Last year, the top films at the box office featured more women of color as lead characters than in previous years. However, it was one of the only noticeable improvements in an overall disappointing outlook for representation in front of the camera, according to one major study.
In 2022, 16 of the top 100 highest-grossing movies in the U.S. starred a woman of color as the film’s lead or co-lead — five more than in 2021, as documented in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest report. The study, released Thursday, is the group’s annual examination of the gender, race/ethnicity and age of lead actors in major movies.
In addition to the 16 movies starring women of color, two top movies in 2022 featured lead roles for nonbinary actors of color: Janelle Monáe in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and Amandla Stenberg in “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” And in a substantial shift from previous years, women of color outpaced men of color in leading roles: The men were leads or co-leads in 14 of the year’s top movies.
The uptick in leading women and nonbinary performers of color on screen was the report’s only bright spot. In 2022, there were no marked improvements in the percentages of women or people of color as leads in major films, the study found. Those percentages have barely moved in the past five years, painting not a particularly optimistic picture. It all suggests that in a period of increased calls for change from multiple so-called reckonings — like the Me Too movement and the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd — “any commitments to diversity or inclusion were mere lip service,” the report warns. (The group, founded by Stacy L. Smith, says it plans to examine LGBTQ+ representation and disability representation in a report later this year.)
On female representation, 44% of 2022’s major films featured women in lead roles, similar to the 41% in 2021. Over the past five years, the…
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