Film is — and always will be — political

When it came time to boycott “Scream 7,” the movie’s dissidents were not afraid to play dirty. No one wants to go into a new “Scream” film already knowing who the killer is. The entire dramatic crux of the series depends on the viewer not being able to guess which member of the cast has donned the Ghostface mask and has been slashing their way through their friend group. Fans’ curiosity drives the dramatic tension. Without the whodunit suspense, a “Scream” film is little more than a handful of co-eds running toward a dead end instead of out the front door, and in the case of the newer films, thin nostalgia bait that sees its value plummeting to zero the moment a spoiler leaks. And that’s precisely why the franchise’s disappointed fans and their frustrated allies spent the months ahead of the seventh installment’s February 27 release spreading and spoiling all of the film’s climactic reveals.

Crucial “Scream 7” narrative details began circulating as far back as late 2025. By January, entire plot summaries were floating around social media, while the movie-logging platform Letterboxd was review-bombed with leaks and poor ratings. Boycotters were not afraid to go low. To them, it was an eye for an eye — well-earned justice after the film’s production company, Spyglass Media, fired the franchise’s new final girl, Melissa Barrera, after Barrera posted on social media in support of Palestine in late 2023. And as public sentiment has continued to shift toward Barrera’s view over the last two-and-a-half years, support for the boycott intensified, backed by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Film Workers for Palestine and more. Almost overnight, “Scream 7” became a politicized film. And as is the case with most politicized issues these days, the boycott was met with its own stalwart opposition, dead set on supporting the film not just despite the boycott, but because of it. While there’s no doubt the boycott irreversibly shifted public perception of the franchise in its rebooted state, “Scream 7” managed a record-breaking opening weekend gross of $63.6 million, the franchise’s largest before inflation is adjusted. Like it or not, “Scream 7” was proof that all films — even the goriest, silliest slashers — have the potential to be political.

Not so, if you believe filmmaker Wim Wenders, who carelessly expressed the opposite in the opening press conference of last month’s Berlin International Film Festival. A journalist at the presser began by mentioning the Berlinale’s institutional loyalty “with the people of Iran and Ukraine.” He then teed up a question about the German government’s role in the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Gaza, asking, “Do you, as a jury, support this selective treatment of human rights?” A bit of an unfair question, as jury member Ewa Puszczyńska noted, but an unsurprisingly unfair one given the culture we live in. Nevertheless, Wenders interjected with a rash answer. “We have to stay out of politics. We are the counterweight of politics, the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of the people, not the work of politicians.”

Though there is some nuance to Wenders’ statement, it rang entirely false and uncaring in a world replete with politicism, and shrouded the festival’s proceedings in a muck of controversy. Film is political because it affects and reflects the average person’s habits and quality of life in the same ways policy does. Right now, the tides are mid-shift. The ground is unstable. When studio mergers are set to change film as we know it, and the seventh film in a relatively innocuous horror franchise can become a political lightning rod, cinema has never been more immediately and imperatively political.

Wenders should understand the impactful potential of cinema better than most. Most known and loved for 1984’s “Paris, Texas,” the filmmaker has more recently devoted his work to nonfiction storytelling. In 2014’s “The Salt of the Earth,” Wenders chronicled the contemporary work of internationally revered photographer and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, who dedicated his life to documenting global societies in series that opposed war and social injustice. And in 2018’s “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word,” Wenders was given rare access to Western religion’s most prominent figurehead as he preached progressive values around the world. Even something like “Perfect Days” — Wenders’ most recent narrative film, a simple but moving meditation on the beauty of life and routine — has the potency of politics in its bones.

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But we live in an age where even our most prolific artists are afraid to say the wrong thing. In the internet age, ignorance has a price, and to avoid paying it, some would rather say nothing at all, even as the window for silence quickly closes. After more than 100 artists in the film industry signed an open letter criticizing the festival’s silence, Wenders alluded to this phenomenon in a prepared statement at the Berlinale’s closing awards ceremony. “Cinema is more resistant to oblivion, and certainly longer-living than the short-lived attention span that the internet offers, while your urgency reaches places our films cannot,” Wenders said.

“Activists are fighting mainly on the internet for humanitarian causes — namely, our dignity and protection of human life. These are our causes as well. As the Berlinale films clearly show, most of us filmmakers applaud you. All of us applaud you. You do necessary and courageous work. But does it need to be in competition with ours? Do our languages need to clash?”

