Directing In Hollywood Is Still Mostly A Mojo Dojo Casa House

Despite the huge success of “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig remains an exception among filmmakers.

Greta Gerwig’s smash hit “Barbie” dominated headlines in 2023, making over $1 billion at the box office and becoming one of the year’s biggest cultural phenomena. But Gerwig’s successful trajectory from directing indie films to 2023’s highest-grossing movie — and the highest-grossing film directed by any woman in history — is still the exception to the norm. The club of directors at the helm of Hollywood’s biggest movies remains primarily a Mojo Dojo Casa House, the masculine abode of Ken (Ryan Gosling) in her film.

Women, people of color, and especially women of color remain woefully underrepresented in the director’s chair on major theatrical releases. It’s a persistent problem each year, and 2023 was unfortunately no different, according to the latest research from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which has gathered data on representation and inclusion in Hollywood dating back to 2007.

Based on the initiative’s data, it has become increasingly apparent that recent pledges from Hollywood gatekeepers to hire more directors from underrepresented communities have been “performative acts by the entertainment industry and not real steps towards fostering change,” the group, founded by USC professor Stacy Smith, wrote in its latest report, whose findings were released Tuesday.

Year after year, the initiative has found minimal changes in the levels of women and people of color directing major movies. For instance, over the past 17 years, just 19 women of color have directed at least one of the top 100 highest-grossing films at the box office annually (from a total of 1,700 films between 2007 and 2023), according to the group’s data.

Four of them were in 2023: Adele Lim (“Joy Ride”), Celine Song (“Past Lives”), Fawn Veerasunthorn (“Wish”) and Nia DaCosta (“The Marvels”), who was the only Black woman to direct a major box-office film last year. These four women of color accounted for just 3.4% of the directors behind the 100 top-grossing films of 2023. That figure was similarly low in 2022, when 2.7% of the directors on the highest-grossing films were women of color.