Wednesday Morning Rant

As the Hollywood strike continues into its second quarter, the effects are starting to ripple through the industry further and further into the future. Release dates keep slipping, the "content pipeline" continues to drain and entire segments of the industry - like the late-night talk shows - may be actually gone, never to return. Regardless, the academic business of Hollywood continues uninterrupted.

Hollywood's adjunct university - USC - has recently completed its 2022 "Hollywood Diversity Report" and it reflects how the single-mindless obsession with "representation" is the lone standard. You might not have realized it, but did you know that Hollywood is doing a bad job on diversity and it's still a hateful white boys' club?

So what is the study from USC's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative - the "leading think tank in the world studying diversity and inclusion in entertainment through original research and sponsored projects?" It looks at movies and does a racial and sexual nose-counting:

Analyzing the 100 highest-grossing movies at the box office each year since 2007, AI2's sample size has now reached 1,600 titles and 69,858 speaking characters.

It's the top 100 best-grossing movies with a theatrical release. That's it. The study doesn't look at all movies, nor does take into account direct-to-consumer (nowadays, that's streaming) movies at all. Just the top 100 most successful movies in theaters per year for 16 years. So what did they actually study? Did they study Hollywood? No, not at all. They studied the audience.

They don't seem to realize that they're studying the audience, but they are. They're looking at top-grossing movies, that is the movies that people were most willing to pay money to go see and the movies that the audience demanded the most. The "representation problem" in Hollywood is not a Hollywood phenomenon at all, it is an audience phenomenon. It's the movie-going public - not Hollywood itself - that doesn't reward diversity and inclusion. When organizations like UCLA cast a wider net, they see that Hollywood entertainment is increasingly "representative."

The lone major improvement identified by the Annenberg study - "Asian representation" - isn't even Hollywood's doing:

The data, [Stacy L. Smith, a professor of communications and head of the initiative] says, suggests that shifts in Asian representation in film can largely be attributed to increased audience appetite for foreign films, not efforts by American studios to diversity Hollywood. "It's a function of the box office changing," she argues, "not the decisions of legacy studios."

The real conclusion the industry should draw - if it were to take off its blinders and see it - is that diversity vehicles don't sell. The DIE obsession in Hollywood isn't profitable. When they build it, the audience does not come. A functional industry would realize this and try to serve its customers.

Hollywood, of course, is not a functional industry.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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