The trailer is on YouTube; anyone may watch it. What distributor Bleecker Street may not do, at any price, is pay YouTube to put it in front of you. All of the major social media platforms — Google’s YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok — have declined to run ads for Musk, a documentary opening in theaters on Oct. 9, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and all three cited reasons related to “political content.” Inside Bleecker Street, THR was told, the company “internally is scrambling to understand why their ad has been rejected.”
The scrambling is understandable, because the rulebooks involved are not obviously about films. TikTok flatly bars political advertising. Meta restricts political ads; Gizmodo describes the regime as pre-authorization rather than a strict prohibition, while Vulture reports that Meta does not allow paid political ads at all, a policy it dates to the Cambridge Analytica scandal — the two accounts do not agree, though neither has room in it for documentaries. YouTube requires only disclosures, and as Vulture notes, anyone without YouTube Premium can attest that the platform runs campaign ads freely. Until now, all of these restrictions had mostly been understood as applying to political campaigns, parties, and advocacy or lobbying groups — not to Hollywood.
And then there is X, the platform Elon Musk owns. X not only refused to acknowledge Bleecker Street’s advertising inquiries, THR reported, it will not “even accept advertising for any of its other films on its upcoming calendar.” The distributor has appealed to each of the non-Musk companies: TikTok and YouTube “are still entertaining the petitions” to reconsider, according to THR, but Meta is not, having rejected the appeal already. None of the social media companies immediately returned THR’s requests for comment.
The film under this interdiction is not a tribute. Musk is directed by the veteran documentarian Alex Gibney, runs four hours, traces its subject’s rise all the way to the White House, and has been described by Variety as “a lacerating portrait of technocratic brilliance, power lust, and crackpot delusion” — POV Magazine settled for “the totality of dread” — and by Vulture, in the vernacular of the animated short, as the portrait of a Wile E. Coyote-style self-proclaimed genius. The subject has seen fit to respond in kind, tweeting that Gibney has “ZERO integrity” and is a “horrible human.”
This is not the film’s first near miss with its own industry. THR previously reported that Comcast-owned Universal nearly declined to distribute the finished movie overseas, getting cold feet over a topic “politically sensitive for parts of the Trump administration” — this despite having paid a “significant sum” for the overseas rights. Universal later said it would support the film. The platforms’ refusals may matter more. Documentaries live on word of mouth, and word of mouth now lives on social media, as THR points out, so a blacked-out paid campaign is a genuine blow — as well as, Gizmodo notes, the latest demonstration of how corporate consolidation narrows the channels available for commentary and artistic work.
There remains, of course, the unpaid route. The trailer sits on YouTube free for the watching, the director’s name is being broadcast to hundreds of millions of followers by the film’s aggrieved subject, and the phenomenon named for Barbra Streisand — in which the effort to suppress a thing furnishes its publicity — has a long record of doing a distributor’s work for nothing. Bleecker Street still cannot buy an ad. It has arguably already been given one.