Elijah Wood’s New Movie Attracts Cancel Culture
Here's what cancel culture has to say about the new Elijah Wood movie.
This article is more than 2 years old
Elijah Wood, who will always be Frodo from the shire to many audiences, has a new movie coming out. It’s called No Man of God. The movie sees Elijah Wood playing Bill Hagmaier, who works for the FBI and is interviewing the serial killer, Ted Bundy. If you’re thinking, “Hey, wait. Isn’t there already a Ted Bundy movie?”, you would be very correct. In fact, there are many Ted Bundy movies. If you search for movies about the serial killer, you actually get lists ranking them. There are so many many movies about this American serial killer that there is another one coming out right now starring Chad Michael Murray called Ted Bundy: American Boogeyman. Both films release in August 2021, a sign that perhaps it’s time cancel culture came for the Ted Bundy film genre. Twitter thinks so, and they have many reasons for taking up the cause.
Twitter met the double Ted Bundy releases head-on, causing terms like Ted Bundy and Elijah Wood to start trending. Some of the tweets are amusing, and with good points against the fact that this has become such a trend with filmmakers.
Many tweets took a very serious stance against the Ted Bundy movies with Elijah Wood and Chad Michael Murray, claiming that they glorify the serial killer.
The complaints aren’t just about wanting Ted Bundy movies to be over and stars like Elijah Wood and Chad Michael Murray to leave them alone. They’re also about other movies people would like to see happen instead.
This is a good point, although to be fair, we do live in a time with a lot of other movies and television series coming soon. The influx of Ted Bundy projects is a sign of just how much content is out there. Still, it’s curious that with so many projects out there, and even with so many serial killers, Ted Bundy is a story Elijah Wood and others have decided we should keep retelling, whether in docu-series style or fiction.
While Elijah Wood is on Twitter, he mostly just retweets other people. It’s unlikely that he will comment on the controversy or say much about people wondering why he decided that adding a Ted Bundy project to the pile was his next great opportunity.
Other projects on Elijah Wood’s plate include a part in the Toxic Avengers reboot. The original movie came out in 1984 and is full of themes on environmentalism and subverting the superhero genre. The reboot has Wood joined by stars like Peter Dinklage, Julia Davis, and Kevin Bacon.
As for No Man of God, Elijah Wood’s Ted Bundy movie, is it likely that cancel culture will hurt the film’s release? It seems like the people who would be interested in going to see the true-crime film are unlikely to be deterred based on the trending topics. The genre has picked up a lot of attention in recent years, between podcasts, docu-series, and fictional films like Wood’s. No Man of God releases August 27, 2021.
