Hollywood spent the first half of the 2020s telling audiences what to think. The industry's most celebrated films of the decade, Anora, Emilia Perez, Conclave, Barbie, are ideological arguments first and entertainment second. The headlines, the awards, the festival circuit buzz all flowed toward the films that affirmed progressive orthodoxies. But here is what the headlines missed: the films audiences actually remembered, the ones they watched twice, the ones they showed their kids, were almost never the ones winning Palme d'Or at Cannes. They were the films that told a story worth telling without a lecture attached.
VirtueVigil has now reviewed over 760 films and shows. Across that database, spanning 2020 through 2026, a quiet counter-current is visible. While the industry's prestige apparatus rewarded ideological conformity, a separate set of films quietly built the decade's actual traditional canon. Some of them, like Sound of Freedom and Reagan, were openly dismissed by critics precisely because their values ran against the grain. Others, like Ne Zha 2 and The SpongeBob Movie, were so commercially dominant that nobody could ignore them. And a few, like The Death of Robin Hood from A24 of all places, proved that even the most progressive studio in Hollywood will fund a deeply Christian story when the craft is undeniable.
This list ranks the 20 most traditional films of the 2020s so far, determined by VirtueVigil's VVWS dual-metric scoring system. The Traditional Score measures traditional values present, the Woke Score measures progressive ideological content, and the Margin is the gap between them. A positive margin means the film's traditional content outweighs its progressive content. Every entry links to the full VirtueVigil review with complete scoring methodology, trope breakdowns, and parental guidance. These are not the films the industry celebrated. They are the films the audience kept. Ranked from most traditional to least.
#1 (Most Traditional): Reagan (2024)
Reagan is not a biopic. It is a monument. Sean McNamara's film, 14 years in the making, does not attempt to understand Ronald Reagan. It does not wrestle with his contradictions, interrogate his failures, or explore the human complexity behind the myth. It worships him. Every frame, every musical cue, every narrative choice is designed to reinforce a single thesis: Ronald Reagan was a great man, chosen by God, who saved the world from communism. The +42 margin is the largest traditional margin in our database for a live-action film. A woke score of 2.4 means there is almost no progressive content to speak of. Whatever you think of Reagan the man, the film is what a traditional values picture looks like when it refuses to apologize.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Reagan
#2: The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (2025)
The fourth SpongeBob theatrical outing arrives with the kind of refreshing simplicity that has become almost exotic in modern animated filmmaking: it tells a straightforward story about friendship and courage, delivers its moral without a lecture, and does not try to be anything other than a SpongeBob movie. SpongeBob wants to be a "big guy." Mr. Krabs, his boss and surrogate father figure, tells him being big is not about height, it is about bravery, adventure, and grit. With a traditional score of 43.1 and a woke score of 1.3, this is one of the highest-margin films in our entire database. In an era where animated family films arrive freighted with ideology, a film this guileless feels almost radical.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
#3: Ne Zha 2 (2025)
Ne Zha 2 is one of the most extraordinary animated films made anywhere in the world in the past decade. Full stop. Yang Yu has created something that Western animation studios spent the last five years failing to produce: a film about destiny, sacrifice, and love between a father and son that hits like a freight train. A woke score of zero is not a rounding error. The film contains no progressive ideological content whatsoever. Its traditional score of 38.6 comes entirely from its treatment of filial duty, self-sacrifice, and the idea that some things are worth dying for. Chinese animation has now produced a more traditionally grounded blockbuster than anything Hollywood has made this decade.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Ne Zha 2
#4: David (2025)
Angel Studios proved that faith-based cinema can compete with the major studios, and they did it with a 3,000-year-old story about a shepherd kid with a sling. David is an animated biblical musical that tells the first half of King David's story, from his anointing through his defeat of Goliath and his eventual rise as Israel's rightful king. The film grossed $84 million against a $60.9 million budget. A woke score of zero confirms what you would expect: there is no progressive content here. The traditional score of 36.0 reflects a film that treats its source material with genuine reverence. There is no modernization, no ironic distance, and no attempt to retrofit ancient Israel with contemporary social politics. Parents looking for biblical content they can trust will find it here.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of David
