The film "Reagan" opened on Friday across the country and by all reports, the audiences love it. While 86% of audiences on Google liked the movie, critics panned it. It got an 18% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and a 22% rating from Metacritic.
Receiving blistering reviews — its critics score is 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — Reagan fared better with audiences, who gave the biopic an A CinemaScore. Box office analysts knew the film would play older, but hoped the attention surrounding the 2024 presidential election would broaden the audience, with no such luck. Roughly 85 percent of ticket buyers are over the age of 35 — including an unheard of 66 percent over the age of 55, setting Reagan up for a promising run on premium VOD, a preferred platform for older consumers.
Nothing surprising here. Besides Donald Trump, there is no more hated figure on the right by the left than Ronald Reagan, despite the Gipper being dead for 20 years.
It's also not surprising that Facebook would look to suppress posts about the film if they were tied to "The Joe Rogan Show." Rogan had actor Dennis Quaid on his Spotify show to talk about the film
“Censorship is happening to us through Facebook,” Quaid told Rogan. “The content in [the posts] was ‘an attempt to sway an election.'”
Newsweek reports that the problem began months ago when Quaid appeared on Jordan Peterson's podcast. "Facebook prevented the film’s marketers from boosting a clip from that interview for brand awareness," reports the Media Research Center.
Rogan and Megyn Kelly slammed Facebook for their efforts to censor word of the film. This led to Facebook issuing an apology.
While there are no restrictions on this page that would prevent the admins from posting, we did identify a handful of ads from this account that were incorrectly rejected. This happened because our automated systems mistakenly determined that content about President Reagan required prior authorization in accordance with our policies for ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics. This was a mistake and the restriction on the ads has been lifted.
Just a big misunderstanding, right? "Automated systems" went haywire. We're so sorry, it will never happen again.
Except it did.
The matter appeared to be settled though “Reagan’s” team said they never heard directly from the company.
Then another “Reagan”-themed post couldn’t be boosted by the film’s marketers just weeks before the movie’s release.
And another.
“Reagan” PR officials shared screen caps with HiT showing the platform blocked them from boosting new videos tied to the film. The clips in question hailed from both Rogan and Kelly’s respective podcasts.
Why?
The clips allegedly went against the platform’s “Advertising Standards, Community Standards or Terms of Service.
“The irony in Facebook banning ‘Reagan’ ads is that this is a movie about a historic figure who, yes, was a politician, but whose bipartisanship and friendship with Democrats is an important part of the film,” Megyn Kelly told Hollywood in Toto.
“It’s a movie about America, and how we used to talk to each other and respect each other, irrespective of political differences. On cue, Facebook bans promotion of the film, apparently seeing it as socially divisive,” Kelly added.
The Democratic Speaker of the House in the 1980s was the rotund Irishman Tip O'Neill. He relates in his memoirs how he and the Republican President Reagan used to sit and have a drink. swapping stories about politics and their common Irish heritage. The next day, O'Neill would stand in the well of the House and bash Reagan without mercy.
O'Neill hated Reagan's policies. But he could like and respect the man. People on the left mostly understood that as did most on the right. Politics wasn't any less intense than it is today. But some barriers and guideposts channeled the passion into productive avenues.
The left hated that Reagan was so popular with ordinary Americans. They hated that Reagan brought down the Soviet empire by confronting them, not kowtowing to them. They hated that he was the most successful president since FDR and they hated that he cut taxes and spending and initiated the longest spurt of growth in American history.
Ronald Reagan will haunt the dreams of Democrats for the next generation. The irony is, that the more they trash his legacy, the better he looks to ordinary people.
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