(Zero Hedge)—In November, the entertainment media was energized by the news of potential studio mergers and a potential jump in content spending by Disney and Paramount. The possibility of more cash flowing into productions was seen as a light at the end of a long dark tunnel for a film industry crushed by endless box office and TV streaming failures. Maybe this new funding would revitalize a Hollywood gasping for oxygen?
However, as The Hollywood Reporter noted, the surge in funding was not necessarily going into the pockets of the current crop of filmmakers and TV series showrunners. Instead, Disney, Paramount and other entertainment conglomerates are shifting cash into sports and foreign content.
The reasons why media giants are quietly abandoning Hollywood should be obvious. In early 2025, these same companies took one last gamble on DEI and stood in solidarity with activist producers, directors and writers. And, the result this year was the same as the last several years: They lost billions in revenues.
The raw box office numbers are ugly, but they don’t tell the whole story. Overall productions costs have skyrocketed by 25% since early 2020 and inflation in ticket prices has hidden the crippling plunge in total ticket sales compared to the same time period. In other words, Hollywood’s profit margins are shrinking while their audience is dwindling.
Their strategy in early 2025 revolved around the idea of attacking the audience (their customer base) as a “toxic fandom” that needs to be shamed and marginalized. The problem is, in most cases when companies go to war with their customers they inevitably lose.
More recent examples include Superman director James Gunn’s social media rants attacking fans for criticizing the pro-illegal immigration propaganda planted in the comic book film which was intended to relaunch the Warner Bros. DC universe. The media applauded Gunn’s handling of the fandom and claimed that he set a precedent for future films that draw audience backlash. In reality, Gunn’s movie was a box office flop, falling $100 million short of the $700 million in global ticket sales needed for the film to break even.
Gunn’s big mouth and far-left propaganda sunk the movie’s chances. Keep in mind, the Superman franchise is about as all-American as you can get; to not draw in a massive US audience requires stunning incompetence.
Then there was the epic failure of Disney’s Star Wars series, “The Acolyte”. The streaming series sought to deconstruct the Star Wars mythos by making the Jedi the villains and portrayed the Sith as misunderstood good guys. The show was saturated with LGBT casting and gay propaganda including the infamous lesbian space witches. The Acolyte was created by Leslye Headland, former assistant of Harvey Weinstein, and was essentially the last attempt by Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy to force fans to embrace a woke version of the franchise.
To this day, Headland has been raging against “toxic” audiences for rejecting the series and making it one of the most embarrassing projects ever to be released by Disney’s streaming service (and there’s a long list of disastrous releases from Disney+). She asserts that her show’s dismal reception had nothing to do with bad writing and woke storytelling; rather, it was the fault of “racist and fascist” fans.
Disney immediately cancelled the show due to rock bottom viewership and it’s unlikely Headland will ever touch another Star Wars project again.
Even “Stranger Things”, a Netflix mainstay considered a sure winner, faced audience decline during its final season after planting abrupt and unnecessary LGBT messaging in the series. The establishment media came to the show’s defense, arguing that audiences have become “entitled” and that studios need to stop trying to give customers what they want.
The truth is, Hollywood has been ignoring audience feedback for years and their concerns have focused more on force-feeding fans a steady diet of woke indoctrination. This might have been possible for them a few years ago when cash reserves were still strong, but the studios are finally realizing that they can’t propagandize the public if no one pays to watch their garbage.
In other words, the leftists in entertainment didn’t take into account the possibility that audiences would simply walk away. They can control every facet of media from TV to advertising to film, but they can’t force people to consume their content (at least not in the US).
And this seems to be the new business model for Hollywood going into next year. 2025 was the last hurrah for woke programming in America. Now, studios are scrambling to cancel a number of politically charged shows and movies in the hopes of finally bringing profits back to their pre-pandemic glory. Their pending 2026 release lineup, though, is anorexic.
In the meantime, companies like Netflix are adapting with targeted woke messaging in countries where people can actually be forced to watch. In Britain, for example, the government is excitedly promoting the Netflix series “Adolescence”. The show is set to be featured in UK classrooms as part of an anti-masculinity program to brainwash young men into avoiding conservative content and fearing their own biology.
It is likely that the industry will try to adapt their productions to markets where audiences have less freedom of choice in the hopes of offsetting their losses in the US, but the fact remains that unless they abandon woke politics completely there is little chance that they will be able to weather another year of failure similar to the ugliness of 2025.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.