Hollywood Overlooks a Key Group That Could Lift Ticket Sales

• Data show films with more diverse casts are more profitable

• Study shows audiences unhappy with current representation

Filmmaker Ashley Eakin, a member of the Inevitable Foundation community, on set.
ASHLEY EAKIN

By Brandon Mioduszewski

As Hollywood struggles with poor theater attendance and a fractured streaming landscape, the industry is overlooking a key demographic that could help drive ticket sales and digital subscriptions: disabled people.

A new report from Inevitable Foundation shows that disabled people are a “massive, loyal and engaged audience” who remain underserved.

“How is it possible that the largest minority group in America is the most invisible?” Inevitable President Richie Siegel asked in an interview. “This is a huge commercial opportunity and untapped market that is being ignored by the industry.”

Inevitable Foundation, which provides fellowships and funds to disabled writers and filmmakers, surveyed 1,000 people, half disabled and half non-disabled, and found that 66% of audiences are unsatisfied with current representations of disability and mental health in film and TV. The Audiences Are Waiting for Hollywood to Greenlight Disability report, released Wednesday, also found that disabled audiences watch more TV than non-disabled audiences, suggesting that stories with authentic representation will drive stronger viewer engagement.

Poor theater attendance, ongoing losses in streaming and the lingering effects from the actors’ and writers’ strikes last year have led to a retrenchment in film and TV spending across Hollywood. Diversity and inclusion efforts, which have stalled across many industries since 2022 according to Glassdoor research, are often among the first to be cut. But prioritizing diversity could be beneficial to Hollywood’s bottom-line.

About 27% of adults in the US have some sort of disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But that group makes up just 4.7% of streaming film actors and 7.1% of theatrical film actors, according to the 2024 UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report. In 2023, most top theatrical films didn’t include actors with a known disability in the main cast, and those with a visible disability were excluded altogether.

Hollywood has taken on some big themes in disability head on and been rewarded. Apple Inc.’s original film Coda, about a young aspiring singer who is the only hearing person in her family, won three Oscars in 2022, including Best Supporting Actor for Troy Kotsur, the first deaf male actor ever to be nominated. It also made Apple TV+ the first streaming service to take home the Best Picture Oscar. The Netflix Inc. miniseries All the Light We Cannot See, based on the bestselling novel by Anthony Doerr about a blind French girl helping the Resistance in World War II, debuted at No. 1 on the English-language TV charts when it came out last fall. The actress Aria Mia Loberti, who plays the girl, is legally blind.

While movies that include authentic disability representation or are led by creatives with disabilities are still rare, the data show that films with more diverse casts in general are more profitable. In 2023, theatrical films that had a cast comprised 41%-50% of Black, Indigenous and people of color had the greatest return on investment, driven by Talk to Me, M3GAN and Saw X , the UCLA report shows. The recent box office success of Bad Boys: Ride or Die, which features two Black leads, suggests that audiences will come out to the theater to see a wider range of representation in Hollywood blockbuster movies.

Younger people especially want to see more films that represent the diverse US population, Ana-Christina Ramon, a social psychologist who co-authored the UCLA report, said. “This is the ultimate moment that a historian can look back at and identify where a shift may happen,” Ramon said in an interview. “Any studio that goes all-in on understanding the main audience, young people, will find immense success.”

Netflix’s original 2022 film I Used to Be Famous featured Leo Long, a neurodivergent actor, playing the lead role of a gifted young autistic drummer. The movie had an 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and shot to No. 4 in Netflix’s most-watched English-language films a week after its release. Access All Areas, a UK-based production company that serves learning disabled and autistic artists, supported Long with acting and drumming coaching sessions throughout the production.

Nick Llewellyn, an artistic director at the production company, attributed some of the film’s success to the honesty in Long’s performance. “I think people saw his truth and his vulnerability, rather than being something where you feel awkward as an audience,” Llewellyn said. “I think that audiences today are interested in connecting to truth and individuality on a human-to-human level.”

Diversity Exodus

An exodus of Black women leaders last summer, many of whom led DEI initiatives at major Hollywood production companies and institutions, including Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. and Walt Disney Co., raised concerns about the future of equitable representation in film and television. Some organizations focused on diversity efforts in the industry have directly felt Hollywood’s stalled DEI investments.

One of those groups is the Creative Futures Collective, which finds opportunities in the entertainment industry for those who come from underrepresented and disenfranchised backgrounds. Co-founder Jai Al-Attas said he noticed that corporations reached out to pursue diversity efforts immediately after the death of George Floyd, but by late 2022 many companies had shifted away from those initiatives.

“We had agreements with corporations that were done deals, and then they had gone ghost,” Al-Attas said in an interview. “Obviously nobody came out and said diversity is no longer a priority of the company — they always blame the market conditions.”

Inevitable Foundation has also been impacted by industry contractions.

“When we started in 2021 we had some solid success getting studios and streamers on board with the work,” Siegel said. “In the last year or two, I have found that Netflix is the only company that has funded these types of projects while virtually every other company in the industry has pulled back.”

As the film industry scrutinizes budgets and becomes more discerning in what films it makes, Siegel argues that investing in representation efforts could help remedy Hollywood’s woes.

“Everyone’s fighting for profitability and attention, why not look at this audience that is untapped and underserved?” he asked.