GLAAD has released its 2024 box office report card, and Hollywood’s top 10 distributors mostly got “poor” or “insufficient” marks as overall representation for LGBTQ characters and inclusion is tilting downwards.
The 13th annual edition of GLAAD’s Studio Responsibility Index found the number of inclusive films had fallen for the second year running. The LGBTQ advocacy organization found 59 films out of 250 contained an LGBTQ character (or 23.6 percent) in 2024.
That marked a decrease from 70 out of 256 films (or 27.3 percent) for 2023 and from a three-year high of 100 films out of 350 (or 28.5 percent) being inclusive in 2022. “In a time when the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) community faces unchecked harmful and false rhetoric in news media and are treated as a wedge issue by politicians, these stories are vital,” GLAAD argued in the study.
The latest SRI report tracked films released in the 2024 calendar year by A24, Amazon, Apple TV+, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Global, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Discovery. That includes subsidiary distribution labels and majority-owned streaming services.
Top of the class for 2024 was A24, which got a “good” grade as 9 of its 16 films last year, or 56 percent, were judged LGBTQ inclusive. Those box office standouts included the romantic thriller Love Lies Bleeding; Problemista, a surrealist comedy; and Queer, about an American ex-pat living in an LGBTQ community in Mexico City.
Amazon and NBCUniversal got “fair” ratings, while Warner Bros. Discovery, Apple TV+, Sony and Paramount Global received “insufficient” marks. Netflix, Lionsgate and The Walt Disney Company all scored “poor” grades.
Stand-out films tracked in the SRI report beyond the A24 titles include Drive-Away Dolls (NBCUniversal), Mean Girls (Paramount Pictures) and My Old Ass (Amazon). Overall, Hollywood films had fewer LGBTQ characters last year, compared to earlier years, and most were gay and lesbian roles, the study found.
And only two of the 59 films tracked in 2024 had transgender roles — Universal’s Monkey Man, where Indian actor Vipin Sharma played Alpha, the leader of a trans community known in India as hijras, and Netflix’s Emilia Pérez, which co-starred the Oscar-nominated Karla Sofía Gascón.
GLAAD has worked for four decades to secure fair, accurate and diverse representation of the LGBTQ community in the media and entertainment industries and to advocate for LGBTQ equality. The GLAAD report said major studios and streamers were missing an opportunity to reach growing LGBTQ audiences domestically and overseas.
“It is clear that studios need to diversity their slates with a variety of story types at staggered budgets to ensure stability and ultimately growth,” the study concluded.