Disney’s diverse storytelling brand making waves
Onyx Collective assembles talent roster, impressive project slate in under 2 years
When Oscar winner Mahershala Ali and his producing partners made the rounds last year, pitching an adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s bestselling novel “The Plot,” it sparked a bidding war.
The buzzy thriller about a failed author who engages in an “act of literary theft,” forever changing his life, is primed for success. In addition to executive producing, Ali is starring in the series.
“The response was overwhelming. Every single place we pitched made an offer,” said Layne Eskridge, president of POV Entertainment, who along with Ali brought the project to six networks and streamers under her producing deal with Endeavor Content.
In the end, Onyx Collective — a relatively new brand focusing on creators of color and underrepresented voices — won out, ordering an eight-episode limited series to stream on Hulu.
Operating much like a mini studio and network, Onyx is a content arm for Disney, developing, producing and acquiring projects exclusively for Hulu and other Disney platforms.
Onyx — whose president, Tara Duncan, had a track record at Netflix and elsewhere for bringing quality, entertaining stories to the screen — demonstrated vision and competitiveness, Eskridge said.
But the fledgling brand also brought something else to the table: During the pitch meetings, Duncan and nearly every member of the executive team involved was a person of color. Moreover, they all had the power to greenlight the project.
“We knew we weren’t going to get that anywhere else,” Eskridge said. “That is unique to Onyx. It’s super special, and we wanted that.”
At a time when Hollywood continues to make public pronouncements about inclusion even as such efforts remain faltering, Onyx has assembled a roster of talent in less than two years that includes Ryan Coogler and Natasha Rothwell in overall deals and has generated an impressive slate of projects with Oprah Winfrey, Kerry Washington and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
After George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the Black Lives Matters protests that sparked a global reckoning over race and society, Hollywood faced heavy pressure to address its lack of diversity in film and executive suites. Although those events occurred after the initial discussions surrounding Onyx, they did accelerate and inform its development.
Onyx’s first official title, 2021’s “Summer of Soul,” won the Oscar for documentary feature last year. At Sundance this year, the filmmaker behind it, Questlove, announced a second collaboration with Onyx, a documentary on Sly & the Family Stone.
The six-part docuseries “The 1619 Project,” an adaptation of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ work in the New York Times Magazine that reassessed America’s history and narrative surrounding slavery and the contributions of Black Americans, recently premiered on Hulu. Onyx is a creative partner, overseeing the series produced by Lionsgate, Harpo Films and the New York Times for Hulu.
“The goal is to create entertainment first, broadly
accessible content for Disney from a culturally specific point of view,” said Duncan, who is also president of Disney’s young adult cable network Freeform.
Future rollouts include the feature movie “Bruiser,” a drama about fathers, families and toxic masculinity that debuted at the 2022 Toronto film festival; “Gigante,” a docuseries about the Spanish language show “Sabado Gigante”; and a pair of comedies, “The Other Black Girl,” starring Rashida Jones as one of two Black employees at a book publisher, and “Deli Boys,” about a pair of Pakistani American brothers who take over their father’s convenience store empire and discover his secret life of crime.
“We’re looking to entertain a broad audience,” Duncan said, adding that she wants “creators (to) feel like this is a place where they can come and do not
only their best work, but work that’s going to be provocative for them and will inspire and push them.
“And I don’t think the conversation around where we have to be is limited to the conversation around identity. There are other elements and aspects of our experience that have yet to be fully tapped from a creative point of view.”
The idea for Onyx began in 2019 when Dana Walden, chairman of Disney General Entertainment Content, began talking with Chief Executive Bob Iger. It was not long after “Black Panther” broke box-office records; to date, the film has earned $1.4 billion worldwide.
“I was relatively new to Disney, and Bob mentioned that he had been giving a lot of thought to creating an environment on Hulu that would be a destination for subscribers of color,” she said.
Walden said that Iger
pointed to the success of The Undefeated (later renamed Andscape), a multimedia brand formed under ESPN that focuses on storytelling at the nexus of race, sports and culture from the point of view of journalists of color.
When Walden tapped Duncan to run Onyx in 2021, Duncan had already cemented her reputation at Disney as someone with great instincts, experience in building programming and numerous relationships with filmmakers.
Onyx, which is based at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, has its own budget and a staff of about 30. Disney would not disclose figures.
Duncan said her first order of business was to build talent relationships in what she calls “the first pillar of success” to “fortify our pipeline.”
Duncan, however, is quick to point out that although Onyx’s focus is on diverse filmmakers and storytelling, it is not a diversity and inclusion initiative. Rather, Onyx is a home for a kaleidoscope of stories and storytellers that taps into leveraging artists of color. “We are positioned and driven to drive subscribers and drive the business in the same way as our colleagues,” she said.
Prentice Penny, a writer, director, producer and a former showrunner on HBO’s “Insecure,” said he was immediately drawn to Onyx.
“At some other places, you might feel like you have to explain why this story is relevant,” he said. “Or you have to go through a lot of stuff to convince people that our art is valid and that we want to see true realizations of ourselves on screen. What really affected me was that (Onyx) was going to be run by people who look like me and who understood things like me.”