Diversity in demand: People of color, women – in audience and on the big screen – hold keys to industry survival

Audiences of color and women drove the biggest box-office winners last year, propping up a film industry desperate to get back to pre-pandemic numbers, according to the latest Hollywood Diversity Report.

As the industry looks to recover from the pandemic and strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, researchers point to box-office returns for films with diverse casts as the way out of the current theatrical downturn. Releases such as “Barbie” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” whose casts included 31% to 40% people of color, had the highest median global box-office earnings ($119.8 million) among the top 200 films of the year, the report found. Films like these were released more widely and earned more money than their counterparts.