After Chris Pratt stunned Hollywood by encouraging young people to be positive, work hard, pray, defend the weak and know that God loves them at the MTV Movie Awards of all places, the Jurassic Park and Guardians of the Galaxy star surprised fans again by showing up in person at a charity showing of Jurassic World to benefit cancer-stricken children of police officers.

He also shook hands and posed for photos with the crowd.  Turns out his brother is a sheriff’s deputy who helped set up the event. 

In a related story, Chris Pratt is rapidly becoming my favorite celebrity. Think of Peter Fonda and Robert DiNiro and imagine the exact opposite.

Fonda’s Failure

Speaking of Peter “Why isn’t this lowlife in jail for making terroristic threats?” Fonda, his new movie made a total of $30,395 in its debut weekend on only five screens.  

Despite his unconscionable Twitter rants about President Trump’s son and my grandchildren (which he’s since deleted and apologized for – and I don’t care), Sony Pictures went ahead and released the film. The studio claimed that yanking it would be unfair to the many other people who worked on it and didn’t call for innocent children to be kidnapped, raped and murdered.    

I’m not going to mention the name of the film, since I don’t want to give it any publicity, and it’s obviously not necessary to gin up a boycott. (One Twitter user sarcastically noted that the studio probably could have made as much money by looking for dropped change under the theater seats.)

As much as I disagree with Sony’s decision, I admit studios do face a difficult situation, and one that arises all too often. They spend years and millions of dollars creating a movie, then spend millions more on publicity, only to send the star out to promote it, and he/she/xi immediately goes on a talk show or social media and spouts some incredibly offensive or insane political opinions that alienate at least half the potential audience.  

The only way to avoid this would be to lobotomize the actors (some of them act like they’ve already had that done). Or more practically, avoid hiring performers who are famous for shooting off their mouths about Trump or Republicans and hitting their employers in the bankbook.  

Hollywood, Admit You Have a Problem

The first step to doing that, though, would be for Hollywood to admit it has a problem.  Despite a mountain of evidence that leftist propaganda and hostility to at least half of America is killing box office returns and TV ratings, they just keep doubling down on stupid. 

Most recently, they’ve managed the mind-boggling feat of tanking the most bulletproof franchise in history, Star Wars, by putting it into the hands of a feminist producer who appears to be openly hostile to the very concept of boys’ adventure tales and to male fans. 

She’s simultaneously trashed everything fans loved about the series while filling it with “woke” messages about evil white men, female empowerment and “woke,” gender-fluid robots. (Robots should only have hydraulic fluid.)

The Wookie in the Room

The reason it’s called “escapist entertainment” is because audiences loved escaping to a galaxy far, far away that was nothing like our overly-politicized present; to bask for a couple of hours in a place where there is no Maxine Waters or Stephen Colbert, and the Storm Troopers don’t enforce PC speech codes.  (Although granted, Hillary Clinton does seem well on her way to morphing into Darth Vader.)

Thanks to the “woke” messaging, the unthinkable has occurred: the production of more Star Wars films has been put on hold while the studio tries to figure out what went wrong. 

Yet they blindly refuse to acknowledge the Wookie in the room: the injection of inappropriate “progressive” politics that is the #1 reason fans are complaining all over the Internet, and not just in Star Wars movies. 

Apparently, Hollywood’s Trump Derangement Syndrome and leftwing echo chamber have made them incapable of dealing with reality in any arena, even if it drives them into bankruptcy.  

They’ll also probably dismiss the dismal box office for the Peter Fonda movie by claiming that it was just a small, human drama that was never going to be a big moneymaker in the comic book blockbuster era.

Yet Christian Films Prosper 

Then how do they explain the massive success of small, human dramas aimed at the neglected Christian, conservative or just Middle American market (you know, those of us the Hollywood studios call Flyover Country Deplorables, but whom they used to call “our audience”)? I mean films such as I Can Only Imagine, God’s Not Dead, The Case for Christ, Miracle From Heaven and Soul Surfer. Those can’t possibly all have been big hits just because none of them had Peter Fonda.

Although I’m sure it helped.

This column originally appeared at MikeHuckabee.com, and is reprinted with kind permission.