2021 was the year Hollywood tried to restart and mostly stumbled. Theaters were reopening but not reliably full. Day-and-date streaming premieres had become the norm. Warner Bros. dropped its entire slate on HBO Max, angering directors and exhibitors alike. And in the middle of all this upheaval, the studios released 16 films that we scored at VirtueVigil, each one a snapshot of what the industry thought audiences wanted to see in a year where nobody knew what audiences would show up for.
The spread is revealing. Only two films landed in the negative woke zone, and neither was particularly severe. Eternals, at -14 WOKE, was the most progressive film of the year and also Marvel's first certified critical and commercial flop. Red Notice, Netflix's most-watched original film at the time, landed at a modest -6. The rest of the field tilted traditional, sometimes dramatically. Spider-Man: No Way Home at +19 TRAD and American Underdog at +24 TRAD outperformed every woke-leaning title at the box office by margins that made the lesson hard to miss, even for studio executives who were professionally committed to not learning it.
The VirtueVigil Woke Score (VVWS) measures progressive ideological content: identity politics, institutional distrust, progressive sexual framing, and systemic oppression narratives. The Traditional Score measures traditional values: courage, family, faith, sacrifice, moral clarity, and individual agency. The margin between them is what matters. A negative margin means the film pushes progressive ideology. A positive margin means it affirms traditional values. The size of the gap tells you how hard it pushes.
Here is every 2021 film in the VirtueVigil database, ranked from most woke to most traditional. Every entry links to the full review with content warnings for parents and complete category breakdowns.
BALANCED WOKE (Margin -5.0 to -14.9)
#1: Eternals
Woke Score: 19.7 • Traditional Score: 6.0 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -14 WOKE
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi / Superhero | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Chloe Zhao
Eternals is the most ambitious and the most divisive film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is also the first MCU film to fail with both critics and general audiences, earning a 47% on Rotten Tomatoes. What went wrong? Director Chloe Zhao, fresh off her Best Director Oscar for Nomadland, brought arthouse sensibilities to the blockbuster format and delivered a film whose diversity goals were front and center: a deaf speedster, a gay Eternal with a husband and child, a Bollywood star, and an Asian-American lead. None of these choices are the problem. The problem is that the film argues the Eternals should disobey their cosmic creators (the Celestials) to save humanity from being harvested to birth a new Celestial. The moral framework is anti-authoritarian individualism dressed in superhero costumes, and the 6.0 traditional score reflects a film that cannot find its footing between spectacle and sermon. Audiences noticed. Marvel noticed too. They have not made another film like it.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Eternals
#2: Red Notice
Woke Score: 8.5 • Traditional Score: 2.8 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -6 WOKE
Genre: Action / Comedy / Heist | Platform: Netflix | Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Red Notice is comfortable with being exactly what it is: a glossy, star-driven heist comedy with three A-listers in expensive locations doing expensive things. On those terms, it mostly works. The problem is the ideology underneath. Dwayne Johnson plays an FBI profiler, Ryan Reynolds an art thief, and Gal Gadot a competing criminal mastermind, and the plot involves a globe-trotting hunt for Cleopatra's bejeweled eggs. But the film's moral compass is broken: every character double-crosses every other character, loyalty is for suckers, and the ending reveals the two male leads are both working for Gadot's character, whose only motivation is greed and whose victory the film frames as a punchline. The 2.8 traditional score is one of the lowest in our database, reflecting how little the film has to say about anything that matters. It is not aggressively woke. It is just morally vacant, which in its own way is worse. At $200 million, it was Netflix's most expensive film at the time. It is also one of the emptiest.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Red Notice
#3: The Matrix Resurrections
Woke Score: 15.1 • Traditional Score: 8.8 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -6 WOKE
Genre: Sci-Fi Action | Platform: Theatrical / HBO Max
The Matrix Resurrections is a fascinating failure. By which I mean: it fails as a blockbuster sequel, it fails as an action film, it partially fails as a story, and yet it succeeds as a piece of cinema that forces genuine engagement. Neo and Trinity are back in a new version of the Matrix, and the film is at least half an essay about why Warner Bros. forced Lana Wachowski to make a fourth Matrix film against her will. The meta-commentary is clever and bitter and occasionally funny, but the ideological content is harder to ignore. The Matrix's red pill became a right-wing symbol, and Wachowski's response is to reclaim it for progressive gender theory, with Neo and Trinity's love literally powering a new revolution against the machines. The 15.1 woke score reflects a film-length argument about identity, autonomy, and the rejection of binaries. The 8.8 traditional score exists because the love story at the center is genuinely romantic and the film believes in something, even if what it believes in is that its own franchise was stolen. A box office bomb that Warner Bros. will not be repeating.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of The Matrix Resurrections
