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“Obsession,” this year’s hit indie horror film, opened to audiences made up of 60% Black, Latino and Asian filmgoers. “Backrooms” drew an audience comprised of 62% minority groups. “Michael” drew in 75% and “Scary Movie” topped the list with 76%.
That’s just the last four box office hits. If you look back at every hit across the last two years, the audiences — as reported by PostTrak, a widely used industry tracking service that surveys filmgoers as they exit theaters on opening weekend — were majority non-white. That’s also true, on a global scale, for “Zootopia 2,” “Lilo & Stitch,” “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” “Sinners” and “Final Destination Bloodlines.”
White audiences have stopped going to the theaters in the same numbers they used to, yet the vast majority of movies spotlight white leads despite there being no evidence that audiences prefer them. In fact, for years, UCLA has published a detailed annual Diversity Report showing the opposite. Of course, the vast majority of film executives, writers and directors are also white.
For a few years, when it was socially and politically expedient, Hollywood experimented with diversity. After strikes by the writers’ and screen actors’ guilds — and after a shift in political headwinds — the industry retreated to the strategy it believed had always worked: casting white leads. Maybe, people wondered, the pendulum had swung too far in the diversity years; maybe we “forced” something people didn’t want.
This may sound like mustache-twirling racism, but it’s accepted wisdom within Hollywood, even if it goes largely unspoken. After all, most American movies used to make at least half their returns in Western European countries, where it was assumed (but not proven) that the audiences were made up of mostly white people interested in watching mostly white actors. The other half of a movie’s income was earned in America, where most of the box office audience was, until relatively recently, white.
But this tenet doesn’t make statistical sense in 2026. “Scary Movie,” as a recent example, was No. 1 at the foreign box office, outperforming the latest “Star Wars” in places as unlikely as France. At the same time, a Jake Gyllenhaal- and Henry Cavill-led film was out grossed in America by “Dhurundar,” a Hindi-language drama. And “The Breadwinner” starring Nate Bargatze, who regularly sells out stadiums, made a fraction of what “One of Them Days,” a film from the same studio starring Keke Palmer and SZA, brought in last summer.
The bald data, reported each weekend, shows that the majority of theater-goers are now Latino and Black. It also says the global audience is increasingly dominated by the theatrical markets of Mexico and Brazil, but less and less dominated by Asia, which is more interested in its homegrown content. For many years, China was a stalwart of foreign box office proceeds. Its growing insularity may be a reaction to the white insularity of Hollywood.
It’s not just movies. Television, especially “prestige” TV, is dominated by the white bourgeois experience. They’re all variations on the same story of suburban white people who love, divorce, murder, etc. In their persistent, reassuring homogeneity, these shows give a feeling of sameness that makes the industry feel like it has nothing original or vital to say. These shows are literal white noise, and they may be leading people back to their phones.
All of this is a harsh and stinging contrast to the years when people regularly said “representation matters,” a phrase that may have ironically led to the decline of representation by training audiences to believe that some movies exist only for sake of representation, which seems to have very little to do with entertainment. These “representation movies” were often low budget and were the result of a system that encouraged a diverse collection of creators to say the only thing the system assumed they could say: their identity.
The existence of art with such a thin premise led audiences (including minority audiences) to the understanding that a lot of diverse art is inessential and generated out of politeness, often cheaply. The engagement with these films was therefore quite low, leading to strange arguments that we should proudly see mediocre films for the sake of representation. But how many people want to spend $20 to support what appears to be a social justice initiative, potentially at the cost of entertainment?
Even more galling to the proponents of representation: Minorities will still show up in droves for entirely white movies. On its opening weekend, half the audience of “The Housemaid,” a truly delicious piece of white noise, was non-white. Why? Because white leads are often a proxy for quality; they don’t necessarily give it that quality, but they’re often given the best material and largest budgets. And they’re allowed to tell stories that aren’t simple statements of identity. They’re allowed to entertain.
Meanwhile, executives seem to think white people won’t watch films with diverse casts. That doesn’t seem to have stopped the fortunes of Denzel Washington or Will Smith. I directed the 2024 film “A Nice Indian Boy,” a gay romantic comedy whose most fervent proponents, much like with “Heated Rivalry,” were white women. Maybe because we don’t watch content that provides an exact correspondence to our personal identity; maybe because we’re all interested in each others’ stories.
The solution is simple. All the industry needs, morally and financially, is not representation, but equity. Minorities should not appear in movies because they need to be represented. They should appear in movies because they make the movies better.
If the industry provides actual access to opportunity, then it will discover more talent and connect to a wider audience. True equity has, in every industry, led to more talent. Medicine used to be largely male; now medical school classes are largely female because women on average score higher on the MCAT. Current medical trainees are largely Indian, Asian and Nigerian for the same reason. It’s not because the children of immigrants have bigger brains; it’s because they have something to prove.
At every stage in its history, Hollywood has benefited from diversity. The best movies in the 1970s flowed directly from Akira Kurosawa. The Jedi are swishing around in robes and, in the case of Darth Vader, wearing literal samurai helmets, because of a Japanese filmmaker. The style of almost every modern action flick was pioneered by John Woo and Master Yuen Woo-ping. These original, global artists broke through the white noise; they said something you hadn’t heard before.
We only stand to gain from making movies and shows that are about more than the white bourgeois experience. If we don’t, cinema will go the way of most white bourgeois art. Indeed, America is now approximately 45% non-white. In roughly a decade, white people will be the minority. The industry should return to the diversity years not out of politeness or an obligation to representation — but because it’s the only way to survive.
