Who Decides Which Stories Get Made? What Hollywood’s 2026 Diversity Numbers Tell Every Author

There is a number buried in this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report that should stop any writer cold. In 2025, films with casts that roughly matched the racial makeup of the United States, somewhere between 41 and 50 percent people of color, earned the highest median box office in the world. They opened in the most theaters. They reached the most international markets. They were, by the numbers, the safest commercial bet in the building.

And the industry made fewer of them.

That single contradiction, audiences rewarding diverse stories while the people who fund stories pull back from them, is the thread running through both halves of UCLA’s 2026 film research. It is also the most important lesson available to anyone who wants to write a book, build an audience, or get a story in front of the people who would pay to read it. Because the gap the report measures in Hollywood is the same gap that decides whose books get published, whose voices get amplified, and who waits years for permission that never comes.

I have spent more than a decade as a ghostwriter, with over fifty books written for other people and more than a hundred published under my own name. I have watched the gatekeeping machinery of traditional publishing from the inside, the same machinery that decides a manuscript is not quite right for our list while the audience for that exact book sits waiting. So when UCLA’s researchers documented Hollywood doing the identical thing at industrial scale, I read it less as a film story and more as a warning every author should hear.

Let me walk through what the report actually found, and then through what it means for you if you have a story to tell.

The two reports, and what they measured

UCLA’s Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, housed in the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, publishes its film findings in two parts each year. Part 1, released in March 2026, examined 109 of the top English-language theatrical releases of 2025, the films that ranked among the top 200 at the global box office. Part 2, released in June 2026, examined 89 streaming original films released on the major subscription platforms that same year. Both were authored by Dr. Ana-Christina Ramón, Dr. Michael Tran, Jade Abston, Nico Garcia, and Dr. Darnell Hunt.

The research is unusual in one respect that matters enormously for its credibility: the team does not rely on data supplied by studios. They compile their numbers independently, from production credits, subscription databases, audience measurement firms, and box office reporting. That independence is the reason the report has become, over thirteen years, the source journalists and industry executives actually trust. It is not Hollywood grading its own homework.

What the team tracks is straightforward. For the top films of the year, who got the lead roles, who directed, who wrote, and what the full cast looked like, broken down by race and ethnicity, gender, and disability status. Then they cross-reference all of it against who actually watched and who actually bought tickets. The result is a yearly map of the distance between the people making stories and the people consuming them.

In 2025, that distance grew.

The rollback nobody asked the audience about

Start with the leads, the central characters a story is built around. In theatrical films, the share of lead roles played by people of color fell to 23.1 percent, continuing a decline that began after a peak in 2023. To put that in context, people of color make up 45.2 percent of the United States population. The lead roles in the country’s biggest theatrical films went to performers of color at roughly half the rate you would expect if the screen simply reflected the country watching it. White actors, whose population share is shrinking, increased their share of theatrical leads to 76.9 percent.

Streaming told a similar story from a different starting point. After people of color reached a high-water mark as streaming film leads in 2024, their share dropped sharply to 36 percent in 2025. White actors, who had seen two years of decline in streaming leads, reversed course and climbed back to 64 percent. Native performers were shut out of streaming lead roles entirely. Not underrepresented. Absent.

The pattern repeated for women. In theatrical film, women had come within a few points of parity as leads in 2024, holding 47.6 percent of lead roles. In 2025 that collapsed to 37 percent, erasing four years of apparent progress and landing women back at 2022 levels. Behind the camera the picture was worse. Women directed just 10.1 percent of the top theatrical films, the lowest share since 2018, down from 15.4 percent the year before. One of the report’s co-authors described it plainly: the gains women had experienced seemed to simply disappear.

Across both reports, the same shape emerges. Wherever the industry had shown movement toward reflecting its audience, 2025 was the year it slid backward. People of color lost ground as leads in both theatrical and streaming film. Women lost ground in most arenas in both. The progress that had been celebrated only a year or two earlier turned out to be, in the words of one researcher, largely cosmetic or tenuous.

Here is the part that should interest every author, though. Nobody consulted the audience before pulling back. And when you look at what the audience was actually doing, the rollback starts to look less like a business decision and more like a failure of nerve.

The audience was never the problem

The central, repeated finding of UCLA’s research, the one the team has documented year after year, is that diverse stories are not a charitable risk. They are a commercial strength. The 2025 data made the case again, in numbers no studio accountant could wave away.

