Politically Unstable: The downfall of Hollywood

Video

Friday, October 17, 2025

OPINION:

Over the years, Hollywood decided being woke was more important than listening to their audiences, and their downfall is being seen in real time. Thankfully, alternatives are emerging.

Cara Leopardo, founder of We The Studios, joins Washington Times commentary editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to discuss.

[SADLER] There is a boycott of Netflix. It was started by Elon Musk and a conservative influencer, Libs of TikTok, which found some disturbing content on Netflix aimed at children, pushing the transgender ideology. It all started with Dead End Paranormal Park, which is a cartoon that features a gay, transgender teenage boy who runs away from his parents, because they won’t accept him, to some sort of theme park. The content is disturbing, and it’s geared toward seven-year-old children. And it has a flare of indoctrination, but then, upon further look at the kids’ content coming from Netflix, this is a theme in a lot of children’s programming, which has caused a lot of people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions.

The market cap of Netflix within the last two weeks has actually fallen by $15 billion. So it is having an impact on their bottom line. But Cara, you’re a Hollywood producer. You’ve been in Hollywood in the movie industry and the producing industry for a long time now, and you and your husband found the need to start a brand new studio. So I’d like you to tell us a little bit about your background, as well as the company that you started and the reasons for it.

[LEOPARDO] My husband and I met and got married in Hollywood. He was making feature films, and at the time, I was making commercials, print music videos, casting specifically. So I really understood talent, and that the name of the game back then was to find the most interesting person that had this unique talent or this unique set of skills that most people don’t have. Middle of that time in Hollywood, I was approached by a major network to do a reality show on myself. And what it did for me was it opened my eyes to the reality game. It got me on the production side even deeper as an executive producer and talent of that show. And I just said, you know what, this is really something I want to do. I’m kind of done with the commercials. I really couldn’t do any more commercials. My soul was not satisfied in that market. So I started producing for major networks and they have something interesting called mandates.

Every single network has a mandate. It’s a set of guidelines of what they’re looking for in terms of talent. So I’m very privileged to how this works and understand that when you have a specific series on your platform or at your network, it’s because it falls within that mandate. So when you’re telling me everything about Netflix, my first thought is, I would love to see what their mandate says for children’s programming. And I could probably tell you what it says.

My husband and I worked in Hollywood. We did really, really well. We started realizing they don’t want talented people anymore. It was DEI talent. It was somebody with the most challenging disability. It was somebody that had the worst sob story. It was like victim casting. And we really wanted no part of it. It was like we’re not finding the most talented people anymore. We’re finding the biggest tragedy, and it just started to feel really, really bad. And the nail in the coffin for us was a children’s network — this was just about 10 years ago — asked us to find pronoun kids.

Now let me read you what I recall the mandate — and actually have it in email, and time will tell when I drop this email — but the mandate was, and the definition of this was: children between 11 and 15 that live at home, with a pronoun that doesn’t identify as a gender, with the parents approving this. What does it sound like? It sounds like what’s happening today. So Hollywood has been at this for a very long time. And my husband and I just looked at each other. We said, we don’t need to do this. We had another business at the time. Let’s just raise our kids, have a few more kids, and just get out of Hollywood because it’s just not what it was. The magic was gone.

I find myself in front of the television as a mother versus behind the camera as a producer. And I start seeing the symbolism. I start seeing the messaging and the television. You get to episode three. That’s the magic number. One and two are fine. You get to episode three. And there’s the father, he’s the big doofus. So there’s the mom, she’s kind of an airhead. And the child always knew best. And so we understood this is what Hollywood’s doing.

So we removed major streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney from our home just about nine or 10 years ago. During that process, we start seeing what’s going on, and our kids are watching old-fashioned DVDs. That was really the only way they could protect them because we were seeing it creeping in. As a producer. I could see it. Well, then it really started taking off just about two years ago.

Our children are bigger. And I expressed to my husband, “Look, we can sit here and complain, but the world around us is on fire.” Hollywood is literally burning down, unfortunately. We need to do something, and we have this set of skills. We know how to run a network. We know how to cast. We know how to produce. You’ve made feature films. Let’s just start our own streaming platform. And it was really just this very simple conversation. He’s like, “Hey, put a business plan together.” What would it look like? What would it take? I did. And within two weeks, we were casting throughout the country for our first set of series.

[SADLER] That’s amazing. And as a mother myself, I was alarmed because my boys don’t really watch much Netflix anymore. But even when you put the parental controls on, the explicit material, the R-rated stuff is filtered out. But this is children’s programming geared toward children that don’t get caught in these filters. They actually want the kids to have a certain perspective, and it is so very, very obvious. I want you to explain a little bit more about the mandates, right? Were these quotas, were these guidelines? Specifications on what needed to be in the program in order to get it on air?

[LEOPARDO] Exactly. So they would have an overreaching, “This is the theme of the network for the season.” This is what we’re going for. So we are going for, you know, energetic African-American talent. I’m making this up here, right? Energetic African-American talent, you know, they may be transgender and queer. And, you know, we want them to live, in this economic class. This is the overall type of talent we want to see in our network this year. And so you would find or develop talent or you would develop series around these ideas. So when you tell me Netflix has this programming that’s completely inappropriate for children, I would love to see what their mandate says. I guarantee you, the mandate says there needs to be this type of content, needs to be filtered into or a percentage of. We need a percentage of transgender. We need a percentage. We need to hit a quota or a mandate. And instead of just saying, which is what we say at We, the Studios, we want to educate and or inspire our viewers. We want our viewers, our customers to feel really good when they watch their content. They’re saying the complete opposite.

They want to indoctrinate our children. I mean, that’s essentially the definition. If you continue to put something in front of somebody and normalize this behavior, the left’s favorite word, normalize, it becomes normal to that child who’s witnessing it. And this is what we’re seeing with these clusters in our country with these kids today.