As this week’s columns got backed up a day thanks to President Trump’s late-breaking Greenland deal on Wednesday night, I’m doing a little more unserious weekend version of the 5QT. (RELATED: Europe Is Thus Illuminated, Exactly As It Is) And I’ll start at the movies, which, yes, you don’t care about anymore. But I’ve got something of an explanation why… 1. Disney’s Impending Send Help Disaster Disney bought 20th Century Fox a couple of years ago and has renamed it 20th Century Studios. Among the properties the new company is rolling out is a Rachel McAdams-Dylan O’Brien thriller called Send Help, which debuts on Jan. 30. You probably know all about Send Help if you watched Indiana beat Miami to win the college football national championship on Monday night. The ABC/ESPN broadcast pushed the movie shamelessly from the pregame show to the postgame show. It was almost oppressive. If you missed it, this is what they were pushing… Everybody likes Rachel McAdams. She’s terrific. People will probably tend to prefer the Wedding Crashers Rachel McAdams to… whatever this is. And let’s remember that Disney was pushing this movie in front of a college football audience. How many college football fans do you think are interested in watching a movie about a frumpy corporate secretary who turns into MacGyver Meets Schwarzenegger as soon as she drops down onto a desert island, to the consternation of her prissy, frat-boy boss? Practically nobody is the correct answer. This movie is destined to bomb for the same reason all of the female-led action movies bomb. Men roll their eyes, and so do women. But Woke Disney can’t help itself. It isn’t a big-budget production, unless you count the bags of money clearly paid to influencers covering social media with rave reviews after its sneak-preview premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Wednesday. I saw all that promotion on Monday night, and I decided to wait for the rest of the week before writing anything about it. And just like I thought, there was very little buzz around this movie. Even when the biggest media company in the world throws all its weight behind a film, the world simply yawns. This is what a dead, clueless industry looks like. 2. Bark Boy and the Death of Advertising You’ve undoubtedly seen this. You can’t not see it. It’s absolutely everywhere, and they will not stop showing it. And what you’re told is that it’s the funniest commercial going. Click on the YouTube link in the embedded video and check out the comments, and you’d certainly get the impression people love that ad. Sure, they do. Just like this ad… And this ad… These are all from Allstate, which actually is capable of great ads (the Mayhem ads starring veteran actor Dean Winters are among the best ever made). And there’s something consistent in all of them. Which is the main character is a stupid white guy with zero situational awareness who causes chaos — for his female Georgia fan boss, for the Hispanic guy tending to the longhorn mascot, and for Charles Woodson and his kid. These are commercials that have been running all year long on college football broadcasts. To state the obvious once again, college football fans are among the most traditional and conservative that you’ll find in sports, and sports is a pretty traditional and conservative audience to begin with. And yes, college football audiences skew white and male. You can’t escape the fact that Madison Avenue is incapable of presenting white men in a positive light. People have been talking about this phenomenon for years. And yet this is what the advertising industry has to offer, principally, to white men. And they wonder why young white men are listening to Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes? They wonder why “homophobia” is “rampant” among Gen Z? Michael Jordan was one of the greatest mass marketers in the history of the world, as well as being the greatest basketball player who ever lived. And Jordan’s greatest contribution to advertising was a simple statement: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” He understood the purpose of mass marketing was to make your product available and desirable to as many people as you can. And yet look what Allstate put in front of the college football audience. The Bark Boy ad might have been funny in a different context. In the current context, it has to be seen as an attack, and the natural response isn’t likely to be good for business. 