In theatrical film, the casts that performed best at the global box office were not the whitest or the most male. They were the ones that looked like America. Films with casts between 41 and 50 percent people of color posted the highest median global box office receipts, the highest median domestic receipts, the widest theatrical releases, and the best average opening-weekend rank. That diversity band happens to sit almost exactly on the 45.2 percent population share of people of color in the country. Films that mirrored the actual audience made the most money.

The genre data sharpened the point. Horror, which was the single most common type of film made in 2025 and a particular favorite of Black and Latino moviegoers, delivered the highest median return on investment of any genre. Meanwhile the genres dominated by white audiences, biographies, documentaries, and dramas, brought in the lowest median box office. The most profitable corner of the theatrical business in 2025 was the one serving the most diverse audience.

Streaming reinforced it from the demographic side. People of color were overrepresented as viewers, relative to their population share, for nine of the top ten streaming films of the year and seventeen of the top twenty. Women made up the majority of viewers for six of the top ten. The single biggest streaming phenomenon of the year, an animated film that stayed on Netflix’s global top ten for fifty-two straight weeks and topped the ratings across every demographic group measured, was directed by a woman of color and led by young women of color.

Read those two findings together and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The audience that drives the ratings and buys the tickets is more diverse than the stories the industry chose to fund. The people watching are ahead of the people deciding what gets watched.

Dr. Ramón, who founded the report, named the mechanism behind this directly. She has said that in times of contraction, diversity is often the first thing sacrificed, and that economic uncertainty becomes an excuse. That is the whole story in one sentence. When the industry got nervous, it retreated to what felt safe, and what felt safe was not what the data said was safe. It was simply what was familiar to the people making the call.

If you have ever been told your story was too niche, too specific, too unlike what is already selling, you have met this exact reasoning. It is not based on what audiences want. It is based on what gatekeepers are comfortable with. And those are not the same thing.

The budget gap is where the real decision lives

Representation in the credits is one measure. But the report exposes a second, quieter form of control that matters even more, and it maps almost perfectly onto the world of publishing. It is the question of who gets resources.

Getting hired to direct a film is not the same as getting the budget to make it well. UCLA’s data on streaming films laid this bare. Every single film directed by a white woman in the 2025 streaming set had a budget under 20 million dollars. Not most. All of them. Directors of color fared only slightly better, with the majority working under that same 20 million dollar ceiling. White men, by contrast, were the ones handed the tentpoles. They were far more likely to direct the films budgeted at 50 million dollars and above.

The number that captures it best: among the eight streaming films made in 2025 with budgets of 100 million dollars or more, only two were directed by a person of color. One was Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. The other was Maggie Kang’s KPop Demon Hunters, the year’s breakout hit, and Kang was the only woman of color directing a film anywhere near that budget range.

So even when the industry let diverse filmmakers in the door, it largely kept them in the smallest rooms. They were trusted to make films, but not trusted with the resources that determine whether a film can compete, market itself, and reach a mass audience. A 15 million dollar film and a 100 million dollar film are not playing the same game, and everyone in the industry knows it.

This is the gatekeeping that does not show up in a representation headline. You can hire a diverse slate of directors and still control everything by controlling the budgets. You can say yes to the person and no to the scale of their ambition. And the result is a self-fulfilling prophecy: under-resourced films underperform relative to lavishly funded ones, and that underperformance becomes the evidence used to justify under-resourcing the next round.

Publishing runs the identical playbook. A book can be acquired and then orphaned, given a tiny print run, no marketing budget, no co-op placement, no publicity push, and then quietly declared a disappointment when it fails to find the audience the publisher never helped it reach. The author did not fail. The book was set up to fail by the allocation of resources, the same way an under-budgeted film is. The decision that actually mattered was never whether to publish this. It was whether to put anything behind it. And that decision happens in a room the author is not invited into.

The writers’ room is the manuscript

There is one arena in the report that deserves special attention from authors, because it is the closest mirror to what we actually do: writing. The report tracks writer diversity separately from directing and acting, and the writing numbers carry a lesson that the acting numbers obscure.

In theatrical film, people of color held 20 percent of writing credits in 2025, and women held 26.6 percent. In streaming, writers of color held 21.3 percent and women 37.1 percent. Writers were, across the board, among the most underrepresented groups in the entire industry, more so in most arenas than actors. The people who originate the story, who put the words on the page that everyone else interprets, were the least likely to reflect the audience the story would reach.

This matters because writing is the foundational act. A film’s perspective, its assumptions about whose experience is central and whose is peripheral, is set in the script before a single frame is shot. When the writers’ room does not reflect the audience, the stories that emerge will systematically miss or flatten the experiences of the people most likely to buy a ticket. The casting can be diverse and the underlying story can still be told from a narrow vantage point, because the vantage point was fixed at the writing stage.

