When the conservative mockumentary Am I Racist? managed to crack the box-office top five, earning a robust $4.5 million over its opening weekend in September, industry observers treated the Borat-esque, DEI-skewering film — a kind of anti-anti-racist lampoon — as a curiosity. A flash-in-the-pan in an era when the nonfiction film genre has seemingly gone from boom to bust. A lucky first theatrical at bat by the reactionary conservative website the Daily Wire, fueled by a spasm of right-wing moviegoing in red-state hubs like Boise, Phoenix, and Nashville.
But by its second weekend out, Racist had grossed over $9 million to become the year’s most successful doc (second place belongs to Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist, trailing with a distant $2.9 million) and muscle its way into the top-five most lucrative political documentaries of the past decade. By the beginning of October, the film — which presents the strenuous provocations of the right-wing activist-author-podcaster-columnist Matt Walsh — had managed to continue selling tickets apace, smashing all financial expectations with a nearly $12 million cumulative gross: almost four times Racist’s production budget.
That budget covered the film’s variously involved setups, in which Walsh (extravagantly be-man-bunned yet in disguise) infiltrates diversity, equity, and inclusion seminars and support groups, reenacts the alleged hate crime of Jussie Smollett, convinces people to sign a petition to rename the Washington Monument the George Floyd Monument, and orders black coffee with performative reluctance from a Black waitress. The film reportedly paid the mother of two young Black girls who had been ignored by a Sesame Street character at a theme park $50,000 for an interview and shelled out $5,000 to attend the Race2Dinner progressive supper club, where a group of mostly white women were filmed raising a toast to “being racist.â€
While documentaries with a pronounced liberal bent such as An Inconvenient Truth or Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine have exponentially outearned conservative titles in the genre, Daily Wire chief executive Jeremy Boreing feels the box-office breakthrough of Am I Racist? should come as less than a shock. Never mind that the film is the first thing the Daily Wire has ever released offline and inside a theater: “A significant percentage of the moviegoing public still hungers for a kind of content not only that they feel they don’t get from Hollywood but something much worse,†Boreing says. “Which is that Hollywood despises them and takes for granted that they will get their money anyway, no matter how badly Hollywood treats them.â€
Co-founded in 2015 by Boreing (a writer-director-producer turned political commentator) and Ben Shapiro, the right-wing firebrand who has made exposing “authoritarian†threats from the left’s control of academia, journalism, corporate America, and Hollywood his mission, the Daily Wire boasts enviable scope. The numbers: more than a million paid subscribers and a monthly network reach of 220 million (encompassing social media, YouTube, and podcast subscribers, the Daily Wire, and DailyWire+). As such, the company has leveraged every available spot on its platforms, including banner ads, email blasts, podcast mentions, and social-media posts in addition to traditional marketing methods like billboards and “wild posting†(i.e., guerrilla-style outdoor advertising often involving rapidly slapped-up wheat-paste posters) to relentlessly drum up buzz for Racist.
“The dirty little secret of conservative media is it is some of the most effective direct marketing that exists anywhere,†Boreing says. “The conservative audience feels so underserved by almost all of the institutions in our culture — in our country — at the moment. So the relationship between the audience and a conservative host is incredibly powerful.â€
Outside of Am I Racist?’, there has been a recent groundswell of audience turnout for projects created with red-state viewers in mind. This summer, the Dennis Quaid–starring Ronald Reagan biopic Reagan was saturation screened around the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July and sold $28.5 million worth of tickets — four times its reported production budget. Likewise, the Sony-distributed Christian drama The Forge took in nearly $30 million on a $6.6 million budget. During the promotional circuit for Twisters, Glen Powell addressed the schism between the country’s conservative-minded interior and the cultural shot-callers of Hollywood and New York, remarking that “vast parts of America are underserved in terms of movies they want to see.â€
“In general, this season’s batch of political films — so far, all right leaning — are connecting with their audience,†says veteran analyst David A. Gross, who publishes the movie industry newsletter FranchiseRe. “Of course, these are all very different movies, but this is a vibrant audience.â€
To hear it from Boreing, Racist’s success is a result of the evolution of Daily Wire’s entertainment division, which kicked off in earnest with the launch of its streaming platform, DailyWire+, in 2021. After minor successes acquiring such independently made films as the 2022 superhero-hostage-comedy The Hyperions and the thriller Run Hide Fight (which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2020), the platform made its breakthrough with Walsh and director Justin Folk’s first Daily Wire documentary, What Is a Woman? The 95-minute film shallowly explores transgender athletes in women’s sports, puberty blockers, and gender-reassignment surgery, garnering praise from conservative commentators and intense backlash from advocates of transgender health care (in addition to outcry from people interviewed in the doc who say they were invited to participate under false pretenses). The company temporarily made the doc free on Twitter in June 2023 and Elon Musk promoted it with viral tweets, even though the platform initially alerted users that the movie “may violate Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct.â€
“We added probably as many subscribers in the first month of the release of What Is a Woman? as we had on the platform before that,†says Boreing, calling the film “an enormous leap forward for the company.â€
Last year, the Daily Wire decided to ramp up its commitment to long-form entertainment, green-lighting production on its first scripted series, The Pendragon Cycle. But during that ambitious project’s lengthy postproduction cycle, company executives began maneuvering to land Racist a theatrical release. Meetings with Angel Studios (the conservative distribution unit behind the faith-based sleeper hit Sound of Freedom) and the Christian TV and film production company Kingdom Story ultimately didn’t yield a deal. Eventually partnering with the smaller-potatoes Texas-based distributor SDG Releasing, the chief executive acknowledges it was a “funny decision†to make the leap into theatrical movies with a nonfiction title under current market conditions. “We’re going to take the thing that’s known for succeeding on streaming and try to succeed with it theatrically,†he says. “But we really did think our audience was hungry for the opportunity to go to a theater and see something that they could feel good about.â€
Exhibitor Relations senior media analyst Jeff Bock points out that not every conservative-skewing title making its way into theaters these days is guaranteed to achieve box-office liftoff. SDG’s Dinesh D’Souza doc, Vindicating Trump, for one, hit 813 theaters on September 27 and to date has grossed a mere $959,000. But in an election year, arriving after a long drought for right-wing political documentaries, Am I Racist? struck a chord that likely has Hollywood scheming new ways to cash in on conservative moviegoing. “I just think that it was something different enough with an anti–Michael Moore vibe that conservatives really responded to,†Bock says. “Michael Moore can’t even open a film at $4 million anymore.â€