Box Office
Hit · 8.9xBudget$20M
Worldwide Gross$177.2M
The Descendants keeps its focus on personal grief, family duty, and individual choices in a traditional drama, delivering neutral storytelling free of political or identity messaging for a safe 2/10 woke score.
The Descendants is a traditional family drama centered on Matt King (George Clooney), a Honolulu attorney and trustee of a large family land trust, who confronts his wife's coma after a boating accident, her infidelity, his daughters' behavioral issues, and the decision whether to sell pristine Kauai acreage.
Themes revolve around grief, parental responsibility, marital betrayal, and personal stewardship of inherited legacy, all resolved through individual character growth rather than collective identity or systemic narratives. The Hawaiian setting and mixed-heritage backstory (Matt as descendant of a Hawaiian princess and American missionary) provide organic cultural texture via the land trust plot, where Matt ultimately refuses the sale to preserve the family legacy, but these elements function as plot drivers without activist framing or critiques of colonialism, patriarchy, or capitalism.
We've run a full content analysis on The Descendants and scored it 2/10 on the woke scale. Read our detailed breakdown above to see exactly what we found.
Our analysis checks for themes like identity politics, race-swapping, gender ideology, environmental activism, anti-religious messaging, and other progressive agenda elements. The score breakdown above shows which specific categories were flagged and how heavily they factor into The Descendants's overall score.
Wokeometer focuses on ideological content rather than traditional ratings (violence, language, etc.). The Descendants is rated R. For a full picture, combine our woke analysis with the age ratingto decide if it's right for your family.
We evaluate media across multiple ideological categories on a 0–10 scale. Scores of 0–3 mean story-first, 4–6 have moderate elements, and 7–10 flag heavily agenda-driven content. Learn more about our methodology →
Methodology: Each score synthesizes audience discourse, critic and aggregator reception, and press coverage — weighed against the work itself, not any single source.
See how this title scores across all 5 woke subcategories with detailed explanations.
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