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This is fallout from the Sony Pictures data leak, specifically an email chain where Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal jokes with film producer Scott Rudin about our Negro President apparently only liking Negro films. I'd say it deserves its own post, because it's an in-depth analysis of shit we talk about here all the time beyond just the movies fronted by the Torch Lady/Pegasus/"S from Hell". If it gets locked, I'll move it into the big one.
This article is essentially trying to say "see? Pascal's not racist! Look at all these black movies she greenlit" with a coating of presumed "ambiguity" (my initial thought balloon after reading the last paragraph was "y'all tried it"), but yet and still, my wonder is not so much in what's being made as it is what discussions are being had when it comes time to market and promote these films.
Could some of these films legitimately do better if they were not marketed as if only black folks ought to go see them, if they got (even slightly) better date-placements, and if there wasn't so much hem and haw about if, when, and where to send them to the overseas distributors.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2014/12/15/sony-makes-more-black-centric-films-than-any-other-studio/
FWIW, Sony Makes More Movies Starring Black Actors Than Any Other Studio
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This is not going to be a piece about whether or not leaked jokey emails between Sony executives discussing whether nor not President Barack Obama would like Django Unchained or is a Kevin Hart fan qualify as racially-insensitive and/or are signs that the executives themselves are in-fact racist. For what it’s worth, I would be slightly annoyed but not overly offended if someone wondered behind closed doors what I thought of This is Where I Leave You or Wish I Was Here, but I’m not naive enough to presume the two situations identical.
Personally I’d rather know what the Commander-In-Chief thought of Zero Dark Thirty, Star Trek Into Darkness, White House Down, and/or Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I digress. Let’s assume, purely for the purposes of this discussion, that the email conversation was racially insensitive if not outright racist, and that the comments leave open the possibility to judge the overall racial attitudes of the people who made them. Now assuming as much, we find ourselves in an interesting predicament. It would be easy to highlight said informal emails as more proof that Hollywood is run by very powerful (mostly white) people who in-fact are not as racially enlightened as they might like to believe. That’s a fair charge, but to what extent do we judge actions as opposed to words? Because, at least over the last three years, Sony Pictures has produced and/or distributed a larger percentage of Hollywood’s total black-centric mainstream theatrical output than any other studio.
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Over the last three years, Sony has distributed twelve films that featured prominent black leading men and women. They released Think Like A Man, Men In Black III, and Sparkle in 2012, The Call, After Earth, White House Down, and Battle of the Year in 2013, and then About Last Night, Think Like A Man Too, No Good Deed, The Equalizer, and the upcoming remake of Annie in 2014 (review dropping Wednesday). That’s twelve feature films in mainstream theatrical release over 2012, 2013, and 2014, with five of those films dropping just this year. For the sake of this discussion, and under the notion that I constantly champion the idea that we need more mainstream films starring black actors that aren’t about race (Soul Plane is as important as Rosewood), let’s make the simplistic conclusion that “starring black people” = “black-centric movie.” Because Sony still leads the pack among the major studios by a lot.
Warner Bros. (Time Warner Inc.) offered Joyful Noise (starring Queen Latifah and Keke Palmer) way back in January 2012 and then offered Journey 2: The Mysterious Island which starred Dwayne Johnson. By the way, the presence of Dwayne Johnson, who is half black, half Samoan, as a movie star will account for much of Hollywood’s output going through these respective studio slates. Halle Berry was one of the handful of uncontested leading roles in Cloud Atlas and Warner kicked off 2013 by releasing the Jackie Robinson biopic 42. After that, it’s basically this October’s The Good Lie, which concerned Sudanese refugees but was wholly sold as a Reese Witherspoon vehicle and never reached more than 461 theaters. So bending over backwards, they get five titles in three years.
Walt Disney closed out this summer with the “Indian chefs trying to make it in France” drama The One-Hundred Foot Journey and the explicitly multiracial animated adventure Big Hero 6. But otherwise, if we’re specifically talking about black actors for whom the film revolves around, they haven’t distributed a film remotely featuring an actor of color in a lead role since The Help in August 2011. Now to be fair, Disney generally releases a lot fewer movies in a given year than say, Warner Bros., and most of them tend to be animated and/or mega-budget tent poles, for what that’s worth.
20th Century Fox opened 2012 with George Lucas’s Tuskegee airmen drama Red Tails and then ended the year with the Viola Davis/Maggie Gyllenhaal public education drama Won’t Back Down. 2013 brought not a single Fox release which starred a black actor while 2014 brought only Let’s Be Cops (co-starring Damon Wayans Jr.). Now if we add Fox Searchlight, which is an indie offshoot of Fox, we get Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012, Baggage Claim, 12 Years A Slave, and Black Nativity in 2013, and Belle in 2014. If we count those alongside Fox, then Fox had eight such releases. But of those five Fox Searchlight titles, only the three 2013 titles could be honestly construed as wide releases. They will be added into the final total but will not be counted in terms of the “big six.”
Paramount gets most of its would-be black-centric filmography thanks to the The Rock (Pain and Gain, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Hercules). Otherwise you’ve got Eddie Murphy’s A Thousand Words and Denzel Washington’s Flight in 2012, plus the just-released Chris Rock acquisition Top Five, and this Christmas’s Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma for this year. Again, you can argue if I should be counting the Dwayne Johnson ensemble adventures (Johnson is second-billed behind Walberg in the Michael Bay crime comedy while Anthony Mackie is the third member of the murderous trio), but I’m trying to be as fair as I can. Universal (Comcast Corp.) had eight such titles over the last three years. They are Safe House and RZA’s The Man With the Iron Fist in 2012, Fast & Furious 6, 2 Guns, Riddick (yes, I’m counting Vin Diesel for the purposes of this discussion), and The Best Man Holiday in 2013, and Ride Along and Get On Up in 2014.
