Actress-turned-director Maggie Gyllenhaal uncorked one of 2026’s biggest duds in March. Her take on Frankenstein’s monster, The Bride!, lost its studio roughly $90 million.
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The critics didn’t have her back. The film earned a tepid 57 percent rating on RottenTomatoes.com.
Guess what happened next?
Gyllenhaal quickly snagged her next directorial assignment, and she was tapped as this year’s Venice Film Festival jury president.
Must be nice to skip what the industry calls “director’s jail” after helming the year’s biggest flop not named Supergirl? Call it “failing up,” or, perhaps better, DEI in action.
Hollywood is deeply ashamed of the disparity between male and female directors working in the industry. Female directors accounted for just 16 percent of 2024’s 250 top-grossing movies, for example. And the problem is far from new.
Matters grew worse when this year’s Venice Film Festival featured only one female-directed title in the main competition. Awkward.
That put festival head Alberto Barbera under the microscope. And he didn’t flinch. Barbera said fewer female-directed submissions came their way in 2026, which helped tie their hands. Plus, he refused to nominate a film that didn’t warrant inclusion, no matter who directed it.
“It’s humiliating for women if they’re thought to have been chosen because they’re women rather than because they made a good film.”
Guess what happened next?
Woman Unknown by Danish-Egyptian director May El-Toukhy (the only female director in competition) came away with the grand prize, the Golden Lion.
What are the odds? Gyllenhaal refused to discuss the odds or the fact that the only female-directed movie came in first.
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“I think I’m tired of talking about this same subject over and over… I just want to celebrate a brilliantly made movie that I felt was like a laser beam.”
Now, El-Toukhy will never know if she won the prize fair and square or if the festival judges put their thumbs on the scale following the gender-based kerfuffle.
Many people now see right through DEI-style platitudes and practices. Not Hollywood dwellers.
They won’t learn a single lesson from this mess. The industry went all-in on woke and identity politics in recent years. Remember the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, a campaign that predated the Academy’s new diversity rules that determine which films can, and cannot, be eligible for a Best Picture honor.
Reagan didn’t make the cut two years ago, for example. Perhaps the only notable star to complain was Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss. The diversity rules, he said, make him “vomit.”
Studios and talent alike still aggressively push diversity box-checking whenever possible. The new Harry Potter TV series, for example, features a black actor, Paapa Essiedu, playing Professor Severus Snape, one of the saga’s villains who is white in the source material.
More importantly, when awards shows base winners on identity politics as well as, if not over, quality, everyone loses. Audience trust dissolves. Viewership goes down, too.
Worst of all, the artists in question will always wonder if they truly deserved the awards in question.
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Welcome to the not-so-wonderful world of DEI.
