Try to imagine if prominent liberals spent day after day demanding the cancellation of a seemingly pro-Trump movie they hadn’t seen based on a script they had not read, going so far as to repeatedly suggest that its impending release could inspire real-world violence. Fox News figures and other right-wing media personalities would predictably respond by rolling their eyes and snickering about “snowflakes.” President Donald Trump may even weigh in on Twitter to mock the outraged liberals and gin up support from his base.

That exact scenario played out nearly word-for-word last week -- only with the sides neatly reversed. Buckling under pressure from outraged conservative media and Trump, Universal Pictures first paused promotion of an upcoming movie and then scrapped it altogether. The brief, bizarre controversy was an instructive example of how right-wing media outlets are waging the culture war under Trump, all while constantly claiming that it's liberals who promote outrage culture.

On August 6, The Hollywood Reporter published a story about Universal Pictures’ plans to pause the promotional campaign for its September 27 release The Hunt. Executives worried that the movie, a violent modern-day adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, might be in poor taste following a spate of mass shootings across the country.

Studios have frequently edited films, delayed releases, or retooled marketing strategies in the wake of national tragedies. After the 9/11 attacks, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage was put on ice until the following February. The Colin Farrell movie Phone Booth, about a man being targeted by a sniper while trapped in a New York City phone booth, was delayed twice -- first after 9/11 and again in the wake of sniper attacks in the Washington, D.C., area in 2002. In 2017, following the Las Vegas massacre, the producers of American Horror Story: Cult removed a mass shooting scene from the TV show. It makes perfect sense that the studio would rethink the release strategy for The Hunt and delay the film.

There’s one thing studio execs probably didn’t count on: Fox News.

The Hollywood Reporter article referenced the film’s political overtones, inadvertently providing Fox News with fuel for its everlasting victimhood narrative. During the August 7 edition of Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham and Fox contributor Raymond Arroyo tore into the very premise of The Hunt, with Ingraham warning that “a new grisly Hollywood film could inspire more mass shootings.”

“Talk about insensitivity,” said Arroyo. “The Hunt is about a group of Middle American Trump voters who find themselves on a preserve where they are hunted by liberal elites. I wish I were making this up.”

Later in the episode, Arroyo referred to the movie as “a revenge fantasy complete with blood splatter.”

The indication that the movie touched on politics primarily came from the Hollywood Reporter article, but the idea that it was meant as some sort of progressive “revenge fantasy” seemingly came out of nowhere. A synopsis posted to the film’s website made clear that the “elites” are the villains of the story and the “hunted” are the protagonists, as is usually the case in such The Most Dangerous Game knockoffs (see: The Purge series of films, The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Surviving the Game, and so on).

But with the right-wing media narrative set, truth became irrelevant. In the coming days, Fox News would run nearly a dozen segments about the movie. During an August 9 episode of The Story with Martha MacCallum, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said the film was proof that “liberal elites genuinely detest their fellow countrymen who are conservative.”

In addition to the Fox News segments, Trump and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel joined the fray, each criticizing the film they hadn’t seen in their own ways.

On August 10, Universal scrapped plans to release the film entirely. In a statement posted to The Hunt’s website, the studio wrote that “while Universal Pictures had already paused the marketing campaign for The Hunt, after thoughtful consideration, the studio has decided to cancel our plans to release the film. … Now is not the right time.”

The studio had taken a pummeling based largely on a willful misunderstanding of who the film’s protagonists were. But in caving to right-wing demands, Universal may have made its public relations nightmare even worse. Never content to let a culture war victory go to waste, Fox continued its coverage of The Hunt, with the majority of its segments actually airing after the movie was shelved.

During the August 11 edition of Media Buzz, Fox News contributor William Bennett applauded the studio’s decision to have “the decency to pull it now” but claimed that it highlighted the problem of how “Hollywood pushes so far, it pushes people far.” While guest hosting the August 12 edition of The Ingraham Angle, Jason Chaffetz called The Hunt a “left-wing fetish film.” Prime-time host Sean Hannity said that “insulting the American people and their choices isn't going to work well” for Hollywood, and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon suggested that the film may have incited actual violence, saying, “Who knows what would have happened if that picture had come out.”

Reporting that followed the film’s cancellation illustrated just how afraid the studio is of right-wing media and their followers.

An August 14 article from The Hollywood Reporter explained how the film got canceled, citing the reaction to its August 6 article: