ACE: Hollywood Is Dying and Jessica Chastain is the Grisly Angel of Death Dragging It to the Grave.

And speaking of Woke movie-making: Jessica Chastain’s latest vanity project, her attempt to prove that she can be an Action Movie Star, bombed abysmally, taking in an incredibly embarrassing $4.3 million at the box office in its opening weekend.

After five full weeks at the box office, plus an additional weekend, it took in $28 million worldwide. It’s out on PPV now so that about wraps up its box office take.

The Spider-Man movie is almost at $1.8 billion globally so this can’t be blamed on covid.

Below, the trailer.

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Who is this for?, Nolte asks.

Well, it’s for Jessica Chastain. Apparently she conceived of the project expressly as a culture war vehicle — she wanted to “challenge the notion that the action-spy genre belonged to men.”

That’s not an artistic motivation. It’s a purely political one.

It’s not that she has a love of spy action films, it’s not that she had a story idea, it’s not that she had this “idea burning inside me” — she just saw something boys were doing and said “girls should plant a flag there to claim territory from the boys.”

That’s about as far from a creative impulse as you can get. It’s not even a money-grubbing impulse — which could result in good art, because good art will often produce money.

No, this is a spiteful impulse, an impulse to denigrate and beat up on men — while also demanding they come give you money to see your movie.

As Charlie’s Angels did a few years ago.

The (female) writer kind of gives away that spiteful motivation. It’s not about the story, or the genre, or the love of the action-spy format.

Didn’t The Avengers, Modesty Blaise, and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. “challenge the notion that the action-spy genre belonged to men” — over half a century ago? (Without alienating half the potential audience in the process.)