If you want to count mini-majors, let’s start with Lions Gate Entertainment. They get high marks for a deluge of Hispanic-targeted releases but the vast majority of their black-centric output over the last three years has been Tyler Perry-related releases. They include Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds, Tyler Perry’s Witness Protection Program and Alex Cross in 2012. 2013 opened with the Dwayne Johnson vehicle Snitch and continued with the Perry-produced Peeples, Kevin Heart: Let Me Explain, and a small-scale release The Inevitable Defeat of Mister Pete. 2014 featured Tyler Perry’s Single Moms Club (which may be the end of the road for the Perry/Lionsgate relationship), the much delayed Frankie & Johnny, the micro-released Repentance, and Addicted. Nonetheless, they deserve credit for seeing the financial potential in Tyler Perry way back in 2005 and thus reaping the rewards. They have eleven such films total and eight out-and-out wide theatrical releases.
The Weinstein Company released Django Unchained and The Intouchables in 2012 as well as The Sapphires (limited release), Fruitvale Station, The Butler, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom in late 2013. 2014 offered only On the Other Side of the Tracks, an Omar Sy two-hander that played on fifty screens. Sony Pictures Classics offered only Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg’s Celeste and Jesse Forever (limited release) in 2012 while Focus Features offered only That Awkward Moment (with Michael B. Jordan as one of the three leads) and I Am Ali (limited release) in 2014. Open Road Films offered only A Haunted House and A Haunted House 2. I think that about covers it in terms of major distribution houses who release multiplex theatrical features.
Now for the record I am explicitly not counting films that starred other ethnic minorities (sorry Life of Pi and Paranormal Activity: The Loved Ones) or films which had African-American characters supporting the white guy’s journey (sorry Pacific Rim or The Maze Runner). Oh, and Hollywood’s comparative track record in terms of gender representation is a whole different article that I may or may not dive into this week. It is of course possible that I missed one or two so-called “black-centric” films (I used the Box Office Mojo database), although I bent over backwards to include some that you might not count (Cloud Atlas was a coin toss) to compensate for that possibility.
So if you add up what is basically most of the major distribution houses in Hollywood and tally up their output over 2012, 2013, and 2014, you get basically 64 releases featuring a black actor or actress either in the lead role or as one of the core group of lead characters. If you’re only counting “majors” (Sony, Warner, Disney, Universal, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox) that number drops to 35 such releases. So of those six major studios that are represented (and that does not include Fox Searchlight, only 20th Century Fox), over 1/3 of the entire multiplex theatrical output of black-centric films from what can be considered “major studios” can be attributed to a single studio and that studio is Sony.
Even the more expansive list leaves Sony with 19% of said titles, with one studio out of eleven noted distribution houses accounting for 1/5 of the total. And yes, 36 of the overall 64-film total came from one major (Sony) and three mini-majors (Weinstein, Lionsgate, and Fox Searchlight). That means, presuming I didn’t miss any such films, that the five major studios outside of Sony released just 23 out of 64 total such movies (36%) over three years, and that’s bending over backwards to be fair with a few of them. Say what you will about what Amy Pascal and Scott Rudin’s informal words do or don’t reveal about their racial attitudes, but their actions as producers and distributors of mainstream feature films arguably show them working in the right direction to a greater degree than their rivals. Not only did Sony make noticeably more multiplex releases starring actors of color than the other major studios, all twelve of their releases incontestably “count,” with no “well, I’ll count this one to be fair” titles or “this barely got a theatrical release” films that popped up while tabulating the other studios’ said output.
Of course, if this needs to be said, the fact that Warner Bros. and Disney were rather light in this department does not necessarily unmask their executives as closeted racists any more than I would say that Hollywood is male-centric because Hollywood is secretly run by a cabal of He-Man Women Haters. Life is more complicated than that, even if the end result is unfortunate and in need of industry-wide correction no matter what the reason. And twelve feature films starring actors of color out of fifty-two films over a three year period isn’t exactly a sterling track record for Sony. But it’s worth noting that it’s significantly better than much of the competition. As we decide how to react to what were some racially-barbed movie-related inquiries aimed at a black president, we must ask ourselves if we should judge the executives at Sony more on their words behind closed doors or their actions that are for all to see.
Now one can make the argument that negative words spoken in private are a sign of attitudes that lead to harmful actions, and that is generally true. But what happens when it’s not necessarily so simple? What do we do about movie studio executives whose private words seem to indicate racist attitudes but whose public product is (perhaps by default) more racially progressive than their peers? That’s not a question I can answer, but I will say (keeping my political leanings in mind) that our country would have been better off if we cared more about Gary Hart’s public policy ideas than his private (consensual) sexual behavior back in 1987. And I sure as hell think we would be better off as a nation if we spent more of our media energy focused on very real racially discriminatory actions and policies and the people who enact them than we do freaking out when a D-level comedian unloads a racially-offensive sexual fantasy on Twitter.
It is not my place to presume the racial mindset of the top executives over at Sony Pictures nor is it my place to absolve them of responsibility for the private conversations that have now been made public. But Sony Pictures is a movie studio, and their primary purpose is to make and/or distribute mainstream movies for theatrical exhibition. On that scale, in terms of the volume of theatrical films which star black actors and/or concern the narrative arc of black characters, they are actually more racially progressive than the majority of their peers. To what extent should we judge their private words over their public actions?
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