Pedro Pascal is shooting a “subversive love story” called De Noche next month, according to Variety. “The story, which echoes classic noirs like ‘Chinatown,’ charts the passionate and unexpected love affair between a cop (Pascal) and a boarding school teacher (Ramirez) in 1930s Los Angeles, when the city is overtaken by corruption and the world is on the brink of war”, Elsa Keslassy reports.
“The two men become targets of the city’s corrupt political machine and are forced to flee to Mexico.” Todd Haynes, the queer activist writer and director of the film, says that the story “arises out of an era — all too relevant to our own — of domestic corruption, racial exploitation and global terror. But it emerges as a testament to the inexplicable powers of desire and love to survive and overcome even the most crippling of human barriers.”
Barriers, as in borders, as in boundaries, which Haynes has said the film will cross explicitly with an NC-17 rating. Joaquin Phoenix, who had been set to star in the film, balked at the script in 2024, canceling production when he reportedly got “cold feet” over the project. Haynes called the sudden departure “a nightmare”. He says the same about Donald Trump.
Haynes called for “resistance” in the early weeks of the second Trump term. “I have no doubt that there will be many people who got in that vote for this president, who will be quickly disillusioned by his promises that he made about economic stability in the United States”, Haynes prophesied. The latter scenario has yet to emerge, but the resistance to Trump administration officials removing criminal aliens has surely intensified.
Haynes courted controversy with his very first film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which he shot using Barbie dolls instead of actors. The stunt drew attention and by the 1990s critics and academics were praising his work in the new queer cinema. By his own telling, Haynes’s politics are rooted in the world of 1980s AIDS activism. No accommodationist, his characters are flamboyantly queer. Morality disappears and queerness “simply exists” on screen in his films.
The reader is forgiven if they have never heard of Todd Haynes. His highest-ever grossing 2015 film Carol made about $55 million worldwide on a budget of $11.8 million. Cate Blanchett gave the film star power and awards nominations propelled its performance in Europe. This is the pattern of Haynes’s career: ‘prestige’ independent queer films that rely on critical reception and industry buzz to profit. They never make money in actual theaters, with mass audiences. More than 1,000 Hollywood directors rank higher than Haynes in lifetime gross earnings.
The reader may also be forgiven for having missed One Battle After Another, the 2025 critical smash hit and box office disaster that, following this same formula with a larger budget, simultaneously lost $100 million and became Paul Thomas Anderson’s biggest box office performance to date. Antifa-themed, One Battle was meant to flatter the self-image of Hollywood as le resistance to Trump. The measure of this virtue-signal is 13 Oscar nominations, making it just one of 15 films to have achieved that distinction. This is a fair summation of what Todd Haynes hopes to achieve with De Noche.
Danny Ramirez, 33, is mostly known for independent and low-budget films. The glaring exception is 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, in which he played Lt. Mickey “Fanboy” Garcia. Of course, that movie had Tom Cruise reprising his most famous role. A more telling role is Ramirez as the Latin Avenger, a Disney+ streaming Marvel series character who appeared in the 2025 box office bomb Captain American: Brave New World. He is set to reprise the role in Avengers: Doomsday.
Pedro Pascal, 50, is also supposed to appear in Doomsday, though his role has reportedly been cut back in the wake of his previous Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, Fantastic Four: First Steps, which underperformed all expectations. Put simply, Ramirez has been marketed as a younger Pedro Pascal, a male lead that is supposed to appeal to the ‘modern audience’ that self-important cultural elites project upon the masses. This ‘modern audience’ supposedly wants deconstruction, queerness, and open borders for all, which just happens to be what the self-important cultural elites want for everyone.
De Noche is not going to be a smash hit. Like Emilia Pérez, it is a ‘message film’ that tells us what the casting agents of Hollywood care about. At best, it may be as self-serious as Eddington, Pascal’s 2025 film about covid lockdowns and hysteria, whereas Emilia Pérez was criticized by transgender advocates for singing the quiet part out loud. Co-starring Joaquin Phoenix, Eddington made back just over half of its $25 million budget at the box office. Also shut out of Oscar contention: the dark, brooding sequel to Wicked, which collapsed at the box office because it was too depressing.
We live during an epoch of bad films from self-important activists. De Noche tells us that no one in Hollywood has learned their lesson, yet. Every celebrity endorsed Kamala Harris, but it had zero effect on voters. Movies with divisive political messaging fail in theaters, and fail again, and fail every time, but they still receive generous support from a legacy establishment that hates the values of the average moviegoer — as long as they toe the ideological line perfectly, in every way.
Danny Ramirez has been wise enough to avoid making controversial political statements, but Pedro Pascal and Todd Haynes have not. Is a comeuppance on the horizon? Almost 80 percent of Americans oppose open border policies, and despite earnest efforts to change hearts and minds by the legacy media, the number is practically unchanged since 2018.
A similar majority probably supports the free speech rights of Haynes and Pascal to make a queer film about blurred national borders. However, the actual demand for such a movie is confined to a deeply self-important, though powerful and rich, minority of Americans telling us all what we are supposed to like.
And if there is one lesson Hollywood has failed to learn, it is that Americans would rather stay home and watch YouTube for pennies than go out to buy expensive tickets for a disappointing, preachy film they were told they must like, or else they are bad people. Save the altar calls for the gospel films, boys.