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Lesbian Movies Fare Just as Well as Straight Movies, but Hollywood Still Isn’t on Board
Hollywood Likes to Repeat the Same Tiresome Mantras There are a few mantras that Hollywood seems to trot out at regular intervals to appease calls for greater minority representation on screen, including: one, that diversity doesn’t sell, and two, that gay and lesbian content won’t sell overseas and that therefore studios can’t afford to include it in their anticipated blockbusters. The first lie can easily be disproven. Consider the following massively successful movies that didn’t focus on white, male protagonists:
- “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015) is the highest grossing domestic movie ever. Cumulatively, it has made just over $2 billion worldwide. Its lead cast members include two women, a black man, and a Latino.
- “Black Panther” (2018) has made $1.3 billion dollars and counting so far. By the numbers, it is now the number one ranking comic book adaptation and the third highest grossing movie ever. Its domestic gross surpassed the total theatrical grosses of white male headlined “Iron Man” ($318 million), “Thor” ($181 million), and the first Captain America ($177 million) movie combined.
- “Get Out” (2017) raked in $255 million worldwide, meaning it made more than 50 times its budget of $5 million. Similarly, “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) made $378 million from its initial $15 million budget, and “Black Swan” (2010) made $329 million from its initial $13 million.
- “Atomic Blonde” (2017) tripled its $30 million budget for a global box office of $95.7 million. 46% of its revenue came from foreign sales, including almost $3.5 million from Russia and Central Asia, $1.8 million from Brazil, and more than half a million dollars each from Ukraine, Romania, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, all countries not exactly known for their welcoming approach to homosexuality.
- Just over half of the box office for “Brokeback Mountain” (2005, budget $14 million, $178 million gross revenue) came from overseas, including $3 million from Brazil and $1.5 million from Taiwan. For “The Hours” (2002), a whopping 61.7% of its $108.8 million revenue was foreign.
- “XXX: The Return of Xander Cage” (2017) was an international hit, with more than half of its $346.1 million revenue coming from China alone despite the fact that Ruby Rose’s character Adele Wolff was openly lesbian. In fact, 87% of the movie’s revenue came from overseas.
- In 2015, period drama “Carol” tripled its budget of $12 million to rake in $40 million (68.4% of its revenue was foreign). For comparison, other Oscar bait movies that year included “Brooklyn” ($62 million box office, $11 million budget), “Room” ($35.4 million revenue, $13 million budget), and “Joy” ($101 million revenue, $60 million budget). By percent returns, “Carol” outperformed “Joy,” while drawing even with “Room.”
- Sometimes movies with same-sex subplots even outperform heterosexual counterparts. The total box office for “Atomic Blonde” was triple its budget, whereas “Red Sparrow” (2018), also an action movie about a female spy, just barely doubled its budget of $70 million.
- The comedy “Rough Night” (2017), with both a lesbian and a bisexual main character, almost doubled its $20 million budget, bringing in $37 million, but slightly underperformed compared to “How to be Single” (2016), which almost tripled its $38 million budget ($112.3 million). Then again, “Rough Night” outperformed “Snatched” (2017), which made only $60.8 million compared to its $42 million budget, suggesting that “Rough Night” performed roughly par for the course for female-led comedies.
- Of course, when movies with lesbian themes do fail, they can fail just as badly as straight movies. Ringing in at $12.6 million, the sports movie “Battle of the Sexes” (2017) made only half its budget of $25 million. Then again, dramatic thriller “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”, which came out the same year, posted almost identically poor numbers. In fact, the only lesbian movie released recently that significantly underperformed when compared to its peers is “Freeheld” (2015), which made only $573,335 to recoup its $7 million budget.