Here's the movie Trump is suddenly attacking on Twitter — and why he might actually like it

President Trump on Friday continued to rail against Hollywood as "racist," this time with a tweet making clearer the specific subject of his ire.

After earlier in the day jabbing Hollywood as "racist" and "dangerous" without providing any context, the president on Friday tweeted angrily about "the movie coming out," which he declared was "made in order to inflame and cause chaos."

Although Trump didn't name the movie, he's almost certainly speaking of Universal's The Hunt, which has recently received Fox News coverage after advertising for it was pulled due to the recent mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. In the film, a group of characters from red states referred to as "deplorables" are hunted by liberal elites for sport, per The Hollywood Reporter.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But Trump is missing a key piece of information he might have gleaned from watching the film's trailer: the "deplorables" are seemingly the film's heroes, with the audience being meant to root for them as they fight to survive against the villainous elites. Still, this didn't stop The Hunt from drawing lots of outrage on Fox News this week, with a guest on Laura Ingraham's show declaring without having seen the movie that its takeaway message is that "you should kill your political adversaries." Trump did not explain in his tweets how The Hunt might be considered racist.

This isn't the first time Trump has weighed in on a controversy surrounding a movie he hasn't seen, last year railing against another Universal film, First Man, for not showing Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon, even though the flag is prominently shown having been planted on the moon in the movie and this action simply takes place off screen.

Universal reportedly fully intends to release The Hunt on Sept. 27 as scheduled, with an executive telling the Reporter earlier this week it's "meant to show what a stupid, crazy world we live in."