Anti-Male Hollywood? How ‘Awards Bait’ Movies Vilify Men

Hollywood has long been known for pushing political agendas. Whether it’s outright radical left-wing ideals (One Battle After Another, The Constant Gardener),  feminist messaging (Barbie, Ocean’s 8), race-based guilt (Crash, Driving Miss Daisy), LGBTQ activism (Bros, Moonlight), or gender ideology (Anything’s Possible, Babylon), Tinseltown is constantly normalizing minority opinions and ideals over the conventional. Hollywood has also been pushing anti-male narratives, but in more subtle ways. Well, until The Bride! came along.

This weekend saw the release of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, which is being described by critics and the filmmaker herself as a “radical feminist reimagining” of the Frankenstein myth, leaning heavily into themes of female agency, rebellion against the patriarchy, and “female rage.” Reviewer Christian Toto says it’s a “blast from cancel culture past,” as if scripted at the peak of the 2020 social justice era, a “MeToo lecture” that relentlessly hammers feminist themes, over and over and over, portraying all men as inherently bad, oppressive, and villainous while women are depicted as oppressed, and righeously angry (with the exclamation “angry!”). Toto argues that Gyllenhaal’s feminist agenda starts early and never relents, resulting in redundant and dull core messages that prioritize ideological lecturing over compelling drama, despite the film’s visually stunning yet dramatically daffy execution.

In fact, Toto’s assessment that the script feels like a throwback from the social justice era is spot on. It looks like other reviewers are coming around as well.

Unfortunately this trend is nothing new, and it’s had a detrimental impact on our culture.

A recent piece on Film Industry Watch exposed how prestige television actually rewrites history in order to vilify men. Their report lays it out very clearly. In today’s prestige TV, female success gets framed as a battle against men, or the dreaded “patriarchy.” In an anonymous essay examining the 2020 series The Queen’s Gambit, they explain how the true story the show was based on gets rewritten, because to the filmmakers “female success is no longer sufficient on its own. It must be framed as success achieved against men.” Men have to become the villains even when history says otherwise.

A recent piece on Film Industry Watch exposes how prestige TV rewrites history to vilify men. Their report lays it out clearly. In today’s prestige television, female success gets framed as a battle against men or the “patriarchy.” An anonymous essay on the 2020 series The Queen’s Gambit explains how the true story gets rewritten because, to filmmakers, “female success is no longer sufficient on its own. It must be framed as success achieved against men.” Men become villains even when history disagrees.

The Queen’s Gambit follows Beth Harmon’s rise in chess. To make her success seem extraordinary, it claims rival Nona Gaprindashvili never faced male competitors. The show states, “There’s Nona Gaprindashvili, but she’s the female world champion and has never faced men.” That’s false. Gaprindashvili beat at least 59 men by 1968, including many grandmasters. The miniseries erases her achievements to paint men as barriers for its fictional protagonist.

The article notes Gaprindashvili, now 84, sued Netflix for defamation. Netflix didn’t defend the accuracy. It argued “the line was protected as artistic expression, despite referring to a real person and asserting a factual falsehood about her life.” In 2022, a U.S. federal judge rejected dismissal, ruling the claim plausibly defamatory. Netflix settled confidentially, with no apology or episode changes. The truth is that women weren’t barred from chess, just far fewer played. Beth Harmon isn’t oppressed by men. She gets mentored, funded, and trained by them. Yet the story frames their help as obstacles to overcome. Feminist ideology discards facts and spreads anti-male sentiment politely.

Unfortunately this pattern has has become nearly ubiquitous throughout cinema, especially in the so-called “awards-bait” films, which all tend follow a familiar formula. Demean men to elevate women. It seems to be a winning formula for winning trophies, critical acclaim, and big headlines, honest storytelling be damned.

