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Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
With DEI Rollbacks, the Business of Hollywood May Take a Hit
Today, America is more diverse than it's ever been, with people of color representing 43% of the total U.S. population as of 2021 — a 34% jump from 2010. The same goes for women, the disabled and LGTBQ+ communities, with rapid growth among historically marginalized groups. Yet despite that growth and an audience demand for more inclusive stories, Hollywood studios have scaled back their inclusion efforts to mollify President Donald Trump and his supporters at the possible cost of alienating a large and growing group of consumers. 'It's a horrible business decision and certainly not the right thing to do,' Darnell Hunt, UCLA's executive vice chancellor and provost, told TheWrap. 'It's very unfortunate, and of course it is a reflection of what the current administration is trying to do, rolling back decades of progress we made on the inclusion and diversity front for Hollywood in particular,' Hunt, who co-founded the university's annual Hollywood Diversity Report, continued. 'The majority of babies born in America today are babies of color, and the population is moving towards minority majority status in a couple decades. So not to have diversity in an industry that's producing stories that need to appeal to diverse audiences is a devastating mistake.' 'What's happening in Hollywood isn't necessarily too different from what's happening in other sectors,' Portia Allen-Kyle, interim executive director of the activist group Color of Change, told TheWrap in an interview. 'We see corporations who are primarily motivated by profit and power capitulating and seeking to fall in line with an administration that has made very clear and transparent that they are not on board with diversity, equity and inclusion,' she added. Changes to Hollywood's DEI initiatives have been real and immediate. Since Trump's inauguration, major conglomerates including Disney, Amazon, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. have cut out or adjusted their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a decision experts and advocates say will ultimately leave a hole in their bottom line. But as TheWrap has reported for nearly two years, DEI programs were already being rolled back, even before the election of Trump. The communities being marginalized by these rollbacks are Hollywood's bread and butter. Not only are minority groups quickly becoming the majority, they also consume more media. Black audiences, despite making up only 14.4% of the country's population, take the lead, spending an average of 3.55 hours per day watching TV, according to a 2024 Nielsen report. The Hispanic/Latino community, the second-largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S. at 19.1%, accounts for 24% of box office ticket sales and 24% of streaming subscribers. In addition, U.S. Latinos see films an average of 3.3 times a year, per capita, compared to Asian Americans (2.9) and white Americans (2.3). However, they only make up less than 5% of the leading on-screen, off-screen and executive leadership roles in U.S. media. In 2021, McKinsey and Company released a report that showed Hollywood loses out on nearly $10 billion a year when it undervalues TV and film projects by Black creators. In 2023, the same year hit films 'Barbie,' 'The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes' and 'Creed III' premiered, UCLA released a study showing that films with casts that were 31% to 40% people of color earned the highest median global box office receipts, while films featuring casts with 11% people of color performed the poorest. That year, female moviegoers bought the majority of opening weekend domestic tickets for three of the top films. 'One of the things our report has shown is that audiences want to see diverse content, that as shows look to American society and become more diverse, they make more money, they get higher ratings on TV and more box office on film,' Hunt said. 'So these rollbacks by the studios and getting rid of shows that obviously reach out to broader audiences are going to hurt their bottom line in the long run.' Hollywood's recent retreat on DEI is one America has seen before. Between the small boost in diverse narratives and representation following the #OscarsSoWhite outcry in 2015 and racial reckoning that took place after the murder of George Floyd, Hollywood has long teetered along the lines of standing firm on its promise for equality in show business. Other activists TheWrap spoke to said while Hollywood's DEI rollbacks are disappointing, it comes as no surprise given that the promises to improve in those areas were already lackluster by their estimates. 'We've been dealing with a lack of representation and a lot of tokenization for a long time, and I think that a lot of DEI efforts in Hollywood were kind of hollow anyway — at least with disability and where it's concerned,' Dom Evans, co-founder of FilmDis, a media organization that consults on disability in media, told TheWrap. Similarly, LGBTQ+ and plus-sized characters combined only make up a total of 10% of roles in the highest-grossing U.S. films, per a 2024 study from the Geena Davis Institute. Kyle Bowser, the senior vice president of the NAACP's Hollywood bureau, said Hollywood is merely playing the same record it's had on repeat for years, adding that the NAACP is mostly concerned with how Hollywood will profit off Black culture. 'What we're most concerned about is the extent to which our culture will continue to be exploited and often even appropriated without the remuneration aid back to our community for that contribution,' Bowser said. 