Semafor

07/21/2025

As a conservative political backlash sweeps across US media, some are reaching for the ultimate prize: Hollywood.

Shifting the liberal tilt of the studios and creative culture that shapes America’s image of itself has long been a goal for the right: The late media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart popularized the notion that politics is “downstream” from culture, and acolytes from Steve Bannon to Ben Shapiro have sought to inject their politics into the business of movie business, with limited success.

But conservatives have celebrated a few mainstream hits, like the patriotic Top Gun: Maverick and Taylor Sheridan’s nostalgic, libertarian-inflected Yellowstone. And a longstanding Christian culture industry has backed projects like the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, a dramatization of child trafficking that grossed more than $242 million for Provo’s Angel Studios. The Christian drama The Forge earned $30 million on a $6 million budget last year.

Now a set of prominent figures close to the software firm Palantir are pitching a new project to shake up streaming TV and film with a portfolio ranging from feature films about daring Israeli and American military operations to a three-part treatment of an Ayn Rand tome.

In a pitch deck circulated to investors in recent months, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett are raising money for Founders Films, a new production company based in Dallas that aims to push for films with a nationalistic bent and unsubtle political overtones. The company said its projects would adhere to a set of rules: “Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”