Directing in Hollywood is still mostly Mojo Dojo Casa

Greta Gerwig’s hit song “Barbie” The film dominated headlines in 2023, grossing more than $1 billion at the box office and becoming one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the year. But Gerwig’s successful trajectory from directing independent films to the highest-grossing film of 2023 — and the highest-grossing film directed by any woman in history — remains an exception to the rule. The directors’ club remains at the top of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters and is Mojo Dojo Casa House, the masculine residence of Ken (Ryan Gosling) in her film.

Women and people of color, especially women of color, remain woefully underrepresented in the director’s chair in major theatrical releases. It’s an ongoing problem every year, and unfortunately 2023 is no different, according to the latest research from the World Health Organization. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiativewhich collected data on representation and inclusion in Hollywood dating back to 2007.

Based on the initiative’s data, it has become increasingly clear that recent pledges from Hollywood’s gatekeepers to hire more directors from underrepresented communities have been “performative acts by the entertainment industry rather than real steps toward promoting change,” the group founded by Professor Stacey of Southern California University. California. Smith, in his latest report, the results of which were released on Tuesday.

Year after year, the initiative finds subtle changes in the levels of women and people of color directing major films. For example, over the past 17 years, only 19 women of color have directed at least one of the top 100 box office films annually (out of a total of 1,700 films between 2007 and 2023), according to the group’s data. .

Four of them were in 2023: Adele Lim (“Joy Ride”), Celine Song (“Past Lives”), Faun Vierasunthorn (“Wish”), and Nia DaCosta (“The Marvels”), who was the only black woman to direct a film . Big movie at the box office last year. These four women of color represent just 3.4% of the directors of the 100 highest-grossing films of 2023. This number was similarly low in 2022, when 2.7% of the directors of the highest-grossing films were women of color.

Women have also generally made few, if any, gains in directing in recent years. According to the report, only 12.1% of the directors of the top 100 films at the box office for the year 2023 were women, which is hardly different from 2022, when the number was 9%. “The proportion has not changed significantly since 2018, when 4.5% of directors were women,” the report said. On average, over the 17 years of group data, only 6% of major film directors were women.

“These numbers are not just data points on a graph,” Smith said in a statement. “They represent real, talented women working toward sustainable careers in an industry that will not hire them for jobs they are qualified for just because of who they are.”

Directors of color have seen a similar lack of progress. Of the 100 highest-grossing films of 2023, a total of 26 directors (22.4%) were people of color. When broken down by race and ethnicity, 14 were Asian (53.8%), eight were black (30.8%), two were Hispanic/Latino (7.7%) and two were multiracial or multiracial (7.7%). Again, there was no significant improvement from 2022, when the number was 20.7%. Both years saw a decline from the 27.3% share of directors of color in 2021. According to the group’s data, there hasn’t been a significant shift in these directors since 2016, when 13.3% of the filmmakers behind the year’s major films were people of color.

When breaking down the best films of 2023 by studio and distributor, the group found that much of the work hiring directors of color came from smaller independent distributors like A24, Crunchyroll, Angel Studios, and United Artists Releasing, rather than from major Hollywood studios. .

Year after year, the group’s findings, along with similar studies elsewhere, have consistently identified the pipeline problem. Compared to their white male counterparts, most women and people of color don’t get the opportunity to move up the career ladder, from directing independent films to major TV show episodes, streaming films, and, ultimately, major box office hits. In other words, the larger the project, the more likely it is that a white man will be hired to direct it.

To provide a quick overview of this issue, the researchers compared three different levels of output. For example, on average, nearly 55% of the directors competing in the last four years in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic category — which includes independent films — were women, and 52% of them were people of color. For episodic TV series, 38% of directors during the 2020-2021 TV season were women, and 34.5% were people of color, according to Directors Guild of America data. Among Netflix original feature films in 2021, 26.9% of directors were women, while 22.4% were people of color.

Given the declines at every level, it’s no surprise that the percentages of women and people of color running the highest levels of Hollywood are so low.

These numbers clearly show that industry leaders and top executives with the power to greenlight films have not kept their repeated promises to hire and support a more diverse group of directors, according to the group.

“This report offers a contrast to those who might celebrate the dawn of change in Hollywood after a year in which ‘Barbie’ topped the box office. One film or one director is simply not enough to bring about the radical change that is still needed behind the scenes,” the researchers wrote in the report. Camera.

“Until studios, executives and producers change the way they make decisions about who is qualified and available to serve as a director on the highest-grossing films, there is little reason to believe that optimism is justified.”