I want to applaud whosever idea it was to re-release “V for Vendetta” on its 20th anniversary this November on Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember, the fifth of November”), but I wish Fathom Events had timed it a few days earlier to coincide with November 3rd, the day of America’s highly contested and high-stakes midterm election. If you don’t know, the 5th commemorates the attempted 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up England’s Houses of Parliament.
(Spoiler alert: In the movie, written by the Wachowskis, and based on the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore, the masked antifa hero actually succeeds with the help of his young acolyte in destroying the story’s dystopian authoritarian regime.)
The metaphor is clear: We’ve got three months before Election Day 2026, and possibly our last chance to put the breaks on the near total corrupt corporate-fascist takeover of America.
I’m not calling for blowing the whole thing up, but there’s a lot riding on the moment—including the latest twists and turns of the Paramount-Skydance-Warner-Bros-Discovery merger. On Friday, it was reported that California Governor Gavin Newsom is looking to cut a deal with Paramount and settle out of court. For its part, Paramount is requesting a trial date of November 4—the day after the election—to move things along.
What will America look like on November 4? By choosing that date, I’m guessing the Ellisons are betting on one of two things: either 1) the Trump Administration will successfully sabotage the results of the mid-terms, finding a way to retain Republican control of Congress, or 2) Democratic infighting coupled with the Elon-Musk-funded-$100-million-dirty-tricks-media-campaign (and extreme racist gerrymandering) will sway enough voters to give the Republicans continued control of Congress.
Filmmakers, film unions, and film organizers can help to stop it. While the #BlocktheMerger campaign has continued to prove itself as a powerful force, coalescing voices around the need to prevent the Ellisons from consolidating control over several of our largest media and news companies, I’d like to shout out the films and filmmakers this fall who will be making some noise—hopefully, alongside millions of other voices who will be shouting from the rooftops along with them. (Let’s get that next #NoKings protest scheduled, too.)
The fall film festivals are stuffed with movies locked and loaded to take down right-wing moguls such as Elon Musk (Alex Gibney’s “Musk”) and Rupert Murdoch (Danny Boyle’s “Ink”) and expose the Trump Administration’s attacks on due process and equal protection (Ava DuVernay’s “14th”), its malicious immigration crackdown (Laura Poitras and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s short film “They’re Here,” among others), and the G.O.P.’s complicity with corporations to destroy workers’ rights (Barbara Kopple’s “Union Town”).
While “Musk” may be the only film that general audiences will get a chance to see before the election in U.S. theaters, when it rolls out on Oct. 16, the others with high-profile names and red-carpet appearances aplenty should hopefully generate enough buzz to get people, press, and social-media influencers talking. Far more people are likely to see “Musk” when (or if, post-merger) it actually shows as scheduled on Warner Bros’ HBO, but that’s not going to happen until 2027 (long after the elections have played out and possibly the merger, too.)
When I spoke to Gibney for this article in May, he wasn’t sure what the future of “Musk” might be on a new Ellison-owned HBO, but Gibney didn’t hold back when it came to the merger, which he called “hugely troubling,” he said, enumerating three reasons.
“Concern #1,” Gibney told me, “Davis Ellison has proven that he will steer the editorial content of his holdings to make the current president of the U.S. happy for financial reasons. Concern #2: What will the appetite be for controversial provocative documentaries that make people uncomfortable? And Concern #3: That much consolidation is terrible for the market because it reduces competition, and when the big networks have big market power, the channels are prioritized over the artistic works.”
Making matters worse, Gibney (director of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”) explained that the company’s post-merger massive debt “is the kind of rapacious financial engineering that may get a key executive massive fees, but cripples the organization trying to produce the programs.”
Netflix hasn’t dated “14th” yet, but if it follows the same pattern as Ava DuVernay’s “13th” did—when it was released on October 7, 2016—it could have a sizable impact on the election. If you recall, “13th” was a lightening rod during the Trump-Clinton election, and generated a lot of press for its attacks on Bill Clinton’s policies, too. Who’s to say it swayed any votes, or whether the “14th” can convince people of the evils of the Trump Administration, but in a deeply divided America, I’ll take whatever films, media, or memes—hopefully ones based in fact—to convince just one more person to go out to the polls.
I doubt anyone at HBO, Netflix, or Disney is reading my Substack, but I do hope they take the next three months to give it all they’ve got—while they still can, before Trump’s oligarchy, insider deregulators, and F.C.C. lackeys do even more damage to freedom of speech, the free-flow of media, and democracy in America.
As I wrote about a few month ago when first decrying the PSKY-WBD merger, Warner Bros was, remarkably, the corporation that helped fund and release “V for Vendetta” in 2006, so it’s true that entertainment companies can and will play to where the people are at (even if they’re leaning toward Democratic-Socialists), especially if it pads their bottom line. (Just look at Columbia Pictures’ wide release of the very countercultural “Easy Rider” in 1969.)
Back in the 2000s, I was gobsmacked that a major American media corporation would have backed “Vendetta,” which was such an unabashedly pro-revolutionary film, which I called at the time “the first true anarchist movie Hollywood has ever made.” I can’t wait to see what Fathom audiences think of it in 2026. Hopefully, by then, it will be a new day in America.
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