Leadership Quote by David Hunt

There’s a neat sting in Hunt’s phrasing: “for so long” and “for themselves” frames Hollywood less as an industry chasing audiences than as a closed-loop culture congratulating its own tastes. Coming from a politician, it’s not film criticism first; it’s a populist diagnosis. The line invites listeners to picture a detached elite, funded by everyone’s ticket money and cultural attention, yet primarily interested in mirroring its own worldview.

The intent is to reassign blame for cultural discontent. If viewers feel ignored, preached at, or bored, Hunt offers a simple culprit: insularity. “Make movies for themselves” compresses a mess of forces - awards politics, talent-agency ecosystems, coastal class signaling, risk-averse studio strategies - into a moral narrative about arrogance. That moral narrative is the point. Politically, it converts aesthetic grievance into democratic grievance: your stories aren’t being told; the gatekeepers are talking to each other.

The subtext also flirts with a familiar power move: delegitimizing an influential cultural sector without having to argue about specific films. It’s a broadside that immunizes itself against counterexamples; any movie that doesn’t land becomes proof of the charge, any success can be waved off as accidental or rare. In the current media climate, where streaming has fractured audiences and “relatability” has become a cudgel, Hunt’s line works because it offers an easy translation of a complicated market shift into a gut-level story about who’s in the room - and who isn’t.