For example, Promising Young Woman (2020), which received five nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards and won Best Original Screenplay, made all the men appear either predatory or pathetic, with one guy trying to take advantage of a woman pretending to be drunk. He attempts to date rape her while whispering “you’re okay, you’re safe.” That kind of messaging hits hard, and signals to the female viewers that every man is guilty; if not of sexual assault, then of silence.

Promising Young Woman is far from the only example. Film Industry Watch shares multiple examples of the same type of anti-male narrative.  Here are just a few:

• Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) tells the same kind of story, but through the exploration of a teenager’s journey to get an abortion. Men around the protagonist are useless or cruel. Her manager harasses her. Her boyfriend raped her. The script shows her breaking down in tears after confirming the assault. “It’s really just a few more hours… You can do it. Besides, I’d get lonely if you left,” one sleazy man says to her. It holds a 99% score with critics at Rotten Tomatoes.
• In Anatomy of a Fall (2023), the husband is emotionally broken, jealous, and unstable. An audio recording exposes his “explosion of violence,” and it is framed as he can’t handle his wife’s ambition. 96% critics score. It also was nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards in 2024 winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
• Barbie (2023) turns the formula into sharp satire. Kens are vain and clueless. Not at all like the Barbies who can easily outsmart them by pretending to be helpless. “Kens can’t resist a damsel in distress.” The film repeatedly mocks male stand-in Ken, but managed to receive eight nominations at the 96th Academy Awards in 2024.
• Poor Things (2023) paints every man as shallow and abusive, with one boasting to the strong female protagonist, “You are a prisoner and I aim to free you… There is something in you, some hungry being, hungry for experience, freedom, touch.” Later he says, “At the risk of being immodest, you have just been thrice fucked by the very best.” The movie went on to secure four Oscars, out of 11 nominations in 2024.
• Anora (2024), a story about a young sex worker from Brooklyn who meets and impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, paints all men as either violent or cowardly. Every single male character in the film fits that mold. There is no complexity, just condemnation. It won the award for Best Picture at the 97th Academy Awards in 2025.
• Triangle of Sadness (2022) dismantles masculinity outright. Men appear grotesque or emasculated. One even prostitutes himself for food. The film humiliates men while praising female power. It turns gender politics into art-house spectacle, which won it a Palme d’Or and helped it receive three nominations at the 95th Academy Awards in 2023.

Long before today’s awards-bait films, Hollywood had already laid the groundwork with The Stepford Wives. The 1975 classic (and its 2004 remake) presents suburban husbands as sinister conspirators who replace their wives with compliant, submissive robots, turning everyday family men into patriarchal monsters. It recast male headship and traditional marriage roles as a horrifying threat that women must escape or destroy. This established a key Hollywood template: portraying ordinary males as inherently suspect, and the problem to be defeated.

These stories reach millions of viewers around the world. They quietly teach boys to view themselves as the bad guys in every scenario. At the same time, they suggest to girls that men stand as nothing more than roadblocks to their own happiness. Families feel the strain from all this, while society starts to fray at the edges. Hollywood’s clear bias is slowly chipping away at our trust in straightforward, honest storytelling.

What fuels this narrative push? Wokeness, plain and simple. Identity politics sits at the wheel, steering nearly every decision in Hollywood these days. DEI mandates and ESG metrics are still very much top of mind and they continue to turn creative projects into something that feels more like propaganda than art. This enables the steady feminization of Western culture which in turn speeds up Hollywood’s long slide toward irrelevance, because audiences are no longer unaware of the agenda.

However, Hollywood will continue this approach because it makes their content culturally insulated. How? Critics who speak up are simply dismissed as toxic, reactionary, or unserious. This also amplifies media coverage, as the Hollywood shills and reporters frame these movies and shows as socially significant rather than just entertaining. On top of that, this approach aligns their shows with the ideological preferences of nearly every award institution and cultural gatekeeper in this post-#MeToo era.

The terribel reception of The Bride! may help, but we have to keep calling this out. Hopefully it can be stopped before it does any more damage to our culture.

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