Roshan Sethi is a film director and the author of the forthcoming novel, “The Simp,” a satire of Hollywood.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column contends that theatrical audiences in the U.S. and globally are now majority nonwhite, pointing to recent hits whose opening-weekend crowds were 60% to more than 70% Black, Latino and Asian, even as studios continue to bankroll films that overwhelmingly spotlight white leads.
It argues that after a brief, post-2010s phase when “diversity” was embraced because it was culturally and politically fashionable, Hollywood used the writers’ and actors’ strikes and shifting political winds as an excuse to revert to a long-standing belief that white-led projects are the safest commercial bet, despite box office numbers that do not support that assumption.
The piece emphasizes a structural mismatch: theater audiences are increasingly Latino and Black, while greenlight power, writing rooms and directing jobs remain dominated by white professionals, which the article suggests funnels money and prestige toward a narrow band of suburban, bourgeois white stories across film and so‑called prestige TV.
It criticizes an era of “representation matters” rhetoric that, in the article’s view, produced a slate of low‑budget “representation movies” whose main selling point was identity itself; the column argues that these projects often felt perfunctory or didactic, conditioning even minority audiences to treat diverse work as inessential and politely supported rather than genuinely coveted.
By contrast, the article suggests that white-led movies function as a proxy for quality because Hollywood routinely gives those casts the biggest budgets, most ambitious scripts and full freedom to tell stories that are not reducible to statements about identity, making them more attractive to all audiences, including nonwhite viewers.
Using examples such as a Hindi‑language drama outgrossing a star‑driven white thriller in the U.S. and a Black, women‑led comedy outperforming a white‑led film from the same studio, the piece argues that when diverse projects are given comparable resources and freedom to entertain, they can draw large, multiracial crowds rather than niche “identity” audiences.
The column points to the reception of queer, South Asian–centered romantic comedies and similar work to argue that white viewers, particularly white women, often become some of the most enthusiastic fans of stories that do not mirror their own demographics, suggesting that audiences seek compelling narratives more than strict identity alignment.
It proposes that Hollywood move away from a narrow focus on “representation” and toward “equity”: instead of slotting minorities into projects to satisfy quotas or optics, the industry should open genuine pathways and decision‑making power to underrepresented artists, on the premise that broader access uncovers more talent and improves the overall quality of films and shows.
To support this, the article draws parallels to medicine, where opening doors to women and to children of immigrants reshaped who excels in the field, and to film history, noting that some of Hollywood’s most iconic aesthetics—from “Star Wars” borrowing samurai imagery inspired by Akira Kurosawa to modern action drawing on John Woo and Yuen Woo‑ping—emerged when global, nonwhite voices pierced the “white noise.”
Ultimately, the column maintains that clinging to white bourgeois stories in an America approaching a nonwhite majority is both morally retrograde and commercially self‑destructive, and it argues that returning to—and deepening—the “diversity years” through real equity is the only viable way for Hollywood to remain artistically vibrant and financially sustainable.
Different views on the topic
At the same time, some researchers and industry observers point out that, in the aggregate, Hollywood has become more—not less—diverse on screen over the last several decades, citing large‑scale analyses showing rising representation for women as well as Black, Hispanic/Latino and East Asian performers in speaking roles and among leads.[3] From this vantage point, the narrative that Hollywood has “retreated” from diverse audiences may understate structural gains while focusing on short‑term swings and high‑profile disappointments.
Moreover, commentary from conservative and anti‑“woke” critics argues that the core problem is not a lack of diversity but the way studios have infused some projects with overt ideological messaging, which these commentators say feels like moral lecturing rather than storytelling; one prominent example asserts that Hollywood is “more diverse behind and in front of the camera” and that there is now “a broader spectrum of voices contributing to storytelling,” while simultaneously claiming that viewers are rebelling against content that foregrounds activism over entertainment.[2]
In this view, the box office underperformance of certain heavily marketed, identity‑forward franchises and reboots is interpreted not as proof that audiences reject diverse casts, but as evidence that audiences dislike being told what lessons to draw from art; critics in this camp argue that the industry’s most successful inclusive stories are those that treat diversity as organic texture rather than as a stated mission.[2]
Additionally, some media scholars and trade‑press analysts stress that the key disruption in theatrical habits is generational and technological rather than primarily racial, pointing to the outsized influence of Gen Z—estimated to account for around 40% of moviegoers—and the rise of “creator‑led projects” such as the horror phenomenon built around “The Backrooms,” where online communities help generate buzz and even story worlds.[1] From this angle, the central challenge for Hollywood is adapting to participatory, internet‑driven fandoms and fragmented attention, not simply recalibrating the racial makeup of casts.
These analysts contend that the dominance of social platforms and streaming means Hollywood is now competing with user‑generated content, gaming and short‑form video, and that the industry’s risk‑averse reliance on familiar IP and star‑driven vehicles is as much about managing financial uncertainty in this environment as about privileging white leads; in their telling, race is one factor among many, rather than the sole or primary driver of creative choices.
Some industry voices also caution against equating audience demographics with a requirement that protagonists mirror those demographics, arguing that film history is full of examples where viewers embraced stories far removed from their own identities. They suggest that insisting on a direct demographic correspondence between audience and cast risks narrowing creative freedom and turning diversity into a checklist rather than an outcome of open‑ended artistic experimentation.
Finally, while acknowledging the importance of access and equity, a number of commentators warn that framing diversity primarily as a commercial imperative—“the only way to survive”—could backfire if specific initiatives fail in the marketplace; they advocate a more incremental approach that nurtures new talent across backgrounds, pairs emerging voices with experienced creators, and measures success over longer time horizons rather than focusing on short‑term box office benchmarks.
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