It’s easy to assume that Hollywood has a history of anti-war movies, but films criticising the Vietnam War didn’t appear until several years after the 15-year conflict. Although some consider the present dissenters five years too late, the fact remains that to have a wide release intervening in a live debate with a mass audience is new to American pop culture.

The start of the current line can be found before the war even began, at a Los Angeles celebrity teach-in in 2002 organised by documentary filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed, Iraq For Sale). Some 200 filmmakers prepared arguments against war and launched their own organisation, Artists United. Former Screen Actor’s Guild president Ed Asner described the movement that followed as “the most diverse and inspiring of my lifetime”.

A significant minority of Hollywood A-listers participated through protest, public speeches and media activism, reaching a peak when trying to oust George Bush at the 2004 elections. Then came the movies. First with documentaries, then art-house and analogous pictures like Good Night, And Good Luck, and finally intelligent A-list dramas, the movement slowly crept into the American Cineplex.

The peak of the trend came late last year during the annual post-summer scuttle for Oscar nominations. In the Valley of Elah earned Tommy Lee Jones a Best Actor nomination. Then came Rendition starring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, Brian De Palma’s Redacted, Robert Redford’s Lions For Lambs starring Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, and Grace Is Gone with John Cusack.

It would be foolish, however, to treat the current trend without a little caution. In The Valley Of Elah only deals with the politics of Iraq obliquely. Grace Is Gone forgoes the big political canvas for a personal story. Rendition deals with terrorism, but is sentimental with a traditional white American heroine and happy ending. The only film that critically attacks Iraq head on is Redacted. The result was catastrophic; and even though the other films broached the sticky subject cautiously they still paid a price at the box office.

Redacted received a five minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, and despite a huge wave of publicity De Palma’s film took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country. 94% of its profits came from abroad. The public’s appetite for self-criticism isn’t as wetted as De Palma had presumed.

The closer to the bone a movie is, it seems, the less people are willing to face it. The old adage that people look to Hollywood for escapism is truer than ever. The War On Terror-related movie to have grossed the most profits is Harold And Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, a crude frat-boy comedy with plenty of boobs and bongs. Hollywood seems to have got the message. This year’s latest anti-war offering, War Inc. starring John Cusack, was touted as a “political cartoon”, and is a dumbed-down satire on the war in Iraq. If you can’t beat them, join them.

Although War Inc. still performed poorly at the box office, 48% of the profit was made in the US, a far higher percentage than any of the others managed. An interesting tally of a film’s controversy is its domestic takings versus those made abroad. Even the most financially successful of the films, Lions For Lambs ($15 million profit – still only half its budget), relied on 76% of its takings from the foreign market.

Hollywood now makes many films through semi-independent companies such as United Artists, where celebrities decide which films to make. Corporations dictate distribution deals but are reluctant to turn down a potential profit maker. Provided there is an audience of paying cinemagoers for anti-war films, at least some will be released. But if the best the celebrities can offer is to recoup half the film’s budget, the movement may be over before it really began.

This month saw the first return salvo from Hollywood’s pro-war contingent. The backlash to the backlash. An American Carol, directed by Airplane! writer-director David Zucker takes aim at liberalism in the United States, seeking to reform a Michael Moore-inspired filmmaker who wants to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. It’s a painfully self-righteous spoof that appeals to the worst in slapstick gross-out humour. Although the film took more in its opening weekend than most of the anti-war movies, it’s still considered a huge flop. Rather than take it on the chin, the producers claimed last Tuesday that they had received reports of “ticket fraud”, and suggested that it could be the reason why the film’s weekend box-office figures were so low – anything but the film’s politics.

An interesting comparison has to be made against the opening weekend of Bill Maher’s film Religulous. Up against Zucker’s film – one of the most deliberately conservative movies in memory – was Maher’s, one of the most liberal. The film takes square aim at middle-America’s holiest of holies, religion itself. The per-screen average takings of Religulous was three times that of An American Carol. Three times as many people showed up in each theater to see it. It’s tempting to see this as a liberal victory in the culture war. Perhaps it’s not so much a win for the message, as the delivery. Maher made Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and his film is one of the funniest of the year.

Entertainment value is still the central factor to a film’s success. Audiences like their politics kept to TV and documentary, and won’t pay $11 to be preached to or challenged. Hollywood may be finding ways to sneak those politics into comedy, but it has to be funny. The key is in juggling relevance with entertainment. Released in the US this week, Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic W. is hyped as both. No stranger to controversy, Stone is adamant that America needs to understand the faults of the past eight years if it’s to move forward. Whether the Cineplex is the place to do it depends on how ready America is to laugh in the face of the man most responsible, and how funny that man’s story really is.