UCLA’s data shows that this is not a hypothetical concern. Films and streaming titles written by people of color were dramatically more likely to feature diverse casts, in the streaming data nearly all of them did, and to feature gender-balanced casts as well. The same held for films written by women of color. Who writes the story shapes who appears in it, who it is about, and ultimately who shows up to watch it. The writing is upstream of everything.

For an author, this is the most direct parallel in the entire report. You are the writers’ room. The manuscript is the place where perspective is set, where the assumptions about whose story matters get locked in. The whole reason a specific, authentic, single-vision book outperforms a committee-smoothed one is the same reason diverse-written films featured more diverse and more engaged casts: the originating voice determines everything downstream. When you write your own book, under your own name, from your own actual perspective, you are doing the thing the data shows the industry does too rarely. You are putting an authentic vantage point at the foundation, where it shapes the entire work.

Why this is the strongest argument for owning your platform

I have written extensively about the cultural forces pulling American institutions in directions their audiences did not ask for. My Enemies of You series examines exactly this kind of disconnect, the widening gap between what large systems produce and what the people inside those systems actually need and want. The Hollywood data is, in a sense, one clean case study in the larger pattern those books trace: institutions making decisions for the audience without consulting the audience, and being slower to change than the people they serve. One volume in particular, The Enshittification of America, documents how private equity transformed industry after industry from serving customers to extracting value from them, which is precisely the budget-gatekeeping mechanism this report exposes in film.

I raise the series here not to summarize it but to make a point about what the report should teach a working author. The lesson is not despair. It is independence.

Here is the reasoning, step by step. The gatekeepers are demonstrably not optimizing for what audiences want. UCLA has now spent more than a decade proving that the most commercially successful choice, casts and stories that reflect the real population, is consistently available and consistently passed over. The people deciding what gets funded are making those decisions on the basis of comfort, habit, and fear of contraction, not on the basis of audience demand. That is not a moral accusation. It is what the numbers show.

If that is true in Hollywood, where billions of dollars and armies of analysts are theoretically aligned on finding the next hit, it is at least as true in publishing, where acquisition decisions are made by far fewer people with far less data and the same human tendency to greenlight the familiar.

Which means the worst possible strategy for a writer is to organize your creative life around earning the approval of those gatekeepers. You would be auditioning for the favor of a system that the evidence says is bad at recognizing what audiences want, slow to correct, and quick to retreat to the safe and familiar the moment money gets tight. You would be handing the most important decision about your work, whether it reaches anyone at all, to people whose track record on that exact judgment is poor.

The alternative is to own the channel between your story and your audience.

This is not a slogan. It is a structural response to a structural problem. When you publish your own book, you are the one deciding it gets made. When you build your own platform, an email list, a website, a body of work under your own name, a direct relationship with the people who want what you make, you remove the gatekeeper from the one place they do the most damage: the decision about whether your audience ever gets to find you. You stop auditioning. You start building.

The streaming report contains a small, almost overlooked detail that proves the audience will reward you for it. KPop Demon Hunters became one of the most successful streaming films in Netflix history, and UCLA’s researchers pointedly noted that the studio left money on the table by not giving it a proper theatrical release first. The people running the platform underestimated their own hit. The audience did not. Given the chance to engage, the audience showed up in numbers that embarrassed the conservative assumptions baked into the film’s rollout.

Your audience will do the same, if you give them a direct path to your work instead of waiting for an institution to decide they are allowed to find it.

What this looks like for an author, concretely

The argument for independence can sound abstract, so let me make it practical. The Hollywood data points to five specific lessons an author can act on.

First, stop treating gatekeeper rejection as a verdict on your work. The report demonstrates that the people with the most resources and the most data routinely decline the most commercially sound option. A no from a publisher or an agent is information about that publisher’s comfort zone and current risk appetite. It is not a measurement of whether an audience exists for your book. Those are different questions, and conflating them has killed more good books than bad writing ever did.

Second, build the direct relationship with your readers before you think you need it. The audience that drives ratings and sales in UCLA’s data exists independently of the industry’s willingness to serve it. Your audience exists independently of any publisher’s willingness to acquire you. An email list of readers who want your next book is an asset no gatekeeper can revoke. It is the publishing equivalent of the audience that kept showing up for diverse films even in a year the industry pulled back from making them.

