Quote (Black XistenZ @ Dec 28 2020 04:30am)
This is patently false. For example, Hollywood started adding gay figures to the cast of a ton of its movies/series back in the 90s, when there was still a stigma surrounding homosexuality and a vast majority of Americans was still rejecting gay marriage. The contrary of your statement is true in this case: the embrace of openly gay characters in cinemas and TV contributed to the change in public opinion on this issue which took place between the late 90s and the early 2010s.
Also, how on earth can anyone unironically claim that movies with minorities are pretty rare in most media in 2020? Like... seriously?!? :lol:
Nowadays, virtually every major movie or commercial and most TV series feature at least one minority cast member, often times a lot more than just one. Similarly, a ton of roles in recent films based on classic material (e.g. superhero adaptations) cast minority actors for roles which were white in the source material. Dito when it comes to female representation (e.g. the remake of Ghostbusters with an all-female cast, Ocean's 8, the Batwoman and Supergirl series, etc.), or the specific effort by film studios to add LGBTQI* characters to their films.
And last but not least, the NBA, NASCAR, the NFL all lost some viewership and thus money because of their emphasis of "woke" themes in recent years. Maaaaybe that's still the correct move in the long run, purging an aging viewership and replacing it with a younger, more lucrative one which will yield higher returns in the coming years or something like that - but it's definitely not self-evident or a no-brainer that Hollywood going socially super-liberal is the positioning which will make them the most money. At the very least, it's a bold and risky strategy to go fully woke and deliberately alienate parts of one's core audience.
This is where you get into tokenism versus real representation. There were gay people in some shows in the 90's, but most of it was under the rug. It was "queer coded", or limited to a single episode. Hell just look at this list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1990s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes) and compare that to the deluge of characters, seasons, and shows in the 90's.
Depends how widely you define "minority". Females aren't minorities bro, and the fact that you think that you needed to include female ghost busters as "minority representation" really shows that the mindset I'm describing is still alive and well in how you and others perceive media. Having a group of women do something is still considered "political" and just speaks to my point. Similarly, having explicitly gay characters isn't nearly as common as you think it is. Like, was there even a gay avenger? I kind of got those vibes from Captain Marvel but it wasn't really stated. Black and Asian representation is definitely "there", although Asian actors face their own challenges, but minority representation as a whole is not at the level you think it is.
NBA, NASCAR, NFL have been suffering for years before the recent "oh they went woke". Even so, they may be an anomaly because sports (especially NASCAR) appeals to a conservative demographic. Still, not really a counter point to bring up something that's already failing, isn't Hollywood, and that appeals to a specifically conservative fanbase, and may well have been an exit of more liberal people because they definitely didn't just "go woke", because the explicit backlash against the wokeness preceded that.