'Conservative Hollywood' dream 'in ruins' as eight-figure show staggers out the door

Ben Shapiro speaking with attendees at the 2018 Young Women's Leadership Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Hyatt Regency DFW Hotel in Dallas, Texas. Gage Skidmore

In early 2020, Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing found himself inspired by the eagerness with which the MAGA community devoured Daily Wire documentaries, and he decided to build a conservative Hollywood in Nashville, according to Bulwark Editor Will Sommer.

“Boreing’s pet project was a Game of Thrones–style take on the King Arthur legend, called The Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of Merlin. And, for a while, the right’s long-running dream of having more influence in entertainment seemed like it just might happen,” said Sommer.

But then the series caught the common Hollywood bugs of cost overruns and chaos and Boreing abruptly stepped down and vanished last March, according to Sommer. Then came the layoffs of Boreing’s entertainment division. “The dream of cool Hollywood conservatism,” said Sommer, “lay in ruins.”

But, lo and behold, the first two episodes of Boreing’s $14 million Pendragon projecthave finallybroken ground. Or, maybe it cost $67 million, as podcaster Candace Owens claimed. Either way, the money just couldn’t buy a path out of mediocrity.

“Production-wise, Pendragon has the look of a quickly forgotten second-tier streaming show—which is . . . not bad, certainly when you consider where it’s coming from,” said Sommer. “Unfortunately for Boreing, he was and is no Ted Sarandos, the Netflix honcho hoovering up the competition. Instead, his dreams of bringing Pendragon to life appear to have deeply complicated his own career and the status of the Daily Wire itself. Investors in the conservative news site long ago began to wonder why they were paying so much to make a fantasy TV show when that money could have gone to, say, another dozen podcasts.”

In a “Deadline” interview, Boreing claimed the show cost “eight figures,” with “seven figures” spent on each of the seven episodes, said Sommer — which does not compare with the cheap, self-soothing schmear of Daily Wire’s 2024 documentary Am I Racist? costing just $3 million and then going on to “become the highest-grossing documentary of 2024.”

The problem for Pendragon is that Daily Wire’s audience prefers to buttress its beliefs with echo chamber documentaries, not wizards with arcane ties to Atlantis. It’s yet to be seen what kind of return all that money is going to bring, but Sommer notes that Boreing touched on his “apparently soured relationship” with Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro in the “Deadline” interview.

“Either way, Boreing seems more focused on the world of movies now,” said Sommer. “He told Deadline he wants to launch ‘a conservative alternative to A24.’ He said Hollywood treats conservative viewers ‘as though they’re anathema. It takes them for granted.’”

“… [T]he sky’s the limit for Boreing’s conservative-film ambitions,” said Sommer, “as long as he is willing to cut the check this time.”

Read the Bulwark report at this link.

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