Exclusive / ‘Founders Films’ aims to remake Hollywood with patriotism, Palantir and Ayn Rand

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.”

“The American Brand is broken. Hollywood is AWOL. Movies have become more ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining. Large segments of American and international viewers are underserved. Production costs have soared and sales are flagging,” the deck, which is labeled confidential, says. Founders aims to be a production studio that would also co-finance projects, distribute films, and engage in brand partnerships.

Podolsky did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Palantir also did not respond to requests for comment.

The project’s name echoes that of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and both Palantir and Garrett have close ties to the investor, a key figure on the new right. A spokesman for Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment on the project.

But in a post late last year on his Substack, Sankar outlined his view for a return to blockbusters of the 80s and 90s, like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. He said the entertainment needed to be unafraid of offending Chinese audiences, and use American cultural power to spread skeptical views of the Chinese government: “Breaking out of our cultural malaise will require the studios to wake up and choose America,” he wrote, invoking the renaissance in American film in the 1970s, when directors including Steven Spielberg “brought back heroes, villains, and romance” and “rekindled the flame of the American Cinematic Universe.”

While Founders’ deck largely avoids political language, the company’s proposed projects celebrate American military action, push for confrontation with China, and elevate heroes of the right from Rand to Elon Musk.

The slate includes 102 Minutes, a feature film about the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 (“courage is contagious,” the tagline reads). The company also hopes to create a three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, and a film about killing Qasem Soleimani.

Not to be confused with the 2000’s stoner comedy Pineapple Express, the deck pitches Operation: Pineapple Express, a movie about the “botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Then there’s The Greatest Game, a “multi-season, global spy thriller that lays bare China’s plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power by showing their operations and sometimes devastating impact from Kenya to the Atacama desert in northern Chile.”

The company brands itself as explicitly pro-American, but many of the projects also celebrate Israel. Founders’ proposed film slate also includes Roaring Lion, a movie about the recent attack against Iran, which depicts Israel as “striving for nuclear non-proliferation and exercising its right of self-defense against a crazed regime intent on destroying it.” The proposed projects also include When the Towers Fall, a film about Israel’s 2024 booby-trapped pager operation against Hezbollah.

While much of the content has a military bent, the company also said it hoped to produce unscripted documentaries about influential figures like Musk, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, who led the development of nuclear-powered submarines.

Founders Films, if it succeeds in its fundraising efforts, would immediately be a major player among conservative media companies like the Daily Wire, which have also gotten into the scripted and theatrical movie and TV business, and have sought to tap into right-leaning audiences while also challenging the cultural dominance of Hollywood.

“It’s great that new players are coming into the space, and I’m almost positive that we will work with them,” said Dallas Sonnier, a former manager for Hollywood talent including Greta Gerwig and whose production company produces for the Daily Wire. His output includes TV shows and films like Am I Racist?, a mockumentary that played in 1,500 theaters and grossed $12 million.