Just one film studio gets ‘good' rating for LGBT+ representation
Transgender representation remains low, with only two 2024 films featuring trans characters and a decrease in screen time for LGBT+ characters overall.
Racial diversity among LGBT+ characters in films has decreased to the lowest level since 2019.
GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said authentic LGBT+ representation in films is important as a means of visibility, especially amid political attacks.
A24 was the only studio to receive a 'good' rating for LGBT+ inclusion, with 56 per cent of its films being LGBT+ inclusive, including titles like Queer and Love Lies Bleeding.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
Final Draft review – could you do 3,240 sit-ups then have a lovely old chinwag?
In a giant TV studio somewhere in Japan, a retired baseball player and a former rugby star are 40 minutes into a competition to see who can do the most sit-ups. Lying with their feet hooked to the top of a steep, bright-pink slide that has long since become a river of sweat, they must respond to a buzzer every five seconds by hauling themselves up using just their abs and hitting a button with their foreheads. They've both done that more than 500 times – when someone eventually misses a rep, their feet detach and down they go. If this were Squid Game, the slide would end with a lethal drop. But instead it's Final Draft, a wholesome and emotional Japanese reality sports contest for ex-sportspeople, so all that's at risk is the right to remain in the competition. As a long sequence of incredibly gruelling elimination showdowns whittles 25 contestants down to the one who will win ¥30m (about £150,000), Squid Game is an influence, but so are Gladiators and Ninja Warrior, as well as modern Netflix sports fests like Physical: 100 and Ultimate Beastmaster. Mature British viewers might think of 1970s BBC stalwart Superstars, the multi-event contest between athletes from different disciplines that briefly threatened to turn parallel bar dips into the UK's national sport. Watching from outside the UK, the barrier to entry here is that, unless you're so keen on water polo, kabaddi, American football or ultimate Frisbee that you watch those sports' Japanese domestic leagues, you will have heard of very few of the contestants. Perhaps Japanese viewers won't be that familiar with them either, since the lineup mixes champions with those who never quite made it. So who cares which of these ripped strangers will be the best at running up a mountain or traversing a monkey bar course? The endeavours in Final Draft are long grinds but the contestants are a happy, humble bunch and, watching them in adversity, we get to know and like them. Emerging personalities include gentle-natured bodybuilder Kenta Tsukamoto, and Hozumi Hasegawa, a wise, wiry boxer with three world-title belts. Olympic wrestler Eri Tosaka's determination and cunning makes her the most likely of the female contestants to defy the odds in a contest that has a few too many events based on pure physical strength. The star, though, is retired baseball hitter Yoshio Itoi, who looks less like a sportsman and more like the singer in a revered art-pop band– with his high cheekbones, debonair grin and the sort of floppy hair most 43-year-olds don't have the looks to get away with. Yet he soon proves to be fearsomely strong. Think Bryan Ferry on creatine, or Brett Anderson if he could deadlift a speaker stack. Final Draft needs alluring characters like Itoi-san, because there is a lot of time to fill. The season runs to an endurance-sapping six episodes, or enough time to perform 3,240 sit-ups: the events last for ever, and then in between the epic bouts of grunting and grappling, there's a lot of chat. The post-exertion interviews tend towards the bland, earnest and obvious: 'I was surprised,' people say after something happens that is to some extent unexpected. 'I was happy,' they report when an event goes well. The 10-second skip button is your friend as every eliminated contestant gives more or less the same speech about how much they respect their conquerors. To try to keep us entertained, the show employs every reality-contest trick it can think of, from splitting the gang into two groups with either luxury or basic accommodation, to allowing tearful Zoom calls with proud loved ones back home. Eventually, it all leads us to what the show is really about, which is the quiet tragedy of the sportsperson whose career is over. Having had to stop doing the thing they loved due to age, injury or just not being good enough, none of these people have known what to do with their 30s and 40s, and have ended up running fledgling businesses that provide paltry incomes, or working low-level jobs with bosses who are younger than them. Over dinner, or in the panting aftermath of another painful stamina test, they bond over the sadness of dead dreams and regrets that their glory days weren't greater. That prize money would fund a precious new start. So it does matter whether or not a guy with a sprained ankle can push a giant medicine ball up a slope, and the finale – a three-way tug of war, each labouring to drag themselves to victory, inch by agonising inch – is gripping despite being a much longer scene of grimacing sports personalities trying to pull each other over with ropes than you ever thought you could tolerate. Stick with Final Draft and your hard work is, eventually, rewarded. Final Draft is on Netflix now.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Ambika Mod says 'brown women have to work ten times harder' to win roles as she doubles down on claim that One Day co-star Leo Woodall 'was treated differently' after show became a Netflix hit