3. Transvestites at Halftime of the Super Bowl? By all means, let’s keep unspooling the rolling disaster that is the NFL’s decision to inflict Bad Bunny on its Super Bowl audience as the halftime-show performer. ????????: Bad bunny plans to “honor queers and LGBTQ+” communities during upcoming Super Bowl performance by wearing a dress. Many NFL fans have already said they will be boycotting the Super Bowl as a result. ??? pic.twitter.com/ayus89GoEU — Dov Kleiman (@NFL_DovKleiman) January 23, 2026 How do you think that’ll go? The sad part about all of this is that the NFL has really had a great year. The games have been good, the four teams left are excellent, physical football is back, and there has been almost no stupid wokery. And they’re going to ruin it by having the entire country, minus a few people who aren’t football fans, throw their hands up in disgust. This isn’t really the NFL. It’s the music industry more than the NFL. Jay-Z is the guy dictating who does what at those halftime shows, and this is all corporate media, which is paying the bills for the league. Corporate media is essentially what George Washington said of government: it is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Yes, you’ll get paid. But you’ll be corrupted. 4. Is There a Better Way? This is what I wrote about in Blockbusters, my latest novel, which has been out for a couple of months. In that book, I presented a scenario whereby a group of investors might couple with new technology to bring down the Big Five media companies and reset the entertainment industry. It’s a super-entertaining book that has nothing but great reviews. (READ MORE: Blockbusters) But it’s only one vision of how things might change (they’re going to have to change, because these people don’t make profits anymore). There are others. Let’s think about this: what’s the fundamental issue in the way of quality entertainment getting to audiences? It’s this — film and TV are massively expensive undertakings, and even “low-budget” projects will cost millions of dollars to produce. Because of that, they’re the province of large corporate institutions, and those institutions have been under attack by cultural Marxists for decades. So much so that the cultural Marxists control them. And Marxists destroy everything they control. Which is why practically every piece of intellectual property corporate media produces is openly, aggressively negative toward white men or traditional America, to the immediate detriment of its profitability. And the lack of profitability means there are fewer resources to produce the same volume of IP. It ought to be understood that film is a medium that is well more than a century old. Feature films date back to the 1920s. We’ve internalized these as the dominant form of entertainment and storytelling. But is it in evidence that it’ll always be like this? Nope. I said in one of our Spectacle Podcast episodes of recent vintage that what I expect we’ll see this year is the debut of something new. I think you’re going to see something — I’ll call it a video novel, but who knows what it’ll ultimately be known as — which fuses books and movies together. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 313: Here’s What We’re Leaving Behind in 2025) I don’t have a good example of this to show you, but consider that most books now come with book trailers, which are essentially video commercials pushing the book. Those have exploded thanks to the availability of AI text-to-video apps. But the application of AI video to digital marketing for books will inevitably lead to its use within the manuscript itself. It’s only a matter of time before you start to see digital books, whether on Amazon or on their own platforms, illustrated with video clips. And once those pop, you’ll have a whole new medium that corporate media will have a hell of a time trying to control. For the price of a few subscriptions to apps like Kling, Veo, and Sora, a storyteller will be able to craft a cinematic vision of his or her product and embed it straight into the text, then deliver it on a platform like Patreon or Substack where readers can access it at their leisure for a few bucks a month. You’re getting a taste of the cinematic experience, and you’re getting it straight from the author. And it isn’t prohibitive for the storyteller to bring it to you; it won’t cost millions of dollars — thousands, is more like it. If six months go by and you haven’t seen something like this, I’ll be surprised. In fact, I’m playing around with the idea of repurposing the Tales of Ardenia novels, which were the first foray I made into fiction writing, into a video novel series. Doing that has driven me down the rabbit hole of the AI video apps, and there is an enormous amount of creative power to be wielded that people simply don’t get yet. Anyway… 5. I Have More Red Clay Strays for You A few 5QTs ago, I threw in a video from my favorite band, The Red Clay Strays out of Mobile, Alabama, of a song called “God Does.” You guys responded awfully favorably to that, so it’s been in my head that I ought to drop a couple more examples of their work. This one’s just audio. It’s from an album they dropped about a year ago that was recorded live at the Ryman Theater in Nashville, and it’s an old song of theirs called “Till Things Get Right…” And here’s a new one… READ MORE from Scott McKay: Europe Is Thus Illuminated, Exactly As It Is Was That Church Attack the Tipping Point in Minnesota? How Great Is the Great Healthcare Plan?