*Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) highly drive box office revenue, according to a study of the top 252 English-language movies released last year.
The UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report chronicles the significant rise in on-camera representation in highly-rated movies in the past ten years. The finding is in the ninth installment of the respected group.
The same report also documents a slow growth in behind-the-scenes participation by people of color, especially Latino women.
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“Last year, every time a big movie exceeded expectations or broke a box office record, the majority of opening weekend audiences were people of color,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, co-author of the report and the director of research and civic engagement for UCLA’s social sciences division. “For people of color, and especially Latino families, theaters provided an excursion when almost everything else was shut down. In a sense, people of color kept studios afloat the past couple of years. Studios should consider them to be investors, and as investors, they should get a return in the form of representation.”
The year 2020, although battered by the pandemic, also ushered in a milestone achievement for the BIPOC: their representation in Hollywood as the mainstream film business peaked at what the study describes as “proportionate representation” on screen. That is, the casts of movies in aggregate is a reflection of the general level of diversity among the U.S. population.
For instance, the study found that films with 21%-30% of cast members from BIPOC backgrounds usually have the highest box office returns. However, movies with fewer BIPOC casts perform poorly.
“Minorities reached proportionate representation in 2020 for the first time when it comes to overall cast diversity in films, and that held true again in 2021,” said co-author Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at UCLA. “We suspect this is at least somewhat due to the outsize impact of the number of films we analyzed that were released direct-to-streaming.”
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