annual Diversity Report<\/a> showing the opposite. Of course, the vast majority of film executives, writers and directors are also white.<\/p>\nFor a few years, when it was socially and politically expedient, Hollywood experimented with diversity. After strikes by the writers\u2019 and screen actors\u2019 guilds \u2014 and after a shift in political headwinds \u2014 the industry retreated to the strategy it believed had always worked: casting white leads. Maybe, people wondered, the pendulum had swung too far in the diversity years; maybe we \u201cforced\u201d something people didn\u2019t want. <\/p>\n
This may sound like mustache-twirling racism, but it\u2019s accepted wisdom within Hollywood, even if it goes largely unspoken. After all, most American movies used to make at least half their returns in Western European countries, where it was assumed (but not proven) that the audiences were made up of mostly white people interested in watching mostly white actors. The other half of a movie\u2019s income was earned in America, where most of the box office audience was, until relatively recently, white. <\/p>\n
But this tenet doesn\u2019t make statistical sense in 2026. \u201cScary Movie,\u201d as a recent example, was No. 1 at the foreign box office, outperforming the latest \u201cStar Wars\u201d in places as unlikely as France. At the same time, a Jake Gyllenhaal- and Henry Cavill-led film was out grossed in America by \u201cDhurundar,\u201d a Hindi-language drama. And \u201cThe Breadwinner\u201d starring Nate Bargatze, who regularly sells out stadiums, made a fraction of what \u201cOne of Them Days,\u201d a film from the same studio starring Keke Palmer and SZA, brought in last summer.<\/p>\n
The bald data, reported each weekend, shows that the majority of theater-goers are now Latino and Black. It also says the global audience is increasingly dominated by the theatrical markets of Mexico and Brazil, but less and less dominated by Asia, which is more interested in its homegrown content. For many years, China was a stalwart of foreign box office proceeds. Its growing insularity may be a reaction to the white insularity of Hollywood.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just movies. Television, especially \u201cprestige\u201d TV, is dominated by the white bourgeois experience. They\u2019re all variations on the same story of suburban white people who love, divorce, murder, etc. In their persistent, reassuring homogeneity, these shows give a feeling of sameness that makes the industry feel like it has nothing original or vital to say. These shows are literal white noise, and they may be leading people back to their phones.<\/p>\n
All of this is a harsh and stinging contrast to the years when people regularly said \u201crepresentation matters,\u201d a phrase that may have ironically led to the decline of representation by training audiences to believe that some movies exist only for sake of representation, which seems to have very little to do with entertainment. These \u201crepresentation movies\u201d were often low budget and were the result of a system that encouraged a diverse collection of creators to say the only thing the system assumed they could say: their identity.<\/p>\n
The existence of art with such a thin premise led audiences (including minority audiences) to the understanding that a lot of diverse art is inessential and generated out of politeness, often cheaply. The engagement with these films was therefore quite low, leading to strange arguments that we should proudly see mediocre films for the sake of representation. But how many people want to spend $20 to support what appears to be a social justice initiative, potentially at the cost of entertainment? <\/p>\n
Even more galling to the proponents of representation: Minorities will still show up in droves for entirely white movies. On its opening weekend, half the audience of \u201cThe Housemaid,\u201d a truly delicious piece of white noise, was non-white. Why? Because white leads are often a proxy for quality; they don\u2019t necessarily give it that quality, but they\u2019re often given the best material and largest budgets. And they\u2019re allowed to tell stories that aren\u2019t simple statements of identity. They\u2019re allowed to entertain.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, executives seem to think white people won\u2019t watch films with diverse casts. That doesn\u2019t seem to have stopped the fortunes of Denzel Washington or Will Smith. I directed the 2024 film \u201cA Nice Indian Boy,\u201d a gay romantic comedy whose most fervent proponents, much like with \u201cHeated Rivalry,\u201d were white women. Maybe because we don\u2019t watch content that provides an exact correspondence to our personal identity; maybe because we\u2019re all interested in each others\u2019 stories.<\/p>\n
The solution is simple. All the industry needs, morally and financially, is not representation, but equity. Minorities should not appear in movies because they need to be represented. They should appear in movies because they make the movies better.<\/p>\n
If the industry provides actual access to opportunity, then it will discover more talent and connect to a wider audience. True equity has, in every industry, led to more talent. Medicine used to be largely male; now medical school classes are largely female because women on average score higher on the MCAT. Current medical trainees are largely Indian, Asian and Nigerian for the same reason. It\u2019s not because the children of immigrants have bigger brains; it\u2019s because they have something to prove.<\/p>\n
At every stage in its history, Hollywood has benefited from diversity. The best movies in the 1970s flowed directly from Akira Kurosawa. The Jedi are swishing around in robes and, in the case of Darth Vader, wearing literal samurai helmets, because of a Japanese filmmaker. The style of almost every modern action flick was pioneered by John Woo and Master Yuen Woo-ping. These original, global artists broke through the white noise; they said something you hadn\u2019t heard before.<\/p>\n
We only stand to gain from making movies and shows that are about more than the white bourgeois experience. If we don\u2019t, cinema will go the way of most white bourgeois art. Indeed, America is now approximately 45% non-white. In roughly a decade, white people will be the minority. The industry should return to the diversity years not out of politeness or an obligation to representation \u2014 but because it\u2019s the only way to survive.<\/p>\n
Roshan Sethi is a film director and the author of the forthcoming novel, \u201cThe Simp,\u201d<\/a> a satire of Hollywood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cObsession,\u201d this year\u2019s hit indie horror film, opened to audiences made up of 60% Black, Latino and Asian…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":887150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[40226,1582,276,12514,1020,14107,18769,3195,2961,224,5337,359905,3196,106709,3546,7171,359906,4370,158328,1628],"class_list":["post-887149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-audience","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-diversity","tag-film","tag-hollywood","tag-identity","tag-industry","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-minority-audience","tag-movie","tag-opening-weekend","tag-people","tag-representation","tag-same-story","tag-show","tag-white-people","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116799402917287279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/887150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}