“KPop Demon Hunters,” the undisputed queen of streaming movies in 2025 with 20.6 billion hours viewed on Netflix, was a cross-cultural hit starring and directed by Asian women. But they are the lone bright spot in an otherwise dismal edition of UCLA’s Hollywood Diversity Report, which found that just like on the theatrical side, the diversity push in streaming films is quickly eroding.
“This is an industry in flux — and in reverse, especially when it comes to diversification,” said Darnell Hunt, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, who co-founded the report. “Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with theatrical films, we’re now seeing the impact of this current political climate in very meaningful and concrete ways. As budgets tighten, opportunities for filmmakers of underrepresented backgrounds are always the first to be squeezed out.”
In UCLA’s survey of streaming films, women and people of color lost ground relative to their male and white counterparts when it comes to directors, writers, lead roles and overall cast.
The most glaring drop came for actors of color in lead roles, as their share of leads in streaming films rose from 33% in 2022 to 51% in 2024. But in 2025, nearly all of those gains eroded as the share of lead roles given to POC actors sank to 36%.
In the director’s chair, only 23.6% of surveyed films were directed by women, down from a peak of 31% in 2023. Among the women who did get to direct a streaming film in 2025, 81% had budgets of less than $20 million, with “KPop Demon Hunters” being one of the exceptions.
POC directors also saw a decline as their share of streaming films dropped from 41% in 2024 to 31.5% in 2025. Among POC groups, Black directors were
overrepresented relative to the U.S. population (14.3%), and Asian directors approached proportionate representation (6.1%). By contrast, Latino (5.1%) and multiracial (4.1%) directors were well below proportionate representation, with no Native American or MENA directors present.
UCLA also found for the first time since it began surveying streaming films separately from theatrical in 2022, that films with a cast that had a majority of actors of color did not make up a plurality of streaming films in 2025. The plurality came from films that had a POC share of 21-30% in their cast at 29.8%, more than double of last year.
“It wasn’t too long ago that streaming was the place where people of color and women foundtheir footing,” said sociologist and co-author Michael Tran.
“These trends away from diversity in films should raise alarm,” Hunt added. “And push the industry to action.”
Despite this backsliding, UCLA also found that diverse audiences continue to drive the most successful streaming films, including “KPop Demon Hunters.” For the first time since surveying streaming films, UCLA examined intersectional viewership ratings within households — by breaking the data into subgroups combining race, ethnicity and gender — of the top 20 streaming films of 2025. The subgroups that posted the highest ratings most often were 18-to-49-year-old viewers within Black households and female viewers within Latino households.
Households of color were overrepresented as viewers for nine of the top 10 and for 17 of the top 20 most watched streaming films of the year. Women represented the majority of viewers for six of the top 10 streaming films and for 11 of the top 20 streaming films.
And as one might expect, “KPop Demon Hunters” dwarfed all other titles in terms of social media discourse, accounting for nearly a third of all social media interactions recorded for streaming films in 2025. The film also marked the fourth year in a row that the most watched film on streaming had a young woman of color as its protagonist, joining the Disney and Pixar films “Encanto,” “Turning Red” and “Moana.”
“These were all animated films that featured diverse characters and strong female leads,” said co-author Jade Abston, who is a UCLA doctoral candidate in cinema media studies. “If studios continue to rollback representation, they’re risking lost profits and lower engagement from key audiences.”
