As Warner Bros. executives, box-office watchers and Wall Street analysts search for clues as to why Happy Feet Two is stumbling, perhaps they should check its progressive politics.

Like its predecessor in 2006, the current iteration of the franchise – though its status as such is now in doubt – has penguins and other cold-weather creatures not only entertaining children but also conveying environmental messages to them. Where the two movies are dissimilar, though, is that the first was a hit and the second one is not. Happy Feet earned $42 million its opening weekend in 2006 while Happy Feet Two, which opened Nov. 18, took 10 days to surpass that mark.

Some are speculating that global warming, which both movies portray as a big problem for penguins and the rest of the planet, doesn’t resonate with audiences nearly as much as it did five years ago, especially with the 40 percent of American adults who call themselves “conservative.” Amid a couple of scandals that revealed shenanigans between climate scientists, the percent of American adults who believe the planet is getting hotter due to human activity has fallen to 47, and it’s much less among conservatives.

Director George Miller acknowledged five years ago that he reworked the script for the first Happy Feet to amplify the environmental themes, and conservatives who weren’t turned off by them the first time around expected similar messages in the sequel. Some, though, complain that Happy Feet Two ramped up the liberalism to the point of propaganda, and these disenchanted right wingers are getting the word out to like-minded moviegoers.

Kyle Smith at the NY Post, for example, says he loved the first Happy Feet but he wrote that the sequel promotes collectivism, feminism, international bailouts, vegetarianism, same-sex marriage, the United Nations and even Occupy Wall Street, which he acknowledges didn’t exist during the moviemaking process.

“Well played, lefties: This is Kiddie Karl Marx,” Smith writes of Happy Feet Two.

There’s about 123 million adult conservatives in the U.S., so if Hollywood insists on inserting liberal messages in its family fare, it risks alienating a huge chunk of its potential audience. And many conservatives are accusing Hollywood of doing just that.