'Our culture is often on the screen even when we're not, and that's been going on for decades.' Evans added that one of the issues the disabled community faces as it relates to accurate and fair representation on screen is inauthentic and/or performative DEI practices. He recalled a time when a major studio ignored his constructive notes on a film as it pertained to its depiction of disabled people. 'I found out that I was one of five [consultants]. They had five different disabled people tell them, 'Don't make this project. It's horrible. You need to rewrite it. You need more consultants that are specifically from these disabled communities.' All of us were ignored, all five of us,' Evans shared. 'I don't think they were looking for consultants, I think they were looking for yes men, yes women or yes people. They wanted the disabled person who would be most palatable to them, and we weren't, because we want better.' Color of Change's Allen-Kyle highlighted how Hollywood's DEI reversal mirrors the changes being made in other industries, specifically as it relates to what appears to be a shared belief system that opposes a need for equity and inclusion. 'Unfortunately what we're seeing is a number of companies and their willingness to be complicit in this moment that is kind of a characterizing of the response to this very blatant anti-civil rights, anti-progress, anti-inclusion agenda — what we've been calling the neo-segregationist agenda of this current administration.' The origins of DEI trace back to the Civil Rights movement and came about as a way to provide marginalized communities with the same opportunities that have been historically afforded to white people. From in-house diversity training, to diverse hiring initiatives, to pipeline programs that help fill the gaps left behind by segregation, racism and sexism in the workplace, DEI has been around for decades. And ironically, white women have been its primary beneficiary. 'When white women really understand their progress is tied to the expansion and the requirements for folks to look outside of the white, old boys network that they've benefited from … it actually benefits everybody when inclusion is policy,' Allen-Kyle said. Even with the implementation of DEI, disenfranchised communities have continued to face inequality in Hollywood. While some gains have been made, Black filmmakers still receive 40% less financial support compared to films by non-Black filmmakers, only 1.5 out of 10 theatrical film directors are women and white writers still make up the largest share of TV employment (63%). The issue now is how to respond. While Hunt questioned the likelihood of a protest in Hollywood, Evans suggested one way for creatives to resist is by being more sharp-witted when making business deals. 'I think that we're going to have to be much more savvy and find ways to make our own stuff together,' Evans said. What about a boycott? For Hunt, the possibility of a movement similar to the ongoing boycotts against Fortune 500 companies really depends on how clearly audiences correlate the content they view with companies behind them and the policies they have in place. 'I think audiences maybe don't make the connection between what they're watching, their favorite show and their favorite star that they identify with,' Hunt explained. 'Unless, of course, those favorite on screen personalities that they can relate to actually come out front and take a stand and encourage them to boycott – that rarely happens. Not to say that it wouldn't happen in this case. It's hard to predict the future.' Tess Patton contributed to this report. The post With DEI Rollbacks, the Business of Hollywood May Take a Hit appeared first on TheWrap.
Los Angeles Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In Trump's second term, Hollywood sweeps DEI efforts under the rug
It only took five years for Hollywood to back track on its big diversity push after the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd's murder by police in Minneapolis. In the weeks since President Trump retook office, entertainment and media companies, like much of corporate America, have quickly moved to water down and dismantle efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — both internally and in the content they produce. This comes after Trump in January issued an executive order that tasked the U.S. attorney general with going after private-sector DEI programs that, in his view, constitute illegal discrimination based on race and sex. Not long after that, the Federal Communications Commission, led by Trump-appointed chairman Brendan Carr, launched a probe into NBCUniversal owner Comcast Corp. to 'root out' such initiatives. As all this took shape, Paramount Global dropped staffing goals related to gender, race, ethnicity and sex; Warner Bros. Discovery rebranded its DEI activities as simply 'inclusion'; and Walt Disney Co. scrapped a 'diversity and inclusion' performance standard used to calculate executive compensation. Meanwhile, Disney continued to shift gears in the culture war, removing a trans athlete storyline from its Pixar animated series 'Win or Lose.' As my colleague Samantha Masunaga wrote recently, this backpedaling has been going on for quite some time. Although diversity initiatives aren't perfect, advocates for greater inclusion worry that gutting them will result in fewer opportunities for people of color. In 2023, a raft of high-level media and entertainment executives in charge of diversity efforts resigned or were pushed out, leading experts to worry that the businesses' goals to make themselves more inclusive were just a passing fad. For companies, the writing has been on the wall since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Indeed, a recent study examining the highest-grossing films of 2024 determined that studios have started to backslide on representation when it comes to race. Actors of color accounted for 25.2% of lead roles in the top theatrical films of 2024, down from 29.2% in 2023, according to the most recent UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report. The