US audiences demand content that reflects world’s diversity, and actors from minorities are benefiting – think Marvel’s Shang-Chi and Eternals and Netflix’s Squid Game

More members of minorities are showing up in mainstream US entertainment, from films and TV to music, as audiences demand stories that reflect the world’s diversity – showing that inclusion is good business – industry executives say.

“Our industry has caught up with reality. The majority of the world is actually Asian,” says Bing Chen, president of Gold House, a non-profit collective that promotes Asian Pacific Islander voices.

“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 US$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, says Liz Jenkins, chief operating officer of Hello Sunshine, the women-led media company co-founded 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 win over 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 says. “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 centre of stories, was sold for US$900 million to a firm backed by private-equity giant Blackstone in August.

Change largely begins with the gatekeepers, Jenkins says.

“Who is selecting the content that gets made? Are they greenlighting that content and ensuring appropriate representation?”

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To help decision-makers tap minority talent, filmmaker Ava DuVernay early this year created a personnel database of women, people of colour 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 says.

The paucity of minority-led content has led to unfair expectations for Asian, Latino and black-led films, says 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 cinemas 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 says. “But if you flip it, it’s actually an excellent opportunity for any financer, studio, network, streaming platform to hit all audiences at once.”