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"Our industry has caught up with reality. The
majority of the world is actually Asian," said Bing Chen,
president of Gold House, a nonprofit collective that promotes
Asian Pacific Islander voices, on a panel at the Reuters Next
conference broadcast on Thursday.
"Audiences are craving things they've never seen, never heard
of."
"Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," the first Marvel
movie to star an Asian superhero, surpassed $400 million at the
box office less than two months after its mid-August release.
"The Eternals," which opened in November, features a diverse
cast including Marvel Studios' first deaf superhero and the
first gay kiss in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The proliferation of audience data debunks much of Hollywood's
conventional wisdom that had devalued women and other
minorities, said Liz Jenkins, chief operating officer of Hello
Sunshine, the women-led media company cofounded by actor Reese
Witherspoon.
"American audiences will watch stuff with subtitles. It's not
just about ticking a box for DE&I (Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion), about being the right thing to do. It's really being
great business."
Global megahit "Squid Game," which debuted in September, helped
Netflix Inc win more new customers than expected to the world's
largest streaming service. "Hellbound," another South Korean
series, followed with a global debut at No. 1 on Netflix in
November.
Chen credits decades of work by executives like CJ Group Vice
Chairwoman Miky Lee, an early DreamWorks investor who was a lead
producer and funder of "Parasite." The South Korean feature was
the first non-English-language film to win the Oscar for best
picture. Through her CJ E&M company, Lee helped propel K-pop
idols such as BTS to the world stage.
"This is about minorities founding different companies and
trying to reshape what media looks like," Chen said. "It's about
incumbents who've always been doing twice as much to get half as
far. It's just good that we've finally arrived."
Hello Sunshine, founded in 2016 to put women at the center of
stories, was sold for $900 million to a firm backed by
private-equity giant Blackstone Inc in August.
UNFAIR EXPECTATIONS
Change largely begins with the gatekeepers, Jenkins said.
"Who is selecting the content that gets made? Are they
greenlighting that content and ensuring appropriate
representation?"
To help decision-makers tap minority talent, filmmaker Ava
DuVernay early this year created ARRAY Crew, a personnel
database of women, people of color and other under-represented
groups for Hollywood's below-the-line crew members.
"We've taken a really great step in the right direction. But we
have to constantly be evaluating bias in this new structure and
how to refine it," Jenkins said.
The paucity of minority-led content has led to unfair
expectations for Asian, Latino and Black-led films, said Chen,
who started a campaign to boost the box office for the debut of
"Crazy Rich Asians" in 2018. Gold House has since formed
partnerships to buy out opening weekends at theaters for films
with diverse casts.
"We have this damning expectation that minority artists have to
be commercially sustainable, critically acclaimed, and
culturally imperative all at once," Chen said. "But if you flip
it, it's actually an excellent opportunity for any financer,
studio, network, streaming platform to hit all audiences at
once."
(Reporting by Richard Chang in New York; Editing by Matthew
Lewis)
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