Any movie featuring a President Ronald Reagan stand-in suggests a Hollywood hit piece.
Heck, Will Ferrell briefly flirted with a comedy about a dementia-addled Gipper roaming the White House halls.
The industry loathes Reagan and all things GOP. It’s why it took a rebel effort to bring “Reagan” to movie screens two years ago. (A film, by the way, enjoying a re-release this September).
Dennis Quaid talks about his reaction after being offered the role of Ronald Reagan.
REAGAN: The Director’s Cut in theaters on September 25th.
Own your copy of the REAGAN Movie now on DVD, Blu-Ray, Amazon and Apple TV. pic.twitter.com/NYYjufwxrN
— Reagan The Movie (@ReaganMovie) July 9, 2026
An upcoming Reagan feature, though, suggests something different.
The first clue is that “The Brink of War” isn’t from a typical Hollywood source. It’s Angel Studios, the upstart company making films that “amplify light.”
The studio doesn’t follow the standard Tinsel Town template, politically speaking. That’s despite its recent “Animal Farm” misfire that clashed with George Orwell’s original vision.
Here’s the Aug. 14 film’s official description, courtesy of Angel Studios’ PR team:
Directed by Michael Russell Gunn, the film takes place during the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, when Ronald Reagan (Jeff Daniels) and Mikhail Gorbachev (Jared Harris) met to discuss the future of the nuclear race. The film is an incredibly topical story of two pivotal figures on completely opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum coming together to reach common ground.
Yes, that’s anti-Trump Daniels playing President Reagan. The actor’s liberal bona fides are beyond debate, and he’s been happy to appear on MS NOW in recent years to share his progressive musings.
It’s to his credit that he’d sign on for a project that likely either celebrates President Reagan’s accomplishments during this critical moment or, at the very least, doesn’t cartoonishly attack him.
Angel Studios would hear it from its right-leaning fan base, no doubt. The blowback to the Left-leaning “Animal Farm” release wasn’t an accident.
The trailer doesn’t have any sucker punches aimed at Red State USA. It’s a just-the-facts, ma’am approach featuring an impressive score to ratchet up the tension.
Tension thrived during the Cold War, and it spiked when Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev debated the state of the nuclear arms race in 1986.
Ironically, left-leaning Hollywood feared the worst from Reagan’s presidency, imagining he might bungle his way into a Third World War. Instead, he helped calm relations between the U.S. and Russia, eventually winning the Cold War without firing a single shot.
Daniels’ take on Reagan isn’t exact in nature. He’s not swaddled in prosthetics to recreate Reagan’s visage. Nor does he push his normal speaking voice to duplicate The Gipper’s inimitable phrasing.
Will “The Brink of War” measure up to history? We’ll know soon enough.
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