#5: F1 (2025)
F1 is the purest strain of old-school Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking released in 2025. It is a comeback story about a broken man who finds redemption through grit, self-sacrifice, and the refusal to quit. No lectures. No deconstruction of masculinity. No identity politics. Just Brad Pitt driving very, very fast. Joseph Kosinski, the director who turned Top Gun: Maverick into the biggest crowd-pleaser of 2022, has done it again. The woke score of 1.1 reflects the near-total absence of progressive messaging. The traditional score of 32.4 comes from a story about a veteran driver who mentors a younger teammate, puts the mission ahead of his ego, and wins not by being the best but by being the one who refuses to stay down.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of F1
#6: Exit 8 (2026)
A man is on a subway platform. Another man berates a mother because her baby is crying. The Lost Man watches, says nothing, does nothing. Minutes later his phone rings. His girlfriend is pregnant. She asks what they should do. He cannot answer. Then he collapses, and when he comes to, he is in a looping subway corridor with a single rule: move forward only when no anomaly is present. Exit 8 is a Japanese psychological horror film based on a viral video game, and it is one of the most quietly profound traditional films of the decade. The entire film is about a man learning to stop being passive, to take responsibility, to choose. The woke score of 0.7 confirms the near-total absence of progressive ideology. The traditional score of 31.6 comes from a story where the answer to paralysis is commitment.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Exit 8
#7: Am I Racist? (2024)
Matt Walsh does his best Borat impression, and it works more often than it does not. The premise is simple. Walsh goes undercover as a bumbling white man named Steven who desperately wants to confront his own racism. He gets a DEI certification online, prints himself a laminated card, and starts paying real money for access to the biggest names in the anti-racism industry. The result is a satirical documentary that exposes the grift at the center of the professional DEI complex. The traditional score of 33.8 comes from the film's core argument: that judging people by the color of their skin is wrong, that the anti-racism industry profits from division, and that the cure for racism is treating people as individuals rather than representatives of demographic categories. None of which should be controversial. All of which, in 2024, was.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Am I Racist?
#8: The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
A24 made a medieval Christian film about a mass murderer who finds redemption through confession, forgiveness, and sacrificial death. Let that sentence land. The same studio that distributed Hereditary and Everything Everywhere All at Once produced a film that takes sin seriously, treats forgiveness as the hardest thing a person can do, and ends with Hugh Jackman's Robin Hood choosing to die so a child can have a future. The woke score of 5.9 reflects some structural critiques of feudal power, but the traditional score of 34.5 overwhelms it with a story about a man who has done unforgivable things, confesses them, and earns his end through sacrifice rather than absolution. In an industry that prefers its heroes morally spotless, a film about genuine guilt and genuine redemption is a radical act.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Death of Robin Hood
#9: Beast (2026)
Beast is the kind of film that used to be a Hollywood staple and is now almost extinct: a gritty, no-apologies MMA story about a man who gave up fighting to live a quiet life, only to be dragged back into the cage when the people he loves are threatened. Daniel MacPherson stars as Patton James, an MMA legend who walked away from the sport and became a commercial fisherman. He did not run from his past out of weakness. He made a choice. Then the choice is made for him. When his brother's life is on the line, Patton returns to a world he left behind. The woke score of 1.5 reflects a film utterly uninterested in ideology. The traditional score of 30.0 comes from a story about a man who protects his family through discipline, courage, and controlled violence, used only when necessary and never glamorized.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Beast
#10: Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot (2024)
The story of Possum Trot, Texas, is one of the most extraordinary stories in American religious life in the last thirty years. A small church in a town most people could not find on a map. Over twenty years, 22 families in that church adopted 77 children from the state foster system, most of them children with trauma histories so severe that the professional system had given up on placing them. Sound of Hope tells this story through Donna Martin, the woman who heard a call and answered by building an entire community around the idea that every child deserves a family. The woke score of 2.0 is negligible. The traditional score of 29.8 comes from a film about faith in action, about families doing the hardest work there is, about the proposition that love is not a feeling but a commitment that costs everything.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot
