Is Hollywood done catering to diverse audiences?

Roshan Sethi, Tribune News Service

“Obsession,” this year’s hit indie horror film, opened to audiences made up of 60% Black, Latino and Asian filmgoers. “Backrooms” drew an audience comprised of 62% minority groups. “Michael” drew in 75% and “Scary Movie” topped the list with 76%. That’s just the last four box office hits. If you look back at every hit across the last two years, the audiences — as reported by PostTrak, a widely used industry tracking service that surveys filmgoers as they exit theaters on opening weekend — were majority non-white. That’s also true, on a global scale, for “Zootopia 2,” “Lilo & Stitch,” “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “Sinners” and “Final Destination Bloodlines.”

White audiences have stopped going to the theaters in the same numbers they used to, yet the vast majority of movies spotlight white leads despite there being no evidence that audiences prefer them. In fact, for years, UCLA has published a detailed annual Diversity Report showing the opposite. Of course, the vast majority of film executives, writers and directors are also white. For a few years, when it was socially and politically expedient, Hollywood experimented with diversity. After strikes by the writers’ and screen actors’ guilds — and after a shift in political headwinds — 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 “forced” something people didn’t want.

This may sound like mustache-twirling racism, but it’s 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’s income was earned in America, where most of the box office audience was, until relatively recently, white.

But this tenet doesn’t make statistical sense in 2026. “Scary Movie,” as a recent example, was No. 1 at the foreign box office, outperforming the latest “Star Wars” in places as unlikely as France. At the same time, a Jake Gyllenhaal- and Henry Cavill-led film was out grossed in America by “Dhurundar,” a Hindi-language drama. And “The Breadwinner” starring Nate Bargatze, who regularly sells out stadiums, made a fraction of what “One of Them Days,” a film from the same studio starring Keke Palmer and SZA, brought in last summer.

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.

It’s not just movies. Television, especially “prestige” TV, is dominated by the white bourgeois experience. They’re 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.

All of this is a harsh and stinging contrast to the years when people regularly said “representation matters,” 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 “representation movies” 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.

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?

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 “The Housemaid,” a truly delicious piece of white noise, was non-white. Why? Because white leads are often a proxy for quality; they don’t necessarily give it that quality, but they’re often given the best material and largest budgets. And they’re allowed to tell stories that aren’t simple statements of identity. They’re allowed to entertain.

Meanwhile, executives seem to think white people won’t watch films with diverse casts. That doesn’t seem to have stopped the fortunes of Denzel Washington or Will Smith. I directed the 2024 film “A Nice Indian Boy,” a romantic comedy whose most fervent proponents, much like with “Heated Rivalry,” were white women. Maybe because we don’t watch content that provides an exact correspondence to our personal because we’re all interested in each others’ stories.