Diversity In Hollywood Is Essential To Its Survival, Report Finds

Hollywood executives are deprioritizing diversity “at their own peril,” a new report out Thursday warns.

Diversity is essential to the entertainment industry’s survival as moviegoers of color consistently drive box-office success, movies with more diverse casts tend to perform best at the box office and prioritizing diversity behind the camera is often what ensures diversity on screen. These have all been consistent findings in the annual editions of the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, including in the latest report, released Thursday.

For over a decade, the team behind the report, led by UCLA sociologists Ana-Christina Ramón and Darnell Hunt, has tracked the relationship between diversity and Hollywood’s bottom line. The reports have perennially documented how people of color drive box office success, both as consumers and producers.

All of that once again held true in 2023, when people of color dominated opening weekend sales for 14 of the top 20 highest-earning films premiering in U.S. theaters. In addition, women drove the box office success of three of the top 10 films, including the highest-grossing movie of last year, “Barbie.” (The researchers plan to release a second installment of the report, examining streaming films, later this year.)

The report has routinely documented that audiences will show up for movies with diverse casts. That was once again the case in 2023, with blockbusters like “Barbie,” “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” which all featured casts with a significant portion of actors of color.

For the second consecutive year, the researchers tracked disability as a category. In 2023, three of the 20 biggest films at the box office, and one of the top 10, featured casts in which more than 20% of the actors had a known disability, they found.

These patterns also hold at the global box office. The report has continually challenged Hollywood executives’ conventional wisdom that diversity doesn’t sell internationally. Once again, the global box office results in 2023 debunked that myth as movies with predominantly white casts consistently underperformed internationally, according to the report. In 2023, nine of the top 10 films at the global box office featured casts that were more than 30% people of color. Movies with 11% or fewer actors of color did the worst at the global box office, making just $18.2 million. Financial success also comes to movies that…