Hollywood to Hollowood: A Post-Mortem
The Afro-Eurasian Narrative Mandate.
[I] Hollywood as the Pentagon’s Propaganda Studio
Hollywood was never simply about movies. It was the cultural propaganda arm of the unipolar order, scripting morality plays for the American century. Its blockbusters were the cinematic equivalent of carrier groups — projecting dominance, disciplining narratives, and ensuring U.S. hegemony extended into the imagination of billions. For nearly a century, the West leveraged the larger-than-life, California-based film industry not merely to entertain, but to normalize its worldview, sanctify its wars, and project a myth of inevitability.
For all intents and purposes, Hollywood was the CIA’s cultural laundromat, and the West’s last definitive monopoly over global narrative hegemony.
But what happens when the empire that fed it starts to wither? You get Hollowood — a hollow projection, flashing the same tired archetypes onto an increasingly indifferent world.
Bad sequels, poor scripts, dwindling originality; the industry’s failures aren’t merely creative mishaps. They are byproducts. Surface symtpoms of structural and ideological illness:
The cultural propaganda arm of a dying unipolar order no longer has the credibility to enforce its myths.
[II] Symptom, Not Cause: A Terminal Illness
The 2025 Primetime Emmy Awards gave us a perfect case study. Actress Hannah Einbinder, upon winning Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Hacks, used her speech to call for a “free Palestine.”
To many, this was celebrated as a long-overdue moral stand. But treating it as a profound moral moment is short-sighted indulgement. One does not glorify a predictable chemical reaction in a lab. One notes it, and files it as another signal of systemic narrative decline. By this point, global public opinion had shifted so decisively that silence carried reputational risk.
Einbinder’s words were not moral courage; they were career calculus. As the reputational math shifted, Hollywood’s internal punishment mechanisms against pro-Palestine speech eroded. Publicists of camera-worthy stars have already for a crucial inflection point: public outrage against the Middle Eastern genocide now commands a net-benefit for their Hollywood charges. Thus, opportunistic ‘activism’ emerged not as moral defiance, but as a lagging indicator of narrative collapse.
This is not cynicism. It is socipolitical anatomy. And simple observation of the Western body shows that their narrative power is decaying faster than media ecosystems can repackage it.
[III] The ACP-EU Culture Programme: A 'Support' Trap
Hollywood’s collapse is not an isolated sickness; it is the cultural expression of a broader Western terminal illness. The same exhaustion, exploitation, and hollow spectacle that have gutted Hollywood’s credibility also infect the institutions it exports abroad. Global South and East nations that allow themselves to be folded into these frameworks find not empowerment, but parasitic entanglement.
The ACP-EU Culture Programme is a case in point. Marketed as a bridge for ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific) filmmakers into global circuits, it quickly revealed itself as yet another mechanism of narrative extraction.
In her extensive audit of EU support to African cinema, University of Lisbon researcher Marija Domarkaite documents how “African” films financed under the programme were staffed almost entirely by European crews, premiered in European festivals, and channeled through European distributors — leaving sovereignty, revenue, and technical capacity outside Africa. These realities are underscored by the lack of agency felt by Kenyan filmmaker Bob Nyanja when he created The Captain of Nakara (2012):
The Kenyan creative team’s experience revealed their frustration for being excluded from the postproduction process of the film... Kenyan and German producers worked on this project. As already noted, the latter had the biggest influence in making the film. Therefore, according to B. Nyanja, he was trapped in the situation where he did not have any control on the postproduction and in this way it appeared that he did not own the film. [77]
Even the programme’s own mid-term evaluation admitted that despite funding hundreds of projects, “cultural ecosystems remain fragile in beneficiary countries,” with systemic problems of ownership, access, and sustainability unresolved. In short: the ACP-EU framework ensured visibility abroad, but hollowed out sovereignty at home.