#4: Black Widow
Woke Score: 16.9 • Traditional Score: 12.1 • Verdict: BALANCED WOKE • Margin: -5 WOKE
Genre: Action / Adventure / Thriller | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+
Black Widow arrives as Natasha Romanoff's belated solo film and the first entry in MCU Phase Four. Set between Civil War and Infinity War, it sends Natasha back to confront the Red Room program that turned her and countless other girls into weaponized assassins. What works: Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova is genuinely great, funny and emotionally raw, and her sisterly dynamic with Natasha is the best thing in the movie. What does not work: the ideological machinery underneath. The Red Room's villain (Ray Winstone's Dreykov) is a cartoonish patriarch whose control over women is so absolute he can smell them. The entire program is run by men who chemically sterilize the girls they train to be killers. The film's central argument is that female autonomy is the only moral good and male institutional control is the only evil. The 16.9 woke score reflects a superhero film that is actually a gender-studies paper with explosions. The 12.1 traditional score reflects the genuine warmth of the found-family dynamic between Natasha, Yelena, Alexei, and Melina. It is a film about sisters who choose to save each other, and that is enough to keep it from tipping fully into sermon territory. But it tips far enough.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Black Widow
BALANCED (Margin -4.9 to +4.9)
#5: Cruella
Woke Score: 14.2 • Traditional Score: 12.3 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: -2 WOKE
Genre: Crime / Comedy-Drama | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+
Disney's Cruella is what happens when a studio takes one of its most iconic villains and runs her through the Joker-meets-The-Devil-Wears-Prada sympathy machine. Emma Stone plays Estella, a talented young designer with a rebellious streak who transforms into the punk-glam antihero Cruella after discovering that the Baroness (Emma Thompson) murdered her mother. The film is a revenge story dressed in designer fashion and scored to a needle-drop playlist that never stops. The ideological tension is interesting. Cruella is a female antihero who rejects polite society's rules and builds her own identity on her own terms, which is the progressive playbook. But the film is also about class warfare, with Estella clawing her way into the aristocracy not to tear it down but to claim what she believes is rightfully hers. The 14.2 woke score reflects the feminist-rebellion framing. The 12.3 traditional score reflects a story that is ultimately about inheritance, legacy, and the discovery that your real family is not the one you were born into but the one you build. The two impulses cancel each other out, and the result is a film that is more fun to look at than to think about.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Cruella
#6: No Time to Die
Woke Score: 12.0 • Traditional Score: 12.3 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: 0 (EVEN)
Genre: Action / Spy Thriller | Platform: Theaters
No Time to Die is a film at war with itself, and the miracle is that it almost wins. Daniel Craig's final Bond film wants to be two things simultaneously: the definitive farewell to the most psychologically realistic Bond in the franchise's history, and a modern reboot that hands the torch to a new generation with better diversity numbers. It nearly achieves the first goal. It stumbles on the second. Lashana Lynch's Nomi, the new 007 who inherited Bond's number while he was retired, is introduced with visible chip-on-shoulder energy, and the film bends over backward to prove she is just as competent as Bond while also allowing him to reclaim the number by the end. The woke score reflects a screenplay that cannot decide whether it wants to honor or replace its protagonist, resulting in a tone that feels like the writers' room had an argument nobody won. The traditional score reflects genuine elements: Bond's love for Madeleine, his sacrifice in the climax, the operatic tragic ending that gives Craig the sendoff he deserved. At an even 12-12 margin, No Time to Die is the most perfectly balanced film of 2021 and the best illustration of what happens when a franchise tries to serve two masters at once.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of No Time to Die
#7: Space Jam: A New Legacy
Woke Score: 5.2 • Traditional Score: 8.9 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +4 TRAD
Genre: Live Action / Animated Sports Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / HBO Max
Space Jam: A New Legacy is a mess. A watchable, occasionally charming, utterly cynical mess. It is the clearest example of a studio film that exists to serve an IP portfolio rather than tell a story, and it did not even bother to hide that fact. LeBron James plays himself as a basketball prodigy father who pushes his son Dom toward the NBA when Dom wants to design video games. The conflict is traditional: a father learning to respect his son's different gifts. The execution is a Warner Bros. commercial. The 5.2 woke score is low because the film barely has ideology at all beyond its corporate self-promotion. What woke content exists is mostly in the margins: a few throwaway gags, the casting of Zendaya as Lola Bunny with a "she's not just a sex object anymore" joke. The 8.9 traditional score exists because the father-son reconciliation arc works in spite of everything around it. This is not a good movie. But at a modest +4 TRAD, it is at least not a harmful one, which in 2021 counts for something.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Space Jam: A New Legacy
