An executive vice president at Marvel Studios said the company’s reason for featuring storylines that include social justice and LGBT themes is less about ideology and more about earnings.
“From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing. I think 51% of our audience is female, 28% of our audience is Hispanic. If we don’t represent the people that watch what we make, eventually they’ll go elsewhere because somebody else will figure it out,” Executive Vice President of Production Victoria Alonso said during a “Women In Animation” panel at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, according to trade publication Deadline.
Alonso went to expand on her hopes that Marvel’s move toward more progressive storytelling will continue:
“For the longest of time, we heard a woman-led film will never open. I say, ‘Please check, Captain Marvel made a lot of money.’ Then they always told us that ‘Black Panther’ was never going to open and that nobody wanted a completely black cast, and that made $1.3B. So you can look at it from the social point of view, the cultural point of view. But truthfully, this is a business. From a fiscal point of view, you are leaving money on the table by not representing. I think 51% of our audience is female, 28% of our audience is Hispanic. If we don’t represent the people that watch what we make, eventually they’ll go elsewhere because somebody else will figure it out.”
Alonso also shared that when she walks into a room she does a “head count” to ascertain how many women present versus men: “If there’s only three women in the room and there’s 17 men,” she said, “I usually make this comment, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of men here today.’”
She then admitted that viewing the world and her work through a constant political lens that tallies the representation of every room can be draining. “I also don’t want a room full of women,” she says, “I truly believe balance is good. The male, the female and the other, all of that is good for us. Is it possible? Yes. Is it erosive and tiresome and an every day chore? Yes.”
The numbers don’t necessarily bear out Alonso’s assertion that “inclusive” productions equal earnings, however.
According to some reports, audiences began tuning out of Disney+’s last Marvel series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” when it became clear the storyline would mirror Black Lives Matter’s worldview that police officers are generally biased against black men. And, as Alonso pointed out, despite having a mostly African-American cast, audiences of all races and genders flocked to Black Panther.
On her premise that representation is purely a matter of good business, Alonso also did not address why, given that a 2021 Gallup survey found that LGBT individuals make up only 5.6% population, they make up more than 10% of characters on TV and were present in 19% of major studio releases.