Western donors are primarily interested in contributing to their own donor agenda... The ACP films programme reserved the right to decide what would work for [a] Kenyan audience. How can European producers know what is relevant for such ethnically diverse country as Kenya (43 tribes)? [Domarkaite, 79]
This is the lesson: interaction with a decaying system spreads the decay. Narrative hollowness isn’t confined to America’s film industry; these cited instances of neo-colonial culture policy reveal a consistent truth: the operational logic of the entire Western cultural export model is predicated on a structural and ideological illness. The Global South cannot rely on Western scaffolding without absorbing Western fragility. The only path to long-term growth is full sovereignty in narrative production — ownership from conception to circulation, from myth-making to monetization.
[IV] The Flops as Signals
Consider recent projects:
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Captain America: Brave New World // Once a guaranteed global box office draw, now struggling to generate ROI. Its patriotic mythos rings hollow outside U.S. borders. And with each morally questionable step made by Democrats, Republicans, and elites, a similar sentiment increasingly propagates within their own borders.
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Lilo & Stitch (live-action remake) // Yet another reheated property, stripped of spirit, performing like a bad cover band of its own cultural past.
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Snow White (2025 remake) // A production mired in PR disasters, narrative incoherence, and low audience trust.
Each flop is not the disease itself, but the fever chart of a terminal patient. They are symptoms of an exhausted, self-referential, morally bankrupt narrative ecosystem.
[V] The Geopolitical Vacuum
Hollywood’s implosion is not just entertainment decay. It is civilizational space opening. The collapse of the last cultural monopoly of the unipolar world creates the single greatest narrative opportunity of the 21st century.
The vacuum begs to be filled. And the forces capable of filling it lie not in the West, but in the South and East.
[VI] Afro-Eurasia — A Narrative Ascension
AFRICA // The beating heart of the new mythos. Africa is the prodigal creative force — rich oral epics, rhythms, and visual palettes awaiting global amplification. From Yoruba cosmology to Swahili maritime legends, Africa is not a latecomer, but the throne itself. Its return is inevitable.
RUSSIA // Slavic folklore and Orthodox mysticism remain untapped on the global stage. Russia is a civilization with Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Tarkovsky — yet no “Russian comics” industry. That absence is a provocation and an opportunity. Imagine Slavic sagas rendered in visual serials, a multipolar answer to Marvel.
CHINA // With unparalleled industrial capacity and global distribution networks, China can scale narrative ecosystems like no other. Its wuxia and xianxia genres are mythic architectures ready for export — with characters, cosmologies, and moral arcs deeper than Hollywood’s CGI pantheon.
Fortified by a wider Global South narrative ecosystem, these streams form the Afro-Eurasian cultural operating system.
Beijing is already operationalizing this mandate with productions like Lord of Mysteries — a sophisticated donghua that has bypassed Western gatekeepers to captivate a global audience. Blending Victorian steampunk with occult mythology, its high-production value and simultaneous worldwide release on platforms like Crunchyroll demonstrate an industrial capacity to create and scale unique narrative ecosystems. With a multi-season roadmap and a pre-existing transnational fandom, it exemplifies a sovereign, post-Hollywood model: building immersive worlds from the ground up and distributing them directly to the world, proving that the future of fantasy is being written in multipolar nations like China, not Burbank.
[VII] From Collapse to Creation
Hollywood is no longer the cathedral of narrative. It is a collapsing set piece. And like any collapsing empire, its debris fertilizes the ground for something new.
The future is Afro-Eurasian. The world’s next cultural operating system will not be made in Los Angeles, but across Lagos, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, and beyond.
[VIII] The Signal
This is not just observation; it is architecture. The next layer of infrastructure after ports, pipelines, and fiber cables is narrative.
To the burgeoning entertainment networks: the narrative craft you build must now scale into mythos, not just media cycles.
To the multipolar institions leading the charge into an environmentally-conscious, equitable future: infrastructure is not only steel and grids — it is cultural distribution networks.
Hollywood to Hollowood.
The story machine of the unipolar order has flatlined. The narrative mandate has shifted. And Afro-Eurasia is primed to write the next epic.