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The most talked-about film in the country climaxes with an American vigilante methodically murdering ten Syrian refugees in their apartment. Citizen Vigilante was banned in Germany for inciting violence against migrants. Elon Musk’s response was to post the entire film on X for 48 hours, where his hundreds of millions of followers drove it to a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the highest of the year. Its star, Armie Hammer, says he never received a full script and calls the finished film hateful. The director disputes that, and has already teased a sequel whose title threatens Somali immigrants. Hollywood loves a franchise.
Some are treating Citizen Vigilante as a culture war curiosity, a bad film with a worse marketing campaign. It is more than that. It is a remake, and everyone in the industry knows the influential original.
The 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation – not to be confused with the 2016 film of the same name, also starring Armie Hammer – glorified Ku Klux Klan vigilantes as heroes riding to save white America. It celebrated white vigilante violence against former slaves, portraying the violent history of the first Klan as righteous and justified. President Wilson screened it at the White House, the first film ever shown there. Within months, inspired directly by the film, the Second Klan was founded, and the movie became a key recruiting tool. The organization it built grew into a movement of millions that terrorized Black Americans, Catholics, Jews and immigrants for a generation.
The tragic element here is that hatred fills seats. For most of my life, the industry’s default Muslim has been a terrorist, a fanatic or a victim in someone else’s war story. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s landmark study Missing & Maligned examined 200 top-grossing films and found that Muslims were 1.6 percent of nearly 9,000 speaking characters, that 90 percent of the films had no Muslim character at all, and that the few who appeared were overwhelmingly framed as foreign, violent or both. And as Riz Ahmed put it when the study launched, “the representation of Muslims on screen feeds the policies that get enacted.”
It feeds culture as well. When American Sniper broke box office records in 2015, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee collected hundreds of violent threats against Arab and Muslim Americans from moviegoers, and formally asked the filmmakers to tell audiences not to use their movie as a license for hate. That was one film, released the traditional way, with studios, ratings boards and theater chains making decisions about how to represent the film.
And those decisions matter to how American Muslims live. A recent Opinium poll commissioned by the Concordia Forum found nearly half of American Muslims fear being physically harmed for their faith, and more than a third avoid certain places to stay safe. A hateful film like Birth of a Nation or Citizen Vigilante could easily tip the balance in a very dangerous direction. Meanwhile, the same poll found Muslims back democracy at higher rates than the general public, 81 percent to 67 percent.
That is why this moment could be just as dangerous as 1915. Every advocacy organization and well-meaning individual working to prevent onscreen hatred from tipping into reality can now be bypassed by one bad actor with a big platform. Elon Musk hit post on the film days after being criticized for amplifying the rhetoric behind anti-migrant riots in Belfast, and the film’s audience of millions materialized overnight, no distributor required. D.W. Griffith needed theaters and a president. The 2026 version needs a tweet.
None of this is inevitable. I know because I have seen Hollywood change for the better. After the USC study, a coalition of Muslim artists and funders built the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion and put money behind new Muslim storytellers. I made a romantic comedy written by and about American Muslim women, and mainstream audiences embraced it. Later this month, another film, Mustache by Imran J. Khan will be released. The award-winning film, executive produced by Muslim stars Riz Ahmed, Hasan Minhaj, and Ramy Youssef, shares the experience of growing up Pakistani-American. The stories that humanize us draw audiences when the industry chooses to make them.
To my fellow actors: read the whole script, because “I didn’t see the script” won’t spare Armie Hammer the association with the violence this film promotes, and it will not spare you. To the studios watching Citizen Vigilante’s numbers and quietly wondering whether there is a market here: unfortunately, there is. There was a market in 1915, too. But it came with cross burnings, and Hollywood spent a century apologizing.
Hollywood follows the money. It always has. But everyone deciding whether to get involved in Citizen Vigilante 2, the End of Somali Scams should be honest about what it means, and about who pays the price. Decent movies sell too.
