Women, People Of Color Still Underrepresented In Movies, Study Shows

LOADING ERROR LOADING Last year, the top films at the box office featured more women of color as lead characters than in previous years. 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. Of those films, five featured women of color who were 45 or older as leads: Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Viola Davis in “The Woman King,” Jennifer Lopez in “Marry Me,” Halle Berry in “Moonfall” and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in “Ponniyin Selvan: Part I.” This was a marked improvement from both 2021 and 2020, when there were zero top films led by older women of color. And it’s substantially lower than for older white men, who were the lead actors in 27 of the top films in 2022 — meaning that an older white man was 5.4 times more likely to be cast as the lead of a major movie than an older woman of color. “By critically evaluating the decision-making process and the way that stories are supported within a studio, companies can remove the barriers that prevent more films that star women and people of color from making it to the screen,” they wrote, pointing out that studios and distributors have been trying to attract audiences back to movie theaters following the pandemic-related uncertainty of the past three years.