Film project uncovers serious diversity problem

From Digital Spy

When a movie like Marvel's Black Panther is breaking box office records, drawing in new audiences and breaking down "long-held false Hollywood beliefs and paradigms" about race, it might feel like Hollywood's problem with representation is on its way out.

Unfortunately, though, it's going to take a lot more than one superhero movie with an unapologetic African heart to do that – especially when some of the most successful and celebrated film series have done nothing for diversity, and more importantly, stayed ultimately unchallenged.

But as attitudes towards inclusion and accurate representation start to shift, there are some who feel emboldened to speak out – and call out the industry for its disparity.

Related: One Show's Jeremy Vine baffles Chadwick Boseman by calling Black Panther cast "overwhelmingly black"

One of those people is writer and "video maker" Dylan Marron, who has recently brought films franchises' overwhelming whiteness to the fore in a series of videos shared on Twitter.

In 'honour of Black Panther', Dylan shared edited videos of the entire Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, Disney's Maleficent and Into the Woods, and the Oscar-nominated Her to demonstrate how few actors of colour there are.

Marron managed to boil down the entire 557-minute LOTR trilogy to just 47 seconds, while also calculating that dialogue spoken by actors of colour in the Harry Potter series makes up just 0.47% of the films' scripts.

Singling out the fantasy genre in particular, Marron went on to write: "None of these stories are about race, yet they have cast white people by default.

"They each deal with fantastical elements yet seem to have found it 'unrealistic' to cast POC in anything but the periphery. For too long universally accessible stories have used white avatars to tell them.

"While there are clearly exceptions, they are just that: exceptions."

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