Fin: The curious case of “Legacy Films,” Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson’s “non-woke movie studio” that doesn’t exist

Plus, lost films from 2020, a great sports documentary podcast, the return of 'Caligula' and more from my weekly notes column.

I wrote a couple of months ago about the rise of low-stakes fake news, which appears to have taken over Facebook recently. It’s “news” stories meant to go viral that are blatantly untrue and not about politics or matters of national importance but rather dumb pop culture ephemera. For some reason, it often seems to involve either Roseanne Barr, The View, or the fictitious idea that Roseanne will get a talk show opposite The View. 

There was a movie-related example this week. The story, on a website called Esspots and various Facebook pages of different names, went “Breaking: Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg Join Hands to Create a Non-Woke Film Production Studio, “Hollywood Is Saved.”

The story: 

“In a bold move shaking up Hollywood, veteran actors Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg have teamed up to launch a new film production studio dedicated to preserving traditional storytelling and avoiding the pitfalls of woke culture. The announcement comes as a breath of fresh air for many in the industry who have grown weary of the pervasive influence of political correctness and social activism in filmmaking…

The venture, aptly named “Legacy Films,” is set to serve as a haven for filmmakers seeking creative freedom and audiences seeking thought-provoking yet unfiltered cinematic experiences. With a focus on timeless narratives and compelling characters, Legacy Films seeks to revive the spirit of storytelling that has been overshadowed by the demands of political correctness and virtue signaling. 

The problem… none of it is true. Wahlberg and Gibson have not formed a “film production studio” called Legacy Films. There is no such company of that name. (Snopes has more.)

Wahlberg has pivoted of late into faith-based films and discussed his plans to do so when I interviewed him two years ago. He promoted a movie, Father Stu, in which Gibson played his father, and Gibson’s girlfriend was the director. 

However, Wahlberg does not ever speak in the language of “woke culture,” nor have he and Gibson formed any business. 

The story is marked as “satire,” and Esspots offered a disclaimer that calls itself “a website that specializes in satire, parody, and humor. Before you proceed to read our content, we would like to emphasize that nothing on this website is real.”

But that’s not what “satire” means. There’s no commentary, no humor, nothing being poked fun at. It’s just “a thing that isn’t true.”

And it doesn’t appear that the Facebook audience for that page, called “SpaceX Fanclub,” knows it’s “satire.” As of this writing, the fake post had nearly 10,000 comments and over 10,000 shares. And the comments look like this:

Everyone knows how bad Twitter has gotten, but don’t sleep on Facebook, which has become almost entirely unusable.