This Sunday millions will tune in to watch Hollywood’s premier awards ceremony, the Oscars. All eyes will be on the red carpet to see who is wearing what and viewers will be anxiously waiting to see if any drama unfolds–like a Will Smith slap or accidentally awarding the Best Picture Oscar to the wrong film. What won’t be mentioned is the fact that many of the movies vying for Oscar wins wouldn’t have made it to the big screen without help from the U.S. military.
From Goldfinger (1964) to Captain Marvel (2019), the Pentagon has assisted in the making of more than 2,500 war-themed movies and television series and continues to contribute to an average of seven feature film projects and over 90 smaller film and TV projects every year.
Roger Stahl, who heads University of Georgia’s Communications Studies Department and author of Militainment Inc. and the documentary “Theaters of War,” suspects that a third to a half of all blockbuster films substantially featuring the military have received military support. “The Oscars have honored a few security state-sponsored productions over the years,” he wrote in an email exchange with Responsible Statecraft.
As reported by Stahl, The Hurt Locker, which won Best Picture in 2010, had DoD help for half of its production before the relationship soured. Argo and its CIA “co-producers” won Best Picture in 2013, and the Navy’s Top Gun: Maverick boasted nine nominations in 2023.
Documents pertaining to the production of this year's films aren’t available yet, as they are often only accessible through time-intensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. But, according to Stahl, “if there was an Oscar category for most likely to do business with the security state, the nominees would be the new offerings in franchises that have done it before: Godzilla, Mission: Impossible, Planet of the Apes, and Captain America.”
The Costs of War’s new Consuming War research series, unveiled earlier this week, highlights the many ways in which “Americans are inundated with cultural projects promoting militarism.” The series’s first paper, “The Militarization of Movies and Television,” provides a timely review of the Pentagon’s influence over the movie and television industry. And it turns out that U.S. taxpayer money is going directly to Hollywood subsidies.
Tanner Mirrlees, the author of the report and Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University, illustrates how Americans are unwittingly helping finance military propaganda disguised as commercial entertainment. A typical war movie budget may range between $50 million and $150 million.
Meanwhile, a single F-35 fighter costs over $80 million. Thus, the cost of acquiring and operating jets, tanks and aircraft carriers would make such weapons inaccessible to movie makers without extensive DoD subsidization. Partnering with the Pentagon gives studios access to technologies and the personnel to operate them, military locations to film at, and U.S. officers who can double as taxpayer-funded extras.
This partnership comes at a price. In exchange for the use of military personnel and equipment, movie producers must abide by the Pentagon’s strict entertainment policy that grants the DoD final say over a movie’s script. These collaborations frequently require changes to the screenplay that amount to historical revisionism. Spy Culture, the “world's leading resource on government involvement in Hollywood,” has utilized FOIA requests to collect tens of thousands of annotated drafts of film scripts which provide a firsthand glimpse at the breadth of the Pentagon’s influence over the movies we know and love.
The script for Godzilla (2014), for example, was dramatically transformed from a movie meant to criticize the U.S. military’s use of nuclear weapons into one in which Godzilla, a monstrous allegory for U.S. atomic bombing, is strengthened by a nuclear missile and later assisted in battle by the U.S. military. The original script’s references to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also removed by the producers after the Pentagon threatened to withdraw its assistance from the film.
Godzilla is one of many movies fashioned by the militainment industry in order to help the Pentagon procure a whitewashed, idealized image of itself. Both Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper exalt the military and U.S. intelligence agencies while stereotyping and minimizing the humanity of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples harmed by American black ops. As Mirlees puts it, these movies “frame U.S. wars as necessary and glorious, downplaying or ignoring the human, social and environmental devastation war causes, particularly for civilians.”
The Pentagon also has a habit of withholding assistance from movies that examine the human cost of U.S. warfare or depict war crimes committed by American military personnel, such as Jarhead, Platoon, Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2008.
“One of my main concerns with DoD-backed Hollywood entertainment” explained Mirlees in an email to Responsible Statecraft, “is its role in sustaining an ideological environment where a purposeful questioning of defense spending—and the interests served beyond just “defense” or “security”—is politically fraught, often framed as unpatriotic or un-American.”
With a proposed budget of $850 billion and a seventh failed audit, the Pentagon is in desperate need of public scrutiny. Yet the silver screen continues to paint a romanticized picture of the military and its equipment. The DoD’s lackluster F-35 fighter jet, which has enjoyed its fair share of the lime light in the Transformers, Superman, and Godzilla franchises, for example, is projected to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 trillion.
When it comes to its embedded role in feature films, the Pentagon does its best to keep its relationship with Hollywood off-screen. “The problem is lack of transparency," said Stahl. “As researchers file more information requests, we have seen the military become more protective and tight-lipped.” Filmmakers too, often obscure the full extent of their collaboration with the Pentagon while actively pitching movie concepts with the Pentagon’s values in mind.
The FCC mandates that all public broadcasts must include a notice of all commercial sponsorships and product usage, which could be used as a framework for legislation that would require a public disclosure of cooperation between the Pentagon and film studios, thus providing the American public with the transparency it deserves. As it stands now, however, any acknowledgement of military involvement with a Hollywood film is buried deep in the credits, only available to viewers after they’ve consumed a movie whose script has been approved by the Pentagon.
While a deeper understanding of the Pentagon’s behind-the-scenes influence on the film industry is needed, Hollywood is just the beginning of the Pentagon's efforts to win the hearts and minds of U.S. taxpayers. From videogames and music to fashion and toys, Consuming War reports will continue to investigate the military’s influence on American cultural life.
So, as you're watching the Oscars this Sunday, just remember that you're not only watching the stars; you're watching the militainment industry hard at work.
