Talk about shock and awe – Hollywood is about to unleash such a fire storm of films about the post9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that moviegoers may soon be raising a white flag. As many as 20 films that deal with the wars have already been shot, are in production or will go into production in the next few months.

They range from big-budget Hollywood productions with Alist casts, such as Lions for Lambs, directed by Robert Redford and starring Tom Cruise, Redford and Meryl Streep, and Rendition, featuring Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, to smaller independent films such as Grace Is Gone, with John Cusack in the lead role. They even include a small British docudrama, Battle for Haditha, with a cast composed of amateur actors. A number of Hollywood’s biggest directors have shot or are planning these movies, including Paul Haggis (Crash), Ridley Scott, Ron Howard, Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma.

Hollywood is taking a huge gamble here. Apart from some propagandist films made during the second world war, the studios have never tried targeting war so directly while American troops were still on the ground, and have shied away from making films, in the middle of a war, that could be seen as even slightly critical of the conduct of serving American soldiers. Almost all the big films about Vietnam, including Coming Home, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, came out years after the fighting ended in 1975. Born on the Fourth of July, for example, was not released until 1989.

It’s also a huge gamble because there is scant evidence that American audiences are ready to plonk down their entertainment dollars to see films that drag them into the thick of a nasty, brutal war, one that polls show two-thirds of them now believe was a huge mistake. Indeed, the films released so far dealing with the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath have enjoyed a decidedly mixed reception – it’s not surprising that US audiences warmed to the patriotism of World Trade Center, Stone’s film about the rescue workers, and, to some extent, to Paul Greengrass’s United 93, about the passengers who fought back on the plane that went down in a Pennsylvania fieldon September 11.

Two films released since then that tackled the war more directly have been box-office disasters, however. Almost nobody went to see Home of the Brave, directed by Irwin Winkler and starring Samuel L Jackson and Jessica Biel. Released last year, the film, about three soldiers who struggle to readjust to life at home after returning from a lengthy tour in Iraq, took a calamitous $46,000 at the box office. Even more surprising was the dire performance of A Mighty Heart, with Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, the widow of The Wall Street Journal’s reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Islamic fun-damentalists in Pakistan. The film, directed by Michael Winterbottom and produced by Brad Pitt, was based on a bestselling book, was warmly received by the critics and won a ton of publicity at Cannes earlier this year, but took only $9m at the box office.

Yet Hollywood is betting heavily that as the USA moves into the presidential-election season, when the “war on terror” could be the decisive issue, these new films will offer audiences a window on the wars they may feel they are not getting from television or other media. And the film-makers are evidently hoping that antiwar Academy voters will reward them at Oscar time.

Audiences at upcoming film festivals will get the first taste of this new crop. Already, a considerable head of Oscar steam is building around In the Valley of Elah, written and directed by Haggis. The film, which will be premiered at the Venice film festival next week, stars Tommy Lee Jones as a veteran who takes on army bureaucracy to find out who killed his soldier son on a drunken night out after a tour in Iraq. Like many of the films about Iraq, In the Valley of Elah (named after the biblical valley where David killed Goliath) is based on a true story, in this case adapted from a Playboy magazine article about a soldier who was killed by his army buddies because he had witnessed them committing atrocities in Iraq.

Venice will also see the premiere of De Palma’s Redacted, a collection of stories about American soldiers in the conflict told through blogs, YouTube clips, videos shot by the soldiers and web reporting. In 1989, De Palma made one of the most harrowing films about atrocities in Vietnam: Casualties of War.

Audiences at the Toronto film festival, meanwhile, will be the first to see Battle for Haditha, the British director Nick Broomfield’s dramatic reenactment of the massacre by American marines of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, on November 19, 2005. Broomfield says he wanted to make the film “because, although there are reports about the war every day on the news, I felt I wasn’t learning much about the complexity of what’s really happening in Iraq. I feel there is much less accurate reporting going on than there was about the Vietnam war. So I wanted to take an incident and show what happened from the point of view of the marines, the insurgents and the Iraqi people who have to live there”.