#8: Mortal Kombat
Woke Score: 4.6 • Traditional Score: 8.2 • Verdict: BALANCED • Margin: +4 TRAD
Genre: Martial Arts Action Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical / HBO Max
Mortal Kombat 2021 delivers exactly what the franchise's fanbase wanted and exactly what its critics expected: hyper-violent martial arts action, faithful adaptations of the game's iconic moves and fatalities, and a story shallow enough not to get in the way of the fighting. The film opens brilliantly with a 17th-century sequence showing Hanzo Hasashi's family murdered by Bi-Han, establishing a revenge motivation that carries through the entire runtime. The traditional elements are baked into the premise: an ancient tournament where Earthrealm's champions fight to prevent Outworld's invasion, a chosen-one narrative, the sacred duty of protecting the innocent. The 4.6 woke score is low because the film has no interest in ideology. The one notable progressive element is the introduction of Cole Young, an original character created as the audience surrogate, who some critics noted was added to diversify the cast at the expense of the established game protagonist Liu Kang. But the film is too busy staging decapitations to lecture anyone. At +4 TRAD, Mortal Kombat is exactly what it claims to be. Parents should know that what it claims to be is extremely violent.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Mortal Kombat
BALANCED TRADITIONAL (Margin +5.0 to +14.9)
#9: Free Guy
Woke Score: 4.4 • Traditional Score: 12.4 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +8 TRAD
Genre: Action Comedy Sci-Fi | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+
Free Guy arrived in August 2021 during a summer of pandemic-delayed blockbusters, and it did something almost no one expected: it worked. Not just as a technical exercise in video-game filmmaking or as a Ryan Reynolds charm offensive, but as a genuinely moving story about what it means to choose to be good when nothing is forcing you to. Guy is an NPC in a violent open-world game who becomes self-aware and decides to level up not by committing crimes like every player but by doing good deeds, helping people, and being kind. The premise could have been a disaster. Reynolds and director Shawn Levy make it sing. The 4.4 woke score is negligible. The 12.4 traditional score reflects a film whose central argument is that goodness is a choice, that individual agency matters, and that the right thing to do with power is to protect the vulnerable, not exploit them. It is not a conservative film in any political sense, but its moral framework is traditionally American in the best way: optimistic, individualist, and convinced that one person doing the right thing can change everything.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Free Guy
#10: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Woke Score: 5.5 • Traditional Score: 14.2 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +9 TRAD
Genre: Action / Adventure / Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical
Shang-Chi is the most pleasant surprise in the MCU's representation era. Where many expected Marvel's first Asian-led film to be a diversity lecture, what we got is a deeply traditional family drama with spectacular fight choreography that draws from Chinese culture with genuine reverence. Shang-Chi fled his father Wenwu's criminal empire at 14 after being sent on his first assassination. He is hiding in San Francisco as a valet when the Ten Rings organization pulls him back into the family conflict he has spent a decade avoiding. Wenwu, played with wounded dignity by Tony Leung, is not a cartoon villain but a grieving husband who believes his dead wife is calling to him from beyond a mystical gate. The film's central conflict is between a son who must confront his father to save his sister and the world, a father consumed by grief, and a sister who has built her own underground empire in Macau to survive. The 14.2 traditional score reflects a story about filial duty, honor, legacy, and the courage to stand against family when family is wrong. The 5.5 woke score reflects minor elements: Awkwafina's Katy is the wisecracking sidekick who occasionally delivers empowerment one-liners, and the film's climactic battle allies Shang-Chi with his mother's mystical village against his father's army. These are small notes in a symphony that is overwhelmingly traditional. Parents looking for an MCU entry they can enjoy with their kids without a side of lecture will find it here.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Shang-Chi
#11: Encanto
Woke Score: 8.7 • Traditional Score: 18.3 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +10 TRAD
Genre: Animation / Musical / Fantasy | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+
