who is rapidly becoming Hollywood's most reliable gauge of what normal Americans actually want to watch, posted his verdict: "Like Braveheart for Americans. Jon Erwin crushed it."
We've seen this exact pattern before. Angel Studios released "Sound of Freedom" and critics either ignored it or treated it like a QAnon recruitment film. Audiences made it one of the biggest surprise hits of that year. The gap between what professional critics think people should watch and what people actually want to watch has become its own genre of entertainment.
The 92% audience score against a critical establishment that's recommending you physically vomit rather than enjoy the film tells you everything about where American culture actually stands versus where the people paid to write about it think it stands. These are the same outlets that gave glowing reviews to films that couldn't fill a Tuesday matinee in Topeka.
NewsBusters' Dawn Slusher documented the full spread of critical meltdowns, and the pattern is consistent: the objection isn't that the movie is poorly made. The objection is that it's patriotic. The craftsmanship complaints are afterthoughts bolted onto a fundamentally ideological grievance. A movie about the father of the country shouldn't make Americans feel good about their country — that's the actual position.
Erwin and Angel Studios have now built a repeatable model. Find a story the establishment considers dangerous, tell it competently, and watch the outrage function as a marketing department that works for free. Every "jingoistic" headline, every recommendation to throw up, every 1.5-star rating is another data point telling the ticket-buying public that this is the movie the woke crowd doesn't want them to see.