In short: yes and no. The internet’s demand for the right response, all the time, is designed to corner people. Cinema can and should speak for itself. Films are statements, and these statements don’t always arrive when they’re requested. But as the reaction to the Berlinale’s messy initial press conference showed, representatives of the art form have a duty to swallow their fear of misspeaking — at least when they’re given a platform as a juror for a major international film festival. This political climate might be the trickiest modern society has ever navigated, but true artists aren’t afraid to adapt if it means staying in step with the very world their art observes.

It’s even more remarkable, then, that Melissa Barrera refused to back down or apologize after her 2023 reposts gained traction and ignited controversy. At the time, Spyglass issued a statement, saying that Barrera’s posts “flagrantly [crossed] the line into hate speech,” claiming that the posts were antisemitic and were “false references to genocide and ethnic cleansing.”

Curiously, though, every “Scream” film is now owned by Paramount Pictures, which has distributed the most recent trio of films after Paramount Global acquired the catalog from Dimension Films — a former subsidiary of Miramax — in 2020. On its face, that may not look suspicious. But in July 2025, Paramount settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump to the tune of $16 million. That same month, the FCC approved the pending merger of Paramount with Skydance Media, leaving many to conclude that the settlement was a pay-to-play way of moving the merger along. Now, Paramount Skydance Corporation holds the highest bid to acquire Warner Bros. after Netflix backed out. And if everything goes the way things look at the time of writing, Paramount Skydance will successfully subsume one of cinema’s preeminent studio giants.

This also means that Paramount (and I’ll refer to the company as that for expediency’s sake) will have a monopoly on the films audiences see. They will control what films get made, and by whom. Given that Trump criticized Netflix staffer Susan Rice on Truth Social just two weeks ago, it doesn’t take an eagle-eyed reader to make the correlation that the president did not want Netflix to have Warner Bros. Paramount, on the other hand, is a much better owner in the conservative administration’s eyes. They’ve already done a number on CBS News, shifting the longstanding program to the middle-right. And if the merger goes through, Paramount could also control the majority of films we see.

That’s a frightening thing, considering Paramount has already announced plans to continue rehabbing disgraced “Melania” director Brett Ratner’s career with a new “Rush Hour” film. They’ve also tapped the equally toxic — and just as shoddy —  filmmaker Max Landis for a new “G.I. Joe,” after Landis was accused of sexual and emotional abuse by multiple women. To put it very plainly: Paramount does not want dissenting voices among its roster, and is all too happy to not only overlook allegations against the filmmakers the company employs, but actively seek them out to give them jobs. Is it really any wonder that Paramount just so happens to distribute the very franchise that Barrera was ousted from? If the new final girl of the “Scream” series wouldn’t play nice and stick to the script, they’d simply toss her away and pay Neve Campbell to return.

While cinema is an inherently political art form — anything put to celluloid or digital has the power to influence people at the same level as politics — it shouldn’t have to be political to this degree. The average person shouldn’t have to fret that bold ideas and wondrous cinematic visions are being gatekept from them by the people in a boardroom clinging to a conservative agenda. And yet, this is the reality that we face; the barrel of the gun that we’re staring down together. Right now, politics is intertwined with almost every facet of big business, no matter what type of business it is, and that objectively sucks.

But maybe there’s a little bit of hope, buried somewhere beneath the rubble. At last Sunday’s Actor Awards, producer Scott Stuber — a key growth figure for Universal in the early 2000s and former chairman of Netflix Films — told Variety that he hopes something good can come from the losses of the potential merger. “I’m hoping there will be new companies that rise up and are entrepreneurial,” Stuber said. “I hope there are all kinds of new places. And you look over the last 50 years, companies like New Line, A24, Miramax, they came out of [entrepreneurial spirits]. And I hope a bunch of people who, unfortunately, may lose their jobs band together and create something great.”

Stuber has a very silver-linings perspective that is, it must be said, rife with privilege. But he also isn’t necessarily wrong, either. The ’90s saw a major renaissance in independent filmmaking that has bled into the new millennium, and scrappy young artists are being given new chances every day as distributors like A24, NEON and their contemporaries move further into film production. Even outside of smaller studios, there’s a renewed chance for independent artists to take bold swings. This is the moment for combative, exciting and unpolished filmmaking; the time to donate a few bucks to the GoFundMe your weird but cool college roommate is starting up to produce their first short film; the time for guerilla productions and picking up the camera to make something fun with your friends. Radicalism is the enemy of big politics, and there’s nothing quite so radical as making and enjoying art on our own terms.