Encanto is that rare modern Disney film that actually earns its emotional payoff. Set in a magical Colombian valley, it tells the story of Mirabel Madrigal, the one family member without a supernatural gift, who must figure out why the family's magic is fading. The answer turns out to be profoundly traditional: the family is cracking under the weight of a matriarch's unprocessed trauma and impossible standards of perfection. Mirabel is not the chosen one because she is special. She is the chosen one because she is ordinary and loves her family enough to tell them the truth. The 18.3 traditional score is the highest for an animated film in our 2021 database, reflecting themes of family loyalty, intergenerational healing, forgiveness, and the recognition that a family's strength comes from its members being honest with each other, not from performing for the outside world. The 8.7 woke score reflects the film's multicultural framing and the fact that the family's collapse is blamed on Abuela's impossible standards rather than on any external threat. Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs are infectious. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" became a legitimate cultural phenomenon. And underneath all of it is a film about a girl who saves her family by loving them enough to demand they be better. That is not woke. That is timeless.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Encanto
#12: Dune: Part One
Woke Score: 7.1 • Traditional Score: 20.0 • Verdict: BALANCED TRADITIONAL • Margin: +13 TRAD
Genre: Sci-Fi Epic | Platform: Theaters / HBO Max
Dune: Part One is the rare epic blockbuster that takes itself seriously without becoming self-important. Denis Villeneuve spent years fighting to get this film made his way, and the result earns every frame of its 155-minute runtime. Timothee Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, the son of Duke Leto, whose family is assigned to govern the desert planet Arrakis and who discovers he may be the fulfillment of a prophecy millennia in the making. The 20.0 traditional score reflects a story built on aristocratic duty, the sacred bond between father and son, the honor of House Atreides, and the weight of destiny. Paul is not a rebel tearing down institutions. He is a son trying to live up to his father's example. Lady Jessica's fierce maternal protection of Paul, Duncan Idaho's warrior loyalty, and Gurney Halleck's mentorship all reinforce traditional bonds. The 7.1 woke score is mostly attributable to the Fremen's depiction as an oppressed indigenous people resisting colonial exploitation, which resonates with progressive framings of resource extraction and cultural imperialism even though Herbert's novel was more interested in the dangers of charismatic leaders and messianic movements. Villeneuve's adaptation is faithful enough to the source material that the traditional architecture holds. What woke content exists is ambient, not structural. Dune is a masterpiece of craft that happens to affirm values conservatives will recognize.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Dune: Part One
TRADITIONAL LEAN and TRADITIONAL (Margin +15.0 and Above)
#13: Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Woke Score: 2.4 • Traditional Score: 17.3 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: +15 TRAD
Genre: Supernatural Adventure Comedy | Platform: Theatrical / Peacock
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is the most traditionally conservative blockbuster of 2021, and I mean that as a sincere compliment. It is a film about family legacy, the courage of children to honor their ancestors, and the importance of standing against genuine evil even when the world has stopped believing it exists. It made critics uncomfortable for exactly those reasons. Audiences loved it. The critics called it a nostalgia exercise. What they missed is that the nostalgia is the point. Jason Reitman, son of original Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, made a film about inheriting your grandfather's calling and discovering that the things he believed in were real and worth fighting for. The 2.4 woke score is negligible. The 17.3 traditional score reflects a film in which a single mother moves her two kids to a decaying farmhouse in rural Oklahoma, the kids discover their grandfather was Egon Spengler, and they must complete his unfinished work of stopping Gozer's return. The final scene, in which the ghost of Egon appears to help his granddaughter finish the fight, is one of the most unabashedly emotional moments in any franchise film. If you find that manipulative, this movie is not for you. If you find it moving, you are the audience for whom it was made.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Ghostbusters: Afterlife
#14: Zack Snyder's Justice League
Woke Score: 5.8 • Traditional Score: 23.5 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: +18 TRAD
Genre: Action / Adventure / Superhero | Platform: HBO Max | Director: Zack Snyder
Four hours. That is what Zack Snyder needed to tell this story properly, and for once in the history of the superhero blockbuster, a studio let a director find out if he was right. He was right. Zack Snyder's Justice League is the most complete argument for what the DCEU could have been, assembled from Snyder's original footage after his departure from the theatrical cut following his daughter's death. The 23.5 traditional score is one of the highest among all superhero films we have reviewed. Snyder's framework is operatic and mythic: gods among men, sacrifice as the highest calling, fathers and sons, the resurrection of Superman as a literally Christ-like figure. The 5.8 woke score reflects minor elements, mostly in the expanded roles for Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman and Ray Fisher's Cyborg, whose expanded backstory carries themes of bodily autonomy and paternal betrayal. But these are grace notes in a symphony built on Snyder's profoundly traditional vision of heroism as martyrdom, of unity as the only path to victory, and of hope as something that must be earned through suffering. The film was made possible by a fan movement that refused to accept the theatrical cut, which is itself an argument for the power of audiences to demand better from the institutions that serve them. Whether you love Snyder's aesthetic or find it exhausting, the values his films affirm are unmistakable.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Zack Snyder's Justice League
