How Hollywood Sells Us War

Hollywood’s relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense helps keep public support for perpetual war by shaping how the military is portrayed on screen—often in ways that make criticism harder to reach blockbuster audiences. The DoD openly describes a “long-standing relationship” with filmmakers, including production agreements that let officials review rough cuts and require script changes before release. While the department frames this as ensuring “an accurate story,” the transcript argues that the practical effect is a consistent, pro-military image: heroic troops, justified missions, and only limited or sanitized acknowledgment of the realities that make U.S. war-making look worse.

The scale of involvement is presented through publicly accessible, decades-spanning documents listing movies and TV shows where the DoD either contributed to production or denied assistance. The key claim is that access to military equipment and locations—resources that would be expensive for studios to recreate—comes with tradeoffs. According to the transcript, DoD-backed projects receive “cleanup treatment,” including altered dialogue and storyline adjustments, while more critical portrayals can be blocked from the same privileges or face obstacles that reduce their chances of becoming major box-office hits.

Several examples illustrate the alleged mechanism. In “12 Strong,” the transcript describes relatively minor rewrites such as removing homophobic slurs and sanitizing the physical presentation of protagonists. “Lone Survivor” is described as involving more consequential changes, including removing a character’s urge to commit war crimes and murder civilians—an internal moral conflict the transcript says existed in the source material. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which recounts U.S. arming of the Mujahideen, is described as having edits that remove mention of how U.S. support contributed to the later rise of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The recurring pattern, as framed here, is that script revisions conceal parts of the truth because the truth “doesn’t look good.”

The transcript also places this modern media influence in a longer U.S. propaganda lineage. It points to World War I-era efforts by the Committee on Public Information, including film-based messaging that helped shift American public opinion toward war. It then connects that history to World War II’s Office of War Information and its Bureau of Motion Pictures, quoting Elmer Davis: entertainment films can smuggle propaganda ideas into audiences without people realizing they are being propagandized.

Finally, the transcript uses a Marxist “superstructure” lens to argue that culture and ideology are not independent of economic power. In a neoliberal, imperial capitalist society where war has been a recurring feature, war becomes culturally central—not only because it sells, but because it helps reaffirm the existing order. Even if critical war narratives exist, the transcript argues they’re structurally disadvantaged when the military can steer resources toward pro-military stories. The result is a cinematic environment where the military is “almost exclusively” depicted as a force for good, weakening the public’s ability to sustain strong critiques of U.S. imperial projects—while major studios benefit from access and production advantages that help pro-war films dominate.