Streaming Films More Inclusive of Female and POC Directors Than Theatrical — Study

The 10th annual UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report has found that streaming releases are more inclusive than theatrical films.

UCLA sociologists Dr. Darnell Hunt and Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón analyzed the top box office performers and streaming hits of 2022, finding that race/ethnic and gender diversity in many key jobs for theatrical releases backslid to pre-pandemic 2019 levels.

However, women and people of color are finding more job opportunities in streaming releases. This is the first year the UCLA study has separated streaming and theatrical releases for analysis. Per the study, researchers separated employment data for movies produced for the big screen and those destined for streaming. As a result, the gains in diversity for theatrical releases melted away.

“People of color saved the theatrical industry during the pandemic, and they are key to bringing the theatrical business back to its pre-pandemic levels,” Ramón, director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, said in a statement. “Our research shows that diversity in the movies is just good business.”

However, it was still mostly white men who have helmed a “supermajority of big budget films,” as the study found. White men accounted for 73 percent of film directors on the big screen, and 60 percent of those films had a budget of $30 million or more. In contrast, white women tended to operate with lower budgets in theatrical projects (56 percent of their films had budgets smaller than $20 million) while directors of color tended to have the lowest budgets in streaming (76 percent of these films had budgets below $20 million).

As statistically proven, female directors or people of color hire more diverse casts, and movies with more diverse casts outperform the least diverse films at the box office and in streaming ratings. More streaming films had diverse casts (64 percent had casts that were more than 30 percent minority) compared to theatrical films (57 percent).

And yet those projects are not receiving the same levels of funding from Hollywood: Theatrical releases directed by women tend to have lower budgets, and directors of color tend to have lower budgets in streaming.

“Hollywood has to look itself in the mirror and identify the concrete practices that actually work to move the needle on the industry’s diversity problem,” Hunt, who is also a professor of sociology and African American studies at UCLA, said.

In theatrical releases, people of color composed only 22 percent of lead actors, 17 percent of directors, and 12 percent of writers. Women were 39 percent of lead actors and 15 percent of directors.

In contrast, streaming originals had casts more reflective of the U.S. population. Women’s share of leads (49 percent) was at parity with men, and racial diversity was also evident. However, writers who are women of color continued to be severely underrepresented. Even though theatrical releases with women writers have gone up 10 percentage points since 2019, only one woman of color penned a top theatrical film in 2022. They were also underrepresented among top streaming film writers.

The two films that were streamed the most in 2022 — “Turning Red” (2022) and “Encanto” (2021) — were both animated movies that told coming-of-age stories about young girls of color. “Turning Red” was, notably, directed by a woman of color.

“These films were culturally specific yet universally relatable,” Ramón said. “With more than half of the current population under the age of 18 belonging to communities of color, these young people will grow up and demand films with protagonists who look like them and who live like them.”

Streaming films with diverse casts drove high social media engagement, also resonating with the younger generation.

In addition to separating streaming from theatrical in study findings, the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report provided data on South Asian representation specifically and disability representation for the first time in the 2023 study.

The report found that South Asians were minimally represented in top films. Actors with disabilities are also poorly represented in both theatrical and streaming. Even though roughly a quarter of adults in the U.S. have disabilities, actors with disabilities made up no more than 10 percent of leads and no more than 5 percent of all onscreen roles in either theatrical or streaming films. Researchers identified disability status using actors’ publicly stated disabilities, information that only recently became available on reliable third-party databases.

The 2023 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report is funded in part by leadership sponsors of Netflix and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, with The Walt Disney Company and Hulu serving as annual sponsors.

“Diversity should not be considered a luxury but a necessity,” Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost and co-founder of the Hollywood Diversity Report, summarized. “Audiences of color are the bedrock of Hollywood and key to the bottom line as research shows once again that audiences prefer diverse casts.”

The report concluded that diversity is the key to competing globally and for Hollywood to stay relevant domestically.

“As the film industry continues to face unprecedented uncertainty, this report identifies a path forward,” co-author Michael Tran, a PhD Candidate in the UCLA sociology department, said. “The pandemic has normalized diversity on screen, not just in theaters but at home. Audiences tuned in. If Hollywood reverses course on diversity in the theaters, they’ll lose audiences to streaming and to international offerings.”