Hollywood Diversity Report: Audiences
The minority share of the U.S. population is growing by nearly half a percent each year. Constituting nearly 43% of the U. S. population in 2021, people of color will become the majority within a couple of decades.
(From UCLA’s ‘Hollywood Diversity Report 2022’)
Looking at last year, every time there was a big movie that exceeded expectations or broke a record, we see that between 53%-60% of opening weekend audiences were people of color.
As noted in UCLA’s 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report, “audiences are becoming increasingly diverse.” Throughout the past two years, in which the global pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on theatrical box office numbers, women and people of color in the US have bought the majority of movie tickets. And with the continuing increases to population diversity, as noted in the report, investment in content that serves these moviegoers just makes good business sense.
Read the ReportIn its conclusion, the report says that its findings “document that increasingly diverse audiences continued to flex their muscles at the box office and on streaming platforms in 2021, driving domestic ticket sales for the top 10 theatrical releases and accounting for a disproportionate share of the audiences for the top 10 streaming releases. Findings also show that diverse audiences, now market anchors in the film sector, clearly preferred diverse content. That is, the lion’s share of the most highly rated films among diverse households in 2021 – and increasingly among White households and viewers 18-49 – featured casts that were at least 30 percent minority.
(via Deadline.com)
Learn More
Hollywood would benefit greatly from embracing 2021’s (re)affirmation of the bottom-line possibilities associated with major advances on the diversity front – particularly in a sector reordered by the ascendance of streaming platforms. People of color constituted nearly 43% of the U.S. population in 2021, and their share is increasing by about half a percent a year. This trend, combined with diverse audiences’ heavy engagement with original, streaming film content, underscores the importance of diversity as a first-order business imperative for the film industry.”
