With ‘1619,’ ‘Summer of Soul’ and ‘The Plot,’ Disney’s diverse storytelling brand is making waves

When Oscar winner Mahershala Ali and his producing partners made the rounds last year, pitching an adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s bestselling novel “The Plot,” it sparked a bidding war. “The goal is to create entertainment first, broadly accessible content for Disney from a culturally specific point of view,” said Duncan, who is also president of Disney’s young adult cable network Freeform. “I really could see that was someone that was worth betting on,” said Coogler, the director and writer of “Black Panther” and “Creed.” “She was just really sharp and had a clear vision on how to build a company that tells great stories and can offer things in the marketplace that people would be excited about.” Coogler found a natural alliance of values and mission between his production company and Onyx in making event-driven films and television shows “that bring audiences into closer proximity with stories or types of characters that are present in society but often overlooked.” At Sundance this month, Coogler announced a pair of projects as part of Proximity’s overall deal with Onyx. It is the second Onyx project for Washington and her production company, Simpson Street, after last year’s well-received legal drama “Reasonable Doubt,” which also ran on Hulu. Washington, who has long had a home inside the Disney family, said partnering with Onyx was a great opportunity “to move our own slate forward.” “We think a lot at Simpson Street about deconstructing the idea of the other and challenging the longstanding ideas about who gets to be a protagonist and making sure that we’re centering all different kinds of people and all different kinds of stories — not necessarily always stories that are created and driven by characters of color, but often that,” she said.