What does the presidential election mean for the movies?

America votes on Tuesday. A look at how the movie business, and movies themselves, will be affected by who wins the presidential election.

As you may have heard, Tuesday is Election Day in the United States. While it’s certainly not the most important consideration in an election being fought on such issues as crime, the economy, national security, women’s autonomy, and presidential impunity, I thought—since this is a movie newsletter—it would be worth exploring what Tuesday’s election result could mean for the movies and for Hollywood.

Assuming, of course, that democracy survives.

A few disconnected thoughts:

• Kamala Harris, and the Democrats, are mostly aligned with major Hollywood figures, both of the movie star and studio mogul variety, while Donald Trump is most opposed by such people. It the op-ed by a movie star, George Clooney, that led directly to Joe Biden being replaced at the top of the ticket by Harris. This dynamic, in the event of a Harris victory, would likely lead to Hollywood getting a sympathetic ear from the executive branch, and a less sympathetic one should Trump win.

• Whether that affects which movies are made and not made is a separate question entirely. The government does not directly control which movies are made, and it’s hard to imagine that changing anytime soon. However, a change in government can have second-order effects that do possibly make a difference.

• Whenever a Republican administration comes in, the are usually some rumblings that such a government will lead to a new rebellious spirit, and therefore lead to better music and movies. But this it hasn’t traditionally been the case, aside from certain punk rock stuff that happened in the U.K., early in the Thatcher era.

• There hasn’t been much of an appetite, since the start of the Trump era, for prestige Hollywood movies about Trump and different aspects of his life; the first big one, The Apprentice, only arrived recently and wasn’t exactly a box office titan. There are, however, countless documentaries made each year, either from the liberal side about Trump being bad, or from the conservative side about Trump being a prophesized leader and Messiah-like figure. Should Trump lose and (possibly) exit the scene, expect far fewer of both. I suspect one day some great filmmaker will make a three-hour magnum opus about Trump, in the style of Oliver Stone’s Nixon, but that’s likely many years away.

• Then there’s the question of fears about censorship. Trump, in his first term, for all his anti-Hollywood bluster, didn’t make any moves to try to use the power of government to censor movies and hasn’t hinted at plans to do so in a new term (the closest he came was ripping the movie The Hunt, but he misinterpreted what the film was about, and it ended up only being delayed a few months.) And while some fear that “wokeness” will compel Democrats to institute a Hays Code-style regime from the left, the Biden Administration did nothing like that, and there doesn’t seem to be any appetite to pursue that in the future.

• That said, should Trump win, it’s not hard to imagine movie studios deciding they’ve been “neglecting the heartland,” and adjusting the choices of the movies they make accordingly. Maybe we’ll even get another really terrible movie about J.D. Vance.

• It’s also worth noting that Trump, in his first term, was the first Republican president in decades to not put a culture war hawk in charge of the FCC, so we were spared such episodes as the government’s war over fines with Howard Stern, and the freakout over the Janet Jackson Super Bowl nipple incident. The Washington Post did recently speculate that Trump could “weaponize” the FCC against the media in a second term, although the FCC does not regulate movies, and that was more about Trump going against broadcasters. Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner who over the weekend ripped Saturday Night Live for hosting Harris and not Trump, would likely become FCC chairman in a second Trump presidency.