Is Hollywood underserving Latinos?
Hispanic moviegoers drive box office, but their stories & faces aren’t often seen.
One of Hollywood’s most underserved audiences is also its most insatiable.
Over the weekend, Eugenio Derbez’s How to Be a Latin Lover hit No. 2 at the box office with a better-than-expected $12.3 million, drawing an audience that was 89% Latino. The movie bested Emma Watson and Tom Hanks’ critically derided newcomer The Circle ($9 million) and finished not far behind the blockbuster The Fate of the Furious (No. 1 for a third weekend with $19.9 million). But the comedy’s performance shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with Hispanic moviegoing habits.
Latinos accounted for 21% of all tickets sold last year, compared with 14% for African Americans and Asians, according to Motion Picture Association of America’s Theatrical Market Statistics. Yet a study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism found that in 2015, only 5.3% of characters in 800 movies examined were Latino — far fewer than white (73.7%) or black (12.2%) characters, and only slightly better than Asians (3.9%). In contrast, Hispanics make up nearly 18% of the U.S. population and are the largest minority group with 56.6 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. By 2050, that population is expected to reach 106 million.
“The Latino audience is really passionate about going to the movies,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. “It should be no surprise, given Eugenio Derbez’s international star power, that Latin
Lover performed well. Hispanic audiences represent one of the most important segments of the potential moviegoing population, and given their tremendous clout, can power movies like (this) to solid box office returns.”
The PG-13 comedy centers on an oafish Lothario (Derbez) who tries to seduce a widowed billion-
aire (Raquel Welch). It’s the 55year-old Mexican actor/producer’s first English-language starring role and movie aimed at American audiences, after his 2013 surprise hit Instructions Not
Included, the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in U.S. history with $44.5 million.
“Instructions Not Included showed Hollywood that there’s a huge Hispanic market waiting for movies that appeal to them,” Derbez says. His character in the movie, who raises his daughter after her mother abandons her, was “a guy that was Mexican, a good dad and able to make money here in the U.S. The Hispanics I met were like, ‘This is the first time we’ve seen in a Hollywood movie a Latino that is not a criminal, a drug lord or a gardener. It’s a very successful guy and we’re proud to watch a movie like that.’ When you give them the right material, they will show up.”
To capitalize on Derbez’s fan base — he has nearly 27 million followers across social media — a Spanish-dubbed version of Latin Lover was released in 300 to 400 theaters nationwide in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods. With a remake of the Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell comedy Overboard going into production starring Derbez (in the Hawn role of the spoiled yacht owner) and Anna Faris, the hope is he could become a viable Hollywood leading man.
There’s a “bilingual, Spanishdominant (market) that someone like Eugenio speaks to,” says Paul Presburger, CEO of Latino Hollywood studio Pantelion, which handled U.S. distribution for Instructions and Latin Lover. “It’s about opportunity, but it’s also about having the right stories that open up these franchises for the Hispanic audience. ... You’ll now see a series of movies with Eugenio. What it really needed was that first movie to pop in that Hispanic market and give the confidence to companies to put their money behind it.”
Overboard joins a short list of other Hispanic-centered movies on the horizon. Disney/Pixar’s Coco (in theaters Nov. 22) features an all-Latino voice cast and follows a young aspiring musician around Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration. Mozart in the Jungle’s Gael Garcia Bernal is set to star in a post-apocalyptic take on the Zorro character, and Catherine Hardwicke has been tapped to direct a remake of Mexican thriller Miss Bala.
Other talent to watch for includes Eiza González, a Mexican telenovela star who appears in
Baby Driver (in theaters June 28); Peruvian-American actress Isabela Moner, who co-stars in Transformers: The Last Knight (June 23) and the upcoming Soldado; and Gabriel Chavarria, who can be seen this year in War of the Planet of the Apes (July 14) and Lowriders (May 12), which centers on East Los Angeles’ Latino car culture. “It seems like across the board, (studios) are getting it,” says Robyn Moreno, editorial director for Latina magazine. “It’s either something like Lowriders or How to Be a Latin Lover, where it’s very Latin-focused, or it’s Latinos in more mainstream, big-budget movies. That’s very exciting, because that’s the nuance of Latinos in this country. We’re Latino and we’re American, so we want to see ourselves almost everywhere.”
Which is why Hispanic visibility shouldn’t be limited to solely Latino stories. Hispanic moviegoers turned out in greater numbers than any minority group for last year’s biggest earners, including Finding Dory (25.7% of ticket buyers were Latino), Captain
America: Civil War (21.9%) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (15.3%), according to PostTrak. Only the latter featured Latino talent in a major role: Mexicanborn actor Diego Luna as heroic Rebel leader Cassian Andor.
Hispanic actors have been featured in other recent franchise movies such as Suicide Squad (Jay Hernandez), X-Men: Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac) and this week’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Zoe Saldana), but no Latino superhero movies are in development from Marvel or DC Comics.
“It’s difficult enough to find superhero live-action media that includes Latinx characters, period,” says Desiree Rodriguez, a contributor at the news site Nerds of Color. “Especially in roles where they play a part in the plot, aren’t whitewashed or used as tragedy fodder for the white characters.”
Moving forward, “I want to see Latinx characters be space pirates, superheroes, musicians, freedom fighters, and a dumb kid in love with a vampire,” she says, pointing to what Star Wars has done with Isaac (as Poe Dameron). “I want to see Latinx characters exist outside of the confines of stereotypes and kill fodder. We deserve to see our community in full as complex, fully realized characters in various genres and settings.”
It pays for studios to market to Hispanics, too. According to statistics collected by Univision, 56% of Hispanics go to the movies six times a year or more (vs. 44% for non-Hispanics). One in two go to the movies opening weekend and are 25% more likely to see a film in IMAX and 26% more likely to see it in 3-D than non-Hispanics.
The National Association of Theatre Owners has seen that Latino moviegoers are “not too different from other audiences,” says Patrick Corcoran, the group’s vice president and chief communications officer. “They tend to go as families more, so animated titles and family pictures tend to do better with Hispanic audiences,” as do horror films, with Latinos making up 26% of all attendees for the genre last year.
“We don’t go by ourselves — we take our kids, and sometimes there are four or five or six,” says Alex Nogales, president/CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. “It’s a costly endeavor to take that many people, but that’s an art form that we appreciate and we like.”
At the end of the day, Hispanics want what all moviegoers crave: to find their faces in mainstream blockbusters and have their stories told by movies that take them and their culture seriously.
“Most Latinos that I know want to see everything,” says Nogales, citing Jordan Peele’s horror smash Get Out, which has a message about what it means to be black in America, as the type of movie that’s missing for Hispanic audiences. “Those are the kinds of films that mean something.”
“We’re Latino and we’re American, so we want to see ourselves almost everywhere.” Robyn Moreno, Latina magazine