#11: Happy Gilmore 2 (2025)
Twenty-nine years is a long time between sequels. Most of those films fail because the audience has grown up and the comedy has not. Happy Gilmore 2 does something most follow-ups cannot manage: it finds a reason to revisit the character that is emotionally honest rather than merely nostalgic. Happy Gilmore is not who he was. He is a widower, an alcoholic, a man living in a supermarket job while his sons quietly subsidize his survival. Virginia is gone. The film treats that loss with genuine weight. The comedy is still the comedy, but under it there is a story about a man who let grief hollow him out, and what it takes to fill that hole back in. The woke score of 3.5 comes from some light modernization of character dynamics. The traditional score of 31.2 comes from a film where a man chooses to stop being a ghost and start being a father.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Happy Gilmore 2
#12: A Great Awakening (2026)
The Whitefield-Franklin friendship is one of history's most interesting odd couples, and it deserves to be seen. George Whitefield was the greatest preacher of the First Great Awakening, a man whose voice could reach 30,000 people in an open field. Benjamin Franklin was a deist, a skeptic, a man of science who did not share Whitefield's faith but admired him enough to publish his sermons and become his friend and printer. A Great Awakening tells their story with care, craft, and a complete absence of ideological interference. The woke score of 0.3 is as close to zero as anything outside pure faith cinema gets. Take your family. Take your small group. Take the skeptic in your life who thinks faith stories are all saccharine nonsense.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of A Great Awakening
#13: How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Dean DeBlois is a rarity in Hollywood. He directed all three animated How to Train Your Dragon films and insisted on full creative control for the live-action remake. That condition shows in the finished product. Mason Thames plays Hiccup, the scrawny inventive son of Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler, returning from the animated films). The film preserves everything that made the original trilogy work: a boy and his father learning to see each other, a community overcoming fear, and the bond between Hiccup and Toothless that never needed ideological translation to land. The woke score of 5.6 reflects some light eco-conscious messaging in the dragon preservation subplot, but the traditional score of 33.2 comes from a story whose core values, the father-son bond, the courage to be different, the refusal to let fear dictate action, are timeless precisely because nobody tried to make them timely.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of How to Train Your Dragon
#14: Mercy (2026)
Mercy is a strange entry on this list because it has the highest traditional score of any film here, 44.0, but also a woke score of 15.8 that reflects its heavy-handed AI ethics messaging. The premise is killer: an LAPD detective wakes up strapped to an execution chair, put on trial by an AI judge for murdering his wife, given 90 minutes to prove he did not do it. Strong hook. Ticking clock. Man against machine. The film's traditional content comes from its treatment of justice as something that requires a human soul, not just algorithmic calculation. A computer can determine facts. Only a person can weigh a soul. That argument, threaded through the spectacle, is why the traditional score is so high. The woke score comes from the AI-as-villain messaging that occasionally overwhelms the story. A fascinating case study in how a film can carry ideological weight on one axis and still land firmly traditional on the other.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mercy
#15: Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026)
Hollywood has been making apology films for a decade. Every American action movie now comes loaded with a second-act speech about institutional corruption, military-industrial complex guilt, or the hero's own problematic violence. Bollywood, specifically Aditya Dhar, has decided not to bother. Dhurandhar: The Revenge runs 229 minutes, the eighth longest Indian film ever made, and uses every single one of those minutes to assert one thesis: India has enemies, those enemies are real, and one man will stop them. The woke score is zero. There is no moral ambiguity, no hand-wringing about the ethics of national defense, no attempt to understand the terrorist's point of view. This is a film about a man who loves his country and kills its enemies. What it lacks in nuance it makes up for in ideological clarity.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Dhurandhar: The Revenge
#16: War Machine (2026)
