Glen Powell is sitting out politics because he hates the discourse, and he blames Paramount’s marketing layoffs for “The Running Man” box-office flop.
The “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Chad Powers” star used an Esquire magazine cover interview to draw a hard line on campaign chatter and culture-war sparring. He said the talk divides people, and he wants no part of it on the press circuit.
Variety reported his remarks alongside a blunt box-office autopsy: Powell tied the weak run of Edgar Wright’s fall 2025 tentpole “The Running Man” to Paramount Pictures dumping its marketing team right before the film opened amid a merger.
Hollywood has spent years treating red-carpet interviews like town halls. Powell is joining a short list of big names who say that habit has stopped paying off.
Esquire framed the cover as a moment when politics interests Powell even less than before. He did not hedge.
Powell told the magazine:
“Over time, I realized that politics divide people,”
He went further on why he will not jump in now:
“People trying to prove their point, for me, it’s the worst version of a conversation. I genuinely do not like the discourse. It’s not as healthy as it once was. [Engaging in politics] is not presently possible. I applaud people for jumping into those things and fighting for what they believe in. If I were a political person, I would be talking about it. For me, my calling is elsewhere.”
That is a plain rejection of the celebrity-as-pundit model. He is not asking fans to adopt a platform. He is saying the platform fight itself has become the product, and he wants out.
Powell’s other message was about studio chaos, not ideology. “The Running Man” finished under $70 million worldwide against a production budget in the $110 million range. For a fall tentpole, that is a miss by any standard measure.
He put the failure on timing and cuts. Mass layoffs hit Paramount in late October 2025, weeks before the movie reached theaters. Powell said the studio emptied the shop that was supposed to sell the film.
His words were direct:
“They let go of an entire marketing department a month before our movie came out in the middle of a merger,”
He added, “There were a lot of issues with that.” In plain terms, the company that spent nine figures making a spectacle then gutted the team charged with getting people into seats.
Powell also looked back at A24’s “How to Make a Killing,” which took in $21 million worldwide this winter relative to the interview. He said the project never had room to breathe.
“There just was not enough time to do it properly. I look back on that one as an example of going, You know what, there’s no rush.”
Two different studios. Same complaint: rush jobs and broken launch machinery, then surprise when the grosses lag.
Powell is not alone. Earlier this year, relative to the Esquire cover, Dwayne Johnson used his own Esquire sit-down to say he would no longer speak publicly about politics and wanted the focus on his work. In 2024 he told Fox News he regretted endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 because the move split his fan base.
Johnson’s earlier line captured the fatigue:
“Politics is omnipresent and it’s forever. I don’t like it. I hate it at times. I hate the slinging. I hate all the bulls*** that comes with it,”
Jennifer Lawrence struck a similar note a few months before Johnson’s quotes, in a New York Times interview. She had spoken out against Donald Trump and, after Election Day, wrote an op-ed that cast his victory as leaving only “white men” feeling safe in America. She has since pulled back from turning every press stop into a stump speech.
Lawrence told the Times she questions the point of the exercise. Celebrities, she said, do not decide elections “whatsoever.” She asked what she is doing if the only result is “add[ing] fuel to a fire that’s ripping the country apart.” She also said she does not “want to start turning people off to films and to art” because viewers reject her political opinions.
That sequence matters. First came the lectures. Then came the divided audiences. Now come the walk-backs, from Johnson on a Biden endorsement he says cost him fans, from Lawrence on the futility of star endorsements, and from Powell on a discourse he calls less healthy than it used to be.
Powell’s box-office comments land in a simple place. A $110 million-range movie that clears under $70 million worldwide did not fail because a leading man refused to hold a mini-rally on late-night television. It failed, in his account, after Paramount let go of an entire marketing department a month before release while a merger was underway.
That is an accountability story about corporate priorities. Lay off the people who open movies, open the movie anyway, then stare at the gross. Powell’s “no rush” note on “How to Make a Killing” points the same direction: hurried production and thin runway, then a $21 million worldwide finish.
None of this requires a conspiracy theory about taste. It requires reading the calendar. Late October 2025 layoffs. Fall 2025 release. Marketing bench emptied. Results followed.
For years, the industry’s loudest voices treated dissent from the political line as a brand crisis and treated quiet professionals as insufficiently brave. Powell’s Esquire answers flip that script. He calls political combat a bad conversation, applauds people who still want that fight, and says his calling is elsewhere. Johnson and Lawrence, in their own recent interviews, described the same fatigue with division and the same doubt that celebrity opinion moves a single vote.
Audiences never needed a seminar to buy a ticket. They needed a movie that was finished, sold, and left free of a loyalty test. Powell is saying the quiet part out loud. More stars are noticing the same thing. Hollywood’s political sermon circuit did not unite the country, and cutting the marketing department a month before opening night does not fill theaters.
