Karishma Vaswani: To win back audiences, put more Asians behind the camera
"Crazy Rich Asians" was a standout cinematic and commercial success, but a rare one. Asian representation on screen may have improved in recent years, but to capitalize on growing audiences, we need to be behind the cameras as well. Ignoring this market means potentially writing off billions of dollars in lost revenue, but also, importantly, neglecting genuine storylines.
The industry is losing out at a time when it can ill-afford to do so. Betting on Asian talent would help. Global cinema revenue is on track to recover from the COVID-19 downturn, but not as fast as executives would like. It's only in 2026 that sales are expected to surpass 2019 levels, which were peaking in 2018 when "Crazy Rich Asians" appeared.
Chinese Canadian actor Simu Liu, who starred in Marvel's "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," is acutely aware of the mismatch between talent and plum projects. He's the studio's first Asian superhero, and yet despite his success is struggling to break through with more meaningful roles. At the Milken Asia Summit in Singapore last month, he bemoaned the lack of available scripts for actors like him.
It was a similar refrain from actor Michelle Yeoh, whom I interviewed last year ahead of her Oscar win for the film "Everything Everywhere All at Once." "What I'm asking for," she told me, "is the privilege to compete."
That this debate is still a thing in 2024, even after the success of "Shōgun," "Squid Game" and "Sacred Games," tells you just how much discrimination still exists in the entertainment industry. Still, there has been progress. Research conducted by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which looks at the diversity of movies in front of and behind the camera, surveyed 1,700 films between 2007 and 2023. It found that Asian representation on screen had soared to 18.4% from 3.4%.
That increase makes a real difference to audiences in the region. Another study conducted in 2023 by McKinsey & Company and Gold House, a firm investing in and amplifying the Asian diaspora, found there was a higher representation of on-screen talent when at least one or more Asian or Pacific Islanders were part of the senior creative team.
It's not just about authenticity, Bing Chen, the chief executive of Gold House told me. It also makes business sense. "The majority of audiences are multicultural, women and people of color," he said.
Crass stereotypes of Asian characters are costing studios money. Often, women are portrayed as sex objects, tiger moms or dragon ladies. Men on the other hand, are depicted as geeks, weak or undesirable.
The McKinsey study interviewed 1,000 Asian and Pacific Islanders in the U.S., and found that nearly half of them would spend more cash, and consume more content, if they saw their own experiences better reflected in stories they watched. Based on the current demographic trends, total additional spending could rise to approximately $4 billion to $8 billion a year by 2060.
That's a lot of dollars to leave on the table. There are concrete steps that studios and content makers can take to tap into what could be a multibillion-dollar moment. The easiest would be to elevate Asian voices at the decision-making level, when projects are first commissioned.
Increasing financial support for diverse projects and their creators would also help. This means recognizing the potential in a script that perhaps won't have big Hollywood names attached to it, as well as finding marketing funds to help boost its revenue and reach. No blockbuster is an island - the promotional dollars spent on creating a buzz around a film are often just as important as the movie itself.
It is always easier to revert to what you know, particularly in an uncertain economic environment. Making movies that studios believe are likely to bring them a guaranteed hit - Walt Disney Co.'s "Deadpool & Wolverine" for instance, or cute rom-coms with Hollywood's sweethearts - are all back with a vengeance. And for good reason, they are highly entertaining and worth your time. But the stories that reflect the aspirations of more than half the world's population deserve a chance to be told, too.
You can't be what you can't see.
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(Karishma Vaswani is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia politics with a special focus on China. Previously, she was the BBC's lead Asia presenter and worked for the BBC across Asia and South Asia for two decades.)
This story was originally published October 5, 2024, 4:49 PM.
