'Red Sonja' To Make Hollywood See Red This Weekend

As in red ink, as in going broke from all the woke

Michael J. Bassett is the director of the new Red Sonja movie out this weekend. He has also been a ‘transwoman’ named M.J. Bassett ever since his “coming out” in 2017. Tasha Huo is a screenwriter with a background in shelter management and a career in video games. Together, they have turned another boy-brand comic book into a failed franchise film with a girlboss in the leading role, the phenomenon that has all but destroyed Hollywood. Slow clap.

The reviews for Red Sonja 2025 are bad — not just bad for the film, the reviews themselves are bad, and Disparu explains why. He is a British YouTuber, one of the successful pop culture critics that progressive dudebros on Reddit love to hate. In this video, he explains why the new film is failing — and exposes the dissonance of reviewers who can’t understand why they dislike it.

Put simply, bad things must happen to good people in order to drive conflict, and plot, but the new rules of storytelling do not allow strong women to have weaknesses, or bad experiences. Without the hero’s journey, there is no character growth, no sense of being ennobled with the character, no sense of justice in the outcome, no stakes, no real plot to speak of. Plot instead becomes armor that protects the ‘strong female’ character from any threat, especially the consequences of her own actions.

The result is all the boring fare we have come to expect as so-called entertainment these days. From The Marvels to Rings of Power to The Acolyte, an avowed feminism has taken over intellectual properties and remade them for the ‘modern audience’, which is not supposed to include the evil men with their evil male gaze.

Creatives now regularly tell male fans of the comic books being transformed into films that the products are ‘not for them’, so men stay away in droves. Fascinatingly, it turns out that women do not flock to theaters to see the male gaze defeated. Turns out that women prefer to go to movies with the men in their lives, and the men like cool sword and sorcery flicks. Especially ones with pretty women wearing scanty armor.

Which brings us to the ‘boob plate’ problem. In 2015, just as the screenwriter for this film was being discovered, all of gamer culture was divided over modern-day value questions within fictional settings. Women in unrealistic armor were already a decades-old feminist complaint about presentation and representation. While these complaints have a point in terms of historicity, they miss the point that the genre is called ‘fantasy’, and that most of its consumers have always been male. Since her debut in 1973, the primary audience for Red Sonja in Marvel comics has been male. The primary audience for any film ought to have been male, since that is who might have gone to see it.

Tasha Huo did not write a film for the primary audience it would need to target in order to succeed. She wrote a film that is not for men. Being transgender, the director of this travesty directed Matilda Lutz as if she was a man in a woman’s body. The result is an uncanny valley of unrealistic behavior in which suspension of disbelief becomes impossible. It is ‘boob plate’ as a script. The film represents a view from nowhere, that appeals to no one, because no one in it acts like a normal human being, or in a way that appeals to normal human beings.

These creators thought they were making a fantasy film that millions of feminist women would watch and appreciate. They made Red Sonja instead. The results were so bad that it took years for the film, which was completed during the height of the girlboss wave, to even find a cinematic distributor. Hollywood is slowly, painfuly learning that woke is broke. The lesson is becoming so expensive that the studios will never forget it — if they survive it.