number of films directed by people of color also dropped in 2024 compared with 2023. Directors of color accounted for 20.2% of 2024 movies, down from 22.9% for the prior year. People of color account for about 44% of the U.S. population. On the corporate side, the rate of reduction in DEI roles in the film and TV industry outpaced the general decrease in employment, according to a review by workforce database company Revelio Labs, which tabulated jobs at Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Studios and Amazon Studios. The DEI flashpoint is just one front in Trump's ongoing fight with mainstream media institutions, which are trying to combat and cope with an ongoing erosion in audience levels and trust. Trump is suing CBS News over edits to its '60 Minutes' interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The FCC is probing the network over the same issue. CBS and its parent company Paramount are fighting both battles on 1st Amendment grounds. Paramount's controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has agitated for a settlement to help move along the company's pending merger with David Ellison's Skydance Media. But as tempting as it is to blame Trump for the shift, there are a variety of factors at play. The backlash against companies doing anything 'woke' exploded into the open as Disney feuded with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over anti-LGBTQ+ legislation governing schools and conservatives boycotted Bud Light over its social media activation with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Much of the entertainment sector has gone through a significant economic retrenchment after years of overspending during the so-called streaming wars, and diversity initiatives are often among the first things cut in such situations. That's despite the fact the executives often tout diversity and representation as being good for business. The most cynical take is that the studios were never all that serious about diversity, equity and inclusion to begin with, even amid the fervent calls for racial justice that broke out in 2020 with protests sweeping the U.S. The people and programs put in place to advance such goals weren't given the authority necessary to produce real change. The most generous reading is that many of the recent changes that the companies have made to their internal policies are surface-level. Karen Horne, who previously oversaw DEI efforts at Warner Bros. Discovery, told The Times that many companies 'are still doing the work, they're just not being as loud about it. They're just doing it quietly.' On the flip side, studios are not being shy about trying to cater more to red-state viewers in light of the country's cultural shift. This goes beyond avoiding critique of the Trump administration or highlighting topics that provoke the ire of conservatives, as outlets including The Times and the Wall Street Journal have pointed out. A&E has announced a 'Duck Dynasty' revival. Amazon on Monday said it's bringing episodes of Trump's reality show 'The Apprentice' to Prime Video. 'Shifting Gears,' the latest sitcom from Trump admirer Tim Allen, is a hit for Disney-owned ABC. In the Trump era, as in any other, Hollywood is going back to what it already knows how to do. Elon Musk's feud with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, explained. The Tesla and X chief's legal dispute against OpenAI could affect the future of one of the most prominent leaders in artificial intelligence. Paramount says Trump's CBS '60 Minutes' lawsuit seeks to 'punish' network. The media company on Thursday asked a federal judge in Texas to dismiss the $20-billion lawsuit. Paramount separately has agreed to have a mediator look at the case as it tries to complete its merger with Skydance. Oscars 2025 surprise: Viewership up slightly from last year at 19.7 million. The availability of the 97th Academy Awards on streaming platform Hulu likely added younger viewers to the telecast. Layoffs hit ABC News and Disney's entertainment TV channels. The Walt Disney Co.-owned news and entertainment divisions are cutting 6% of their workforce. Data journalism unit 538 is shuttered. ICYMI: Bong Joon Ho's 'Mickey 17,' his follow-up to the best picture-winning 'Parasite,' opened with a sluggish $19.1 million in the U.S. and Canada, for a global gross of $53.3 million. That's a poor result, considering its production budget was $118 million, which doesn't count marketing expenses. The film is yet another example of the challenges of launching a big-budget high-concept sci-fi without established intellectual property attached ('Mickey 17' is based on a 2022 novel, but this isn't exactly 'The Da Vinci Code.') The movie earned decent reviews from critics but a less promising 'B' grade from CinemaScore, which doesn't bode well for this Warner Bros. release. 'Bluey' is a boon for Disney+. During her talk at last week's Morgan Stanley investor conference, Disney entertainment co-chair Dana Walden noted that the beloved Australian kids program was the most streamed show of 2024 on U.S. televisions. Americans streamed 55.6 billion minutes of the show last year. As LightShed analyst Rich Greenfield recently pointed out, 'Bluey' accounts for a substantial amount of the traffic on Disney+. Keep in mind, though, that Disney doesn't actually own the show; it licenses 'Bluey' from BBC Studios, which handles distribution rights. Queensland-based Ludo Studio produces the Joe Brumm-created series. But Disney is certainly doing what it can to capitalize on the success. A 'Bluey' feature film is headed to theaters in 2027. Last week, local on-location production was still down significantly from the same period of time in 2024. Read and watch: The Times' interview with comedian Andrew Schulz about his new Netflix special, 'Life.' Read: Smart take on Joan Didion's relationship with Hollywood.