Third, understand that resources, not just acceptance, are the real lever. The budget gap is the report’s sharpest insight. When you self-publish or build your own platform, you are not just bypassing the yes-or-no of acquisition. You are taking control of the resource allocation that traditional publishing uses to quietly determine outcomes. You decide what goes into the cover, the editing, the marketing. You are not at the mercy of a house that acquired your book and then put nothing behind it.

Fourth, write the specific story, not the safe one. The genres and films that overperformed in 2025 were frequently the ones serving audiences the industry treated as niche. Specificity was an asset, not a liability. The book that is unmistakably yours, aimed clearly at the people who want exactly that, will almost always outperform the watered-down version engineered to offend no one and therefore compel no one. Gatekeepers reward the safe version. Audiences reward the real one.

Fifth, take the long view that the institutions cannot. UCLA’s report describes an industry whipsawing year to year, lurching toward inclusion when times are good and retreating the moment they get nervous, producing what the researchers called high volatility rather than sustained progress. An independent author is not subject to that quarterly nervousness. You can build steadily across years, accumulating a body of work and an audience, precisely because you are not managing a portfolio for nervous shareholders. Your consistency is a competitive advantage over institutions structurally incapable of it.

The honest counterweight

It would be dishonest to read this report as proof that the gatekeepers are simply foolish and that independence is free of cost. Neither is true, and an author making real decisions deserves the full picture.

The theatrical data actually complicates the simplest version of the story. There, films with leads of color were the least likely to have the smallest budgets and the most likely to have budgets of 100 million dollars or more, the opposite of the streaming pattern. In other words, when Hollywood did commit to a diverse-led theatrical film, it sometimes committed real money. The picture is not uniformly grim, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of distortion. There is genuine investment happening alongside the rollback, and some of the year’s biggest theatrical bets were placed on diverse-led films.

It is also true that gatekeepers provide things independence does not hand you for free: distribution, credibility signals, advance capital, the editorial and marketing infrastructure that a major release can mobilize. The fact that the system underserves audiences does not mean the system offers nothing. A theatrical release reaches screens an independent film cannot, and a major publisher reaches shelves and reviewers an independent author has to fight for one at a time. Walking away from gatekeepers entirely means walking away from those advantages too, and for some books and some authors that trade is the wrong one.

And there is a reasonable case the gatekeepers themselves would make. They are not running a museum of the most statistically optimal choices. They are managing risk under genuine uncertainty, where any individual film or book can fail for reasons no data predicted, and where the cost of a single expensive miss is severe. The retreat to the familiar in a nervous year is not purely irrational. It is what risk-averse institutions do when the downside of being wrong is large and the people making the call bear that downside personally. UCLA’s data says that caution is misplaced on average. But averages do not protect the individual executive whose one big swing misses.

None of that overturns the core lesson. It sharpens it. The point is not that gatekeepers are useless or that you should refuse every institutional opportunity. The point is that you should never let the gatekeeper’s yes or no be the thing that determines whether your story reaches anyone. Use the institutions where they genuinely add reach and resources. But build the direct line to your audience first, so that their decision is an option for you, not a life sentence over you.

What the audience keeps telling us

Step back from the specific numbers and the largest finding in thirteen years of this research is almost reassuring. Across every period the team has studied, in good years and bad, through booms and contractions, audiences have consistently shown up for stories that reflect the actual world. The preference is stable. It does not whipsaw. It is the industry’s willingness to serve that preference that swings wildly, and 2025 was a year it swung the wrong way.

For a writer, that stability is the foundation to build on. The audience for honest, specific, well-told stories is not a trend that might evaporate. It is a durable fact that the data confirms again and again, even in the years institutions lose their nerve. The people who want your work are out there, and they are more reliable than the systems that claim to connect you to them.

The question the UCLA report poses to Hollywood is whether the industry will trust its own audience or keep retreating to what feels safe. The question it poses to you is simpler and more urgent. You cannot control what the gatekeepers decide. You can decide whether your relationship with your readers depends on them.

Own the channel. Tell the specific story. Build the direct line. The audience has been ready the whole time. The only real question is whether you will wait for permission to reach them, or build the path yourself.

This article analyzes findings from the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report 2026, Parts 1 and 2, published by the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. All data and statistics are drawn from that research and are the work of its authors. The interpretation and commentary are my own. A companion piece examining the same research through the lens of film and culture appears on Master of Worlds.

Suggested citation: Ramón, A.-C., Tran, M., Abston, J., Garcia, N., & Hunt, D. (2026). Hollywood Diversity Report 2026, Part 1: Theatrical Film and Part 2: Streaming Film. UCLA Entertainment and Media Research Initiative, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. https://socialsciences.ucla.edu/hollywood-diversity-report-2026/

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