War Machine is a glorious throwback to the testosterone-fueled sci-fi action films of the 1980s and 1990s, and it does not apologize for it. Patrick Hughes has made a film that could sit comfortably on a shelf between Predator and Aliens: a squad of elite soldiers, an unstoppable alien threat, a hostile wilderness, and a hero who wins through grit, ingenuity, and sheer refusal to die. In 2026, when most action films feel obligated to deconstruct their heroes or subvert masculine tropes, War Machine simply assembles a team of soldiers and lets them be soldiers. The woke score of 1.7 reflects the near-total absence of messaging. The traditional score of 28.2 comes from a film that treats courage, competence, and brotherhood as self-evident goods rather than things that need to be justified or apologized for.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of War Machine
#17: Solo Leveling: ReAwakening (2024)
Solo Leveling: ReAwakening is two things stitched together: a rushed 80-minute recap of Season 1 and a spectacular 40-minute preview of Season 2. The first part is mediocre. The second part is genuinely thrilling. For conservative parents wondering whether to let their teenager see the anime film tearing up the box office, here is what you need to know. The story follows Sung Jinwoo, the world's weakest hunter, who is given a second chance through a mysterious system that lets him level up beyond all known limits. This is not a story about deconstructing power. It is a story about earning it. The protagonist does not complain about his place in the hierarchy. He works, fights, sacrifices, and rises. The woke score of 1.3 comes from a few minor character dynamics. The traditional score of 28.4 comes from one of the most meritocratic stories in modern anime.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Solo Leveling: ReAwakening
#18: Sound of Freedom (2023)
Here is what you need to know about Sound of Freedom before anything else: studios sat on this film for five years. Fox, which became Disney after the acquisition, shelved it. Not because it was bad. Test screenings were strong. Not because there was no audience for it. Because nobody in the corporate entertainment complex wanted to make a $14.5 million movie about a DHS agent rescuing trafficked children into a hit. Angel Studios released it on July 4, 2023. It made $14.2 million opening weekend, out-earning Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on its second weekend. The woke score of 4.2 reflects virtually nothing. The traditional score of 30.8 comes from a film about a man who risks everything to save children, driven by faith and a belief that evil must be confronted, not managed.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Sound of Freedom
#19: Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (2026)
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man delivers exactly what its six seasons of television promised: a masculine, violent, morally complex crime drama about a deeply flawed man who comes out of hiding to save his son, fight fascists, and protect his family during Britain's darkest hour. The year is 1940. The Luftwaffe is bombing Birmingham. Tommy Shelby has faked his own death and retreated into obscurity. But when his son gets pulled into the orbit of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, Tommy returns. The woke score of 4.2 comes from the anti-fascist framing, but that framing is not progressive: it is Churchillian. The traditional score of 30.6 comes from a story about a patriarch who will burn the world down to protect his blood, and a film that understands the difference between a good man and a man who does what must be done.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
#20: I Swear (2026)
I Swear is one of the most profoundly human and profoundly traditional films in recent cinema. It celebrates family love, personal courage, and the dignity of every human being. It rejects shame, cruelty, and the reduction of persons to their conditions. It shows that the measure of a person is not their appearance or their difference, but their heart. Robert Aramayo plays John Davidson, a man with Tourette syndrome who fought for the right to live a normal life, to work, to love, to be seen as a person rather than a diagnosis. A woke score of 0.3 reflects a film that has absolutely no interest in progressive ideology. The traditional score of 24.8 comes from a story about the irreducible dignity of the individual, treated not as a political argument but as a self-evident truth. It closes this list for a reason: because the most traditional value of all is the belief that every life has meaning, and films that actually believe that are rarer than they should be.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of I Swear
These 20 films span animation, action, drama, faith, comedy, and horror. They come from America, China, Japan, India, and Britain. Some were blockbusters. Some were barely released. What unites them is a shared refusal: each one declines to use its runtime to lecture the audience. These are films that trust their stories to carry the weight, and that trust, it turns out, is what audiences have been hungry for all along.
VirtueVigil will continue scoring every major release through 2026 and beyond. The traditional counter-current is not a fluke. It is a market signal. Hollywood ignores it at its own risk.
All scores reflect the VirtueVigil Woke Scoring System (VVWS). Every film on this list has a full review with detailed trope breakdowns, content warnings, and parental guidance on virtuevigil.com.