Happy Fourth of July! And fittingly enough, word is the revolution at Paramount isn’t being fought with muskets. It’s being fought with spreadsheets.
Cosmic Book News has learned from sources that David Ellison and Paramount brass are sitting on internal data and analytics tracking the audience shift around “wokism” and DEI-driven content, hard numbers confirming what moviegoers have been declaring at the box office for the better part of a decade.
Hollywood’s messaging-first era isn’t just unpopular. Per the data, it’s measurably, quantifiably over.
In other words: Ellison has the receipts.
The Audience Already Voted
You don’t need a leaked deck to see the pattern. The public numbers tell the same story the internal data does.
Supergirl just delivered James Gunn’s DCU its Yorktown. The movie opened to $37 million, after tracking at one point had it as high as $78 million. Variety is already projecting a loss of $200 million or more, and the movie flat-out bombed overseas, especially in China and India. In its second weekend, it dropped a massive 73%. And guess what? It lost to George Washington.
As Cosmic Book News previously reported, people inside the studio knew it was a disaster from the screenings. The audience that did show up handed it a B- CinemaScore below The Marvels and The Flash, and the script, as our own review detailed, was loaded with the same divisive material audiences have been rejecting since at least 2016.
Now the flop is being blamed on the fans. Right on schedule. And so is the backlash to The Odyssey.
Marvel post-Endgame has shed audience at a rate that would have been unthinkable in 2019, with Nielsen data and box office numbers revealing that brands like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar have lost as much as 75% of their audience.
Disney knows the number is troubling and is scrambling to course-correct, including resting IP entirely before relaunching and targeting other studios to fill in the gap.
Disney is even stepping back from publishing Marvel Comics, looking to license the line out.
Star Wars speaks for itself.
The Disney+ era burned through goodwill at a historic clip, and The Mandalorian and Grogu tanked in theaters, losing to low-budget horror movies as the franchise’s audience collapse hit 85% from its Disney-era peak, where its fix sounds even worse.
Doctor Who: the same playbook, the same result. A legacy institution was retooled around messaging, and the audience walked.
The pattern isn’t subtle. Per sources, Paramount’s data says the same thing the grosses do.
That’s why you’re seeing figures like former X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo speak openly about feeling like he was a DEI hire. It’s also why voices on YouTube are now saying flat-out that woke culture destroyed Supergirl and is destroying cinema.
Hollywood, sources stress, is very aware of the influence that Cosmic Book News, Nerdrotic, WDW, Film Threat, The Critical Drinker and others now carry.
The influencer-shill screening model is collapsing in real time. Supergirl‘s screenings arguably hurt it, and The Odyssey quietly canceled its own influencer screenings. YouTubers who also shilled have been forced to change their tune.
Ellison’s Playbook: Back To What Works Globally
So what does Paramount do with the receipts?
Per our sources, Ellison and Mike De Luca‘s answer is simple: take Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery once the merger closes, back to what works globally.
And what works globally is rooted in the 1980s.
Think Top Gun: Maverick. Think Michael. Big, earnest, crowd-pleasing tentpoles built for the entire world, not for a faction on BlueSky and Threads.
It’s already happening. As Cosmic Book News reported, Danny McBride’s G.I. Joe movie is being taken seriously. Not comedic. Rooted in the comics.
Exactly the kind of 1980s American IP played straight that defines the Ellison approach.
As Cosmic Book News exclusively reported, that’s the same template Ellison is applying to Star Trek: take the franchise back to what made Wrath of Khan through The Next Generation work.
No lectures. No deconstruction. Optimistic, adventure-driven storytelling that made Star Trek a global institution in the first place. And now William Shatner just said he would come back.
On the DC side, sources point to the Absolute Universe as proof the same energy sells right now. Absolute Batman is moving on the order of 500,000 copies a month, and sources tell us Absolute has revitalized DC the same way The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen revitalized DC in the ’80s.
It doubles down on the themes and aesthetic Zack Snyder explored on film. Ellison and De Luca, we’re told, are very well aware of Frank Miller’s influence and how it extends into the worldwide phenomenon.
It’s no coincidence the receipts run through Snyder, either.
The first five SnyderVerse DC films grossed nearly $5 billion, compared to Marvel’s first five at $2.3 billion.
And as Snyder himself just reminded everyone, the 2017 Wonder Woman he co-wrote and shepherded deliberately avoided political agenda, which is precisely why boys could love the character as much as girls did.
That’s the model. It always was.
Meanwhile, Gunn’s DCU is going the other direction, with Adria Arjona set as his Wonder Woman amid growing behind-the-scenes chaos. There are now big questions about his future at DC.
Hollywood Lost The Audience. Ellison Knows It.
The audience already declared independence from the messaging-first era.
They did it with empty seats, rejected franchises, collapsed streaming numbers, word-of-mouth, and box office bombs Hollywood spent years pretending were isolated incidents.
They weren’t isolated. They were the trend.
Now, according to sources, Paramount has the data to prove it.
That puts Ellison in a very different position than the executives still trying to spin failure as fan toxicity, franchise fatigue, sexism, nostalgia, or bad luck.
If the internal analytics match the public numbers, this is no longer a vibes debate. It’s a business reality.
And per our sources, that’s precisely how to read Ellison. He’s well-liked in Hollywood, we’re told: a Democrat, but a centrist, who genuinely loves movies, understands tentpole filmmaking, and is filmmaker-friendly.
This isn’t a culture warrior with an axe to grind. It’s a studio boss looking at the numbers.
That distinction matters. When the data on the audience shift is coming from a centrist Democrat who wants to make crowd-pleasing movies, not from someone with a political agenda, the “toxic fandom” spin has nowhere left to hide.
Audiences are not asking for lectures. They are asking for heroes. They are not asking for deconstruction. They are asking for myth, adventure, sincerity, scale, and characters played straight.
And make no mistake, this isn’t the Guardians approach all over again.
That’s what worked in the ’80s. That’s what worked with Top Gun: Maverick. That’s what worked with Snyder’s early DC run. And that’s the lane Ellison appears to be moving Paramount and, eventually, Warner Bros. Discovery back into.
Hollywood can keep blaming the audience if it wants.
Ellison has the receipts. The audience already fired the warning shot. And this Fourth of July, the message could not be clearer: the old regime is over.
