Can we make pop culture great again?

When the movies Wicked and Gladiator II debuted together late last month, there was a painful attempt to call their shared box office success "Glicked"—a reference to the portmanteau of "Barbenheimer" that described the joint cultural triumph of Barbie and Oppenheimer in 2023.

- Ross Douthat

It was painful because the Barbenheimer phenomenon was a genuine old-fashioned Hollywood success story: Two unusual and vivid and original stories (based, yes, on real history and a famous doll, but no less creative for all that) from directors working near the peak of their powers that managed to be culturally relevant and open for interpretive debate.

Whereas Wicked and the Gladiator sequel are conventional examples of how Hollywood makes almost all its money nowadays—through safe-seeming bets on famous brands and franchises that can be packaged into just-OK-enough cinematic entertainments.

Neither is as egregiously mediocre as Moana 2, the other blockbuster of the season: The musical numbers in Wicked and Denzel Washington's Roman scenery-chewing lend energy that's absent in the Disney empire nowadays. But neither is anything like the expression of mass-market creativity that we used to call The Movies.

I've been writing lately about how American politics seems to have moved into a new dispensation—more unsettled and extreme, but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles' villainous Harry Lime in