Broomfield, whose background is in documentary films, says he also wanted to “do it differently from all the glossy Hollywood films that will be coming out. I wanted to make it absolutely real”. To that end, he used former marines, some of whom had fought at Fallujah, and real Iraqis to act in the film, which he shot earlier this year in Jordan. A key influence, he says, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. “I think cinema should reflect the politics of the moment, rather than things that happened long ago, which people have already made up their mind about.”

While Broomfield and De Palma are tackling their subject head-on, many of the other films go for a more oblique approach, focusing on the effects of the wars on Americans and locating the action away from the battlefields. Rendition, for example, stars Witherspoon as the pregnant wife of an Egyptian-born chemical engineer who is kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a secret detention centre in a Third World country for interrogation. Directed by the South African Gavin Hood, who won an Oscar for Tsotsi, the film also stars Gyllenhaal as a CIA analyst who is forced to question his allegiances when he becomes involved in the brutal interrogation of Witherspoon’s film husband. And Grace Is Gone, which won the audience award and a screenwriting prize at this year’s Sundance film festival, stays on home ground, with Cusack as a man whose wife, Grace, is killed while serving in Iraq. The film follows the attempts of Cusack’s character to tell his two young daughters about her death.

“I feel people will be interested in seeing the story of the human cost of this war,” Cusack says. “I think people are probably tired of being manipulated endlessly on the reasons for and realities of this misadventure. I don’t mean the soldiers fighting; I mean the civilian leadership.”

Other post9/11 films set for release in the next few months are more traditional dramas. Redford’s Lions for Lambs is about two students inspired by a professor to join up and fight in Afghanistan, while a presidential contender, played by Cruise, is about to leak a story that will affect their fates to a television journalist, played by Streep. The Kingdom, directed by Peter Berg and starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, is a big-budget thriller about the effects of a terrorist bomb attack on a western compound in Saudi Arabia. Foxx and Garner play special agents who track down the bombers through the political and social complexities of Saudi Arabia.

Hollywood is also adapting a number of magazine articles and bestselling books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Cruise has bought the rights to The Fall of the Warrior King, an article in The New York Times Magazine about a lieutenant colonel who resigned after a scandal in which men under his command drowned an Iraqi civilian. Columbia is planning to make a film of Against All Enemies, the bestselling book by a former counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, about how the threat from Al-Qaeda was ignored before 9/11, with Haggis likely to direct. Greengrass, director of United 93 and The Bourne Ultimatum, will make a movie version of Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about life in the Green Zone in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion, based on the book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Harrison Ford is likely to star in No True Glory, based on Bing West’s tale of the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war, for Fallujah, in April 2004. Ford would play Lieutenant General James Mattis, the controversial marine commander who played a key role in the campaign.

Why has Hollywood’s stance on war films shifted so overtly? Robert Thompson of Syracuse University believes the studios feel emboldened because we live in a very different media world from the one that prevailed during the Vietnam war. “The reason we didn’t see these kinds of films during Vietnam is that the studios and the television networks didn’t want to offend anybody, because they were focused on the mass audience,” he says. “Now the cable networks deliberately go after a niche audience. They aren’t so worried about offending half the audience if they can attract the rest.”

Thompson doesn’t believe this crop of post9/11 films emanates from a sinister conspiracy of antiwar Hollywood liberals. “Hollywood is run by a conspiracy,” he says, “but it’s not a liberal conspiracy, it’s not a conservative conspiracy – it’s a conspiracy of the marketplace. Which is why the films that have been made so far about the war, including World Trade Center and United 93, have been very conservative.”

But is the American public really ready to pay to see films about nasty, bloody, complicated wars that most wish would simply go away? Hollywood is about to learn the answer to that very expensive question.

The Kingdom opens on October 5, Rendition on October 12, Lions for Lambs on November 9

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