Study: Hollywood hired more black directors, fewer women in 2018

In the final days of 2018, as Stacy L. Smith and her pioneering team of researchers at USC Annenberg were putting the final touches on one of the most comprehensive and intersectional reports on inclusion in Hollywood to date, a historic finding in the data sent a ripple of excitement through the lab.

Their research found that in 2018, a year of record-breaking box office, more black filmmakers — 16, to be exact — directed films among Hollywood’s 100 highest-grossers than ever before in the study’s 12-year span, representing 14.3 percent of top directors. That marks a nearly threefold increase over 2017’s six black directors and a 100 percent increase from 2007, the first year Smith’s group began charting inclusion, when eight black directors helmed top Hollywood films.

Those numbers signify “a huge jump,” Smith said Thursday afternoon, reviewing the final data at the headquarters of USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the industry-leading think tank she founded and directs from a second-floor office on campus. “For the first time in 12 years, we’re seeing a historical shift in the hiring practices of black directors,” she said.

But as Smith is often quick to remind, there’s no resting on laurels in this game. An enormous amount of work remains to be done, and culling hard data is just a first step in helping the stubbornly resistant entertainment industry reverse a history of deeply entrenched inequity.

Pre-dating by a decade the critical mass reached in 2017 by the #MeToo movement first sparked by activist Tarana Burke in 2006, Smith’s research on Hollywood employment practices have influenced the way the industry talks about the change it says it wants to see — even if that change has been awfully slow to come.

The findings published Friday in the annual “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair” report ahead of Sunday’s Golden Globe Awards track gender, race and age among directors across the top 100 performing films of each year.

And while they indicate major gains for black directors in Hollywood in the year that Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” was the highestgrossing film, with more than $700 million domestically, growth remains elusive for nearly every other underrepresented demographic group.

Of the 112 directors who helmed the top 100 movies of 2018, a mere 3.6 percent were women, the study found. You can count all of those filmmakers on one hand: Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle In Time”), Kay Cannon (“Blockers”), Abby Kohn (“I Feel Pretty”) and Susanna Fogel (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”).

The rate of hire for female directors — or lack thereof — has remained disappointingly consistent since 2007 among the directors of Hollywood’s top films. Across 1,200 films released between 2007 and 2018 — a total of 1,335 directors — men have outnumbered women in the director’s chair by a ratio of 22:1.

Likewise, only four of the top-grossing directors last year were of Asian descent — Aneesh Chaganty (“Searching”), Jay Chandrasekhar (“Super Troopers 2”), Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and James Wan (“Aquaman”) — representing 3.6 percent of all directors in 2018.

That marks relatively no change over the study’s 12-year span, during which only 3.1 percent — or 39 Asian men and three Asian women — have directed top-grossing films.

The outlook is even worse for female directors of color, only seven of whom landed a combined nine directing gigs in the last 12 years across those 1,200 films. Of those women, four are black, two are Asian and one is Latina.