Ambika Mod has doubled down on her opinion that her and her One Day co-star Leo Woodall 'weren't treated the same' with the calibre of roles they landed after the show's success. The pair starred as lovers in the hit Netflix show - but in the months that followed many of her fans on social media pointed out the differences between her and Woodall's career trajectories. After One Day Leo notable landed a role in Tony, A24's Anthony Bourdain biopic. One penned on X at the time: 'It's quite sad to see that despite being in incredibly popular, high-performing shows the POC women are never booked as much as their white counterparts'. Ambika subsequently said in an interview: 'We just don't get treated the same at all.', something which she reiterated in an interview with The Times this Sunday. Speaking of if she regretted her remarks, she explained: 'Not really. I mean, it's the truth! 'This is nothing I've not said to Leo's face, by the way… Obviously it's not personal. It's just the industry and the way that our society works. 'If you're brown, if you're a woman, if you don't have any connections, you do just have to work ten times harder to get half as far. That's sadly a reality of it.' Ambika will soon play a porn addict in a new stage show at Britain's most 'experimental' publicly funded theatre. The Royal Court has announced that they will be staging Sophia Chetin-Leuner's Porn Play, which focuses on a female academic who is addicted to pornography, and also tackles the taboo topic of female masturbation. The play was informed by a study which suggested that women are statistically more likely to watch violent pornography than men. Ambika will take on the leading role in the play, which will be directed by Josie Rourke. David Byrne, the Royal Court's artistic director, said the play had a 'conversation that I have not seen anywhere else'. He said: 'It is going to be a play that everybody will be talking about. Of course the subject matter elicits attention but it is a really deep and complex work.' Chetin-Leuner, a London-based playwright, previously said she started writing Porn Play, because she 'wanted to write something that I had never seen on stage before, and I had never seen a woman masturbate so it started from there'. Ambika and Leo were praised by fans when they starred in Netflix's One Day last year, which was based on the novel of the same name by David Nicholls. One Day follows the story of Emma and Dexter after meeting on the final night at Edinburgh University and the next 20 years of their lives on the same date, July 15. The two graduates become integral to each other's lives with a series of 'will they won't they' moments and obstacles in the path of a possible romance. The Daily Mail revealed Ambika originally turned down the role of Emma Morley after the star explained she found it was a 'massive, massive undertaking' given Emma was previously played by Anne Hathaway, 41, in the 2011 adaptation. She said: 'It was definitely originally written as white and previously played by a white actress. I'm really excited to bring something new to the role, I hope that young women who don't see themselves on screen that often see that it's possible. Ambika admitted she wouldn't have landed the role 10 years ago due to her skin colour, saying: 'I'm very different to Anne Hathaway, so I was never worried about that. Just the fact that I'm not white and I'm getting to play Emma. 'I don't think that would have happened ten years ago. That in itself is a way to modernise the story.'
BBC News
3 days ago
- BBC News
'It took a big hit for the studio': How dark and daring gamble The Black Cauldron became a notorious Disney flop
Disney Animation's ambitious and innovative 1985 film The Black Cauldron was an experiment that dramatically failed, arguably putting the future of the studio in question. Disney Animation was on the lookout for a new identity in the 1980s. After half-a-century of success, this decade of the company's history is commonly referred to as the "Bronze" or "Dark Age", neither exactly a ringing endorsement of its films. Hope came in the form of The Black Cauldron, which seemed like the perfect way to announce a new kind of Disney animation. It was the studio's first foray into high fantasy, a PG-rated film about a young boy trying to stop a mythical cauldron that can create an army of undead soldiers (the so-called "Cauldron-Born" scene, in which an undead army emerges from a boiling pot is still terrifying, 40 years on). It signalled that Disney was ready to appeal to a new audience. Instead, The Black Cauldron was a disaster for the studio. A box office failure, it earned $21m (£15.6m) less than half of its $44m (£32.7m) budget. It came in fourth on its opening weekend, behind National Lampoon's European Vacation, a re-release of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, and Back to the Future, already a month into its theatrical run. At the time of its release in 1985, it was the most expensive animated film ever made. Instead of being the film that would take Disney to new heights, The Black Cauldron has become known as the film that nearly took down the company. That perception seems to have first emerged in a 2010 Slate article, which stated that the film "almost killed Disney animation". In 2025, it's hard to have a conversation about The Black Cauldron without it being mentioned that it almost shut down the animation department. But is that a justified claim, or is it merely a myth that's lingered for decades?