#15: Spider-Man: No Way Home
Woke Score: 3.5 • Traditional Score: 22.1 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL LEAN • Margin: +19 TRAD
Genre: Superhero / Action / Science Fiction | Platform: Theatrical / Disney+ / Netflix | Director: Jon Watts
Spider-Man: No Way Home is not just the best Spider-Man film ever made. It is one of the most emotionally devastating blockbusters of the decade, and it earned every tear. Jon Watts and writers McKenna and Sommers faced an impossible task: take a film already crammed with five returning villains from two legacy franchises, add two beloved actors making their first MCU appearances, satisfy the most demanding fanbase in cinema, and make it all mean something. They did it. The 22.1 traditional score reflects a film whose entire moral architecture is built on Peter Parker's defining conviction: that everyone deserves a second chance, that saving the villains is more important than defeating them, and that the right thing to do is the right thing to do even when it costs everything. Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man saving MJ from the fall that killed his own Gwen Stacy is one of the most cathartic moments in any superhero film, and it works because the film has spent two hours earning it. The 3.5 woke score is negligible. The film has exactly zero interest in politics, identity, or institutional critique. It is about a boy who makes a selfish wish, breaks the universe, and then sacrifices everything he has ever wanted to fix it. Including his own existence in the memories of everyone he loves. That is not progressive. That is heroic.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of Spider-Man: No Way Home
#16: American Underdog
Woke Score: 2.0 • Traditional Score: 26.0 • Verdict: TRADITIONAL • Margin: +24 TRAD
Genre: Biography / Drama / Sports | Platform: Theatrical | Director: Jon Erwin, Andrew Erwin
There is a version of Kurt Warner's story that gets made as a gritty prestige drama. Dark photography, ambivalent faith, a marriage under strain, the question hanging over everything about what all this suffering was for. That film would get 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. This is not that film. And the film we got is better. American Underdog is a faith film in the Erwin Brothers tradition: openly Christian, unashamedly earnest, and convinced that Kurt Warner's improbable journey from stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee in Iowa to winning Super Bowl XXXIV as the starting quarterback for the St. Louis Rams was not luck or talent but divine providence. The 2.0 woke score is the lowest in our 2021 database. There is no progressive content in this film because the film's worldview has no room for it. The 26.0 traditional score is the highest, reflecting a story in which faith is not a background detail but the engine of the entire narrative: Kurt praying before tryouts, Brenda's faith sustaining her through a divorce and single motherhood with a special-needs child, the couple's mutual belief that God has a plan for them even when the evidence suggests otherwise. Zachary Levi plays Warner with the right mix of aw-shucks humility and quiet determination. Anna Paquin's Brenda is the film's secret weapon: a woman who has been chewed up by life and still believes. If you find faith-based filmmaking inherently uncool, this movie will not change your mind. If you believe stories about people who believe in something larger than themselves still have a place in American cinema, American Underdog is the most traditional film of 2021, and it wears that distinction like a Super Bowl ring.
Read the full VirtueVigil review of American Underdog
The 2021 Scorecard
Sixteen films. Two lean woke. One sits dead even. Thirteen lean traditional.
If you are looking for a Hollywood that spent 2021 pushing progressive ideology, the numbers do not support it. What they support is a Hollywood that was confused and scared: confused about what audiences wanted after a year of closed theaters, scared of losing the streaming wars, and too distracted by its own structural problems to settle on a consistent ideological project.
The three biggest box office successes on this list were Spider-Man: No Way Home (+19 TRAD), Dune: Part One (+13 TRAD), and Free Guy (+8 TRAD). The biggest critical and commercial failure was Eternals (-14 WOKE). The pattern is not subtle. Audiences rewarded films that told stories worth caring about. They rejected films that lectured them. It took Hollywood another three years and a string of historic flops to begin absorbing this lesson, and whether they have fully learned it is an open question.
The 2021 slate also illustrates something important about the VirtueVigil scoring system: the numbers do not care about your feelings. Eternals and American Underdog both got fair hearings. The system evaluates what is on screen, not what anyone wishes were on screen. That is the whole point. Objectivity is the moat.
Every film on this list has a full review on VirtueVigil with complete content warnings, parental guidance, and category-level scoring breakdowns. Use the links above to read the deep dives. The 2021 movie year is closed. The data is in. And the data says what the data says.