“Barbie” may have painted the box office pink last year, but the overall outlook for women in Hollywood might make you feel sad.
Women and people of color fueled the biggest box office winners of 2023, even as they remained underrepresented in the film industry, according to the latest UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report released today.
Despite last summer's “Barbie” juggernaut, women's representation among writers, lead actors and overall cast fell in 2023, and the proportion of women in the director's chair showed virtually no progress from the previous year.
Now in its 11th edition, the UCLA report analyzed the top English-language theatrical releases of 2023 and found that people of color accounted for the majority of opening weekend ticket sales for 14 of the top 20 films released the year. past, while women led ticket sales. buyers of three films in the top 10.
While the box office continued to struggle to return to its pre-pandemic levels overall, audiences flocked to films with diverse casts, according to the report.
Nine of the top 10 films globally featured casts that were more than 30% people of color, while five of the top 10 films featured casts that were more than 40% women. Films with casts made up of 31% to 40% people of color, such as “Barbie” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” had the highest average global box office earnings among films. 200 most important films of the year. to 119.8 million dollars.
Meanwhile, the franchise's 2023 installments, such as “Creed III,” “Scream VI” and “John Wick: Chapter 4,” all featuring casts with 50% or more actors of color, posted the biggest gains in their respective series, with audiences of color representing at least 60% of each film's opening weekend audience.
“After examining global and domestic box office success and audience demographics for more than a decade, we have repeatedly found that people want to see movies that reflect the diversity that exists in their communities and in the world,” said Ana- Christina Ramón, director. of the UCLA Media and Entertainment Research Initiative, in a statement accompanying the report.
According to the report, this trend continued to hold not only nationally but throughout the world. “Diversity sells here and abroad,” said co-author and UCLA doctoral candidate Michael Tran. “It is the opposite of the conventional myth. “The least diverse films performed the worst and even posted a negative return on the studio’s investment.”
Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in the movie “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
(Murray Close / Lionsgate)
But while women and people of color demonstrated their strength at the box office, when it came to representation within the industry itself, the picture was decidedly more mixed.
“Barbie,” directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, proved to be a watershed cultural event and broke box office records, grossing $1.4 billion at the global box office, the most for any film ever directed by a woman. But the film's message of female empowerment belied a deeper lack of progress for women in the industry.
According to the report, only five of the top 200 films were directed by women of color, and only three films directed by women had budgets of $100 million or more, compared to 25 films directed by men with that budget level.
The UCLA report's findings echoed those of a report released earlier this year by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative that criticized studios' efforts toward inclusion in hiring in recent years. as “performative acts” and “non-real steps” toward change.
While people of color remain underrepresented in all major areas of the industry, the report points to some signs of progress. Representation of leading actors, directors and writers of color recorded the highest proportions in each of those categories in the studio's 11-year history. The proportion of theatrical films directed by people of color reached 22.8%, up 6% from the previous year and almost double what it was in 2011. The number of theatrical films with a budget of $100 million or more directed by people of color reached its highest level in the study's 11-year history.
Still, the authors cautioned that it is not clear that the trajectory will continue. “These advances are most likely the result of projects that were greenlit three years ago,” said Darnell Hunt, executive vice chancellor and provost at UCLA, and co-founder of the report with Ramón. “We are in a very different and politicized place, and as the efforts and executives who championed inclusion and equity disappear from the studios, will the next three to five years show a free fall in terms of diversity in Hollywood?”
As Hollywood still tries to regain its footing after last year's devastating strikes between writers and actors, the study's authors conclude that embracing diversity remains not only a moral but a strategic imperative for the industry going forward. (The report was funded by UCLA, Netflix, the Golden Globe Foundation, the Latino Film Institute, the Walt Disney Company and Hulu.)
“If Hollywood sacrifices the progress it has made on diversity, how will it sustain itself?” the report asks in its conclusion. “Any remake of Hollywood must prioritize investing in diversity in front of and behind the camera.”
You can read the full report here.
