In June 2025, Black filmmaker Nina Lee wrapped production on her first feature film, “That’s Her.”
The romantic comedy starring Coco Jones, Kountry Wayne and Emmy Raver-Lampman follows Chance, an aspiring comedian with a stressful day job torn between two women: Favor, a temp worker at his office who dreams of launching her own music career, and Mercedes, a stunning but controlling ad exec who also ends up at Chance’s office hoping to land a pivotal client.
It’s the kind of date night film that theaters sorely need more of. The rise of streaming has eroded the volume of films that used to make a decent profit off of people just going to the movies and seeing what was playing at the time — like a good rom-com. And rebuilding the theatrical ecosystem for those lower-budget titles will be the difference between the $9 billion box office totals theaters are seeing these days and the $11 billion they saw before the pandemic.
But in the process of shopping “That’s Her” around Hollywood, Lee got a frustrating response from one executive: the film looked good, but their company was going to wait and see how the Will Packer-produced “You, Me & Tuscany,” another rom-com featuring Black leads that Universal will release in theaters this weekend, does at the box office before they make a decision.
“We had our sales screening and we got a lot of phone calls from executives saying how impressed they were by the film and that we did it in a 15-day shoot, but they weren’t interested in buying it until they see how these other Black rom-coms do,” Lee told TheWrap.
So the filmmaker took to social media urging people to go see “You, Me & Tuscany,” noting that “a film that has nothing to do with me could change my life.” Her posts went viral amongst filmmakers, including Packer himself.
“Hollywood has always been reactive not proactive but in the current IP obsessed environment A LOT of eyes are on an original romantic comedy with two Black leads,” he wrote.
While Hollywood’s past decade of pushing for diversity has led to the rise of filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Barry Jenkins, Jon M. Chu and Chloé Zhao, the goal of systemic change that would allow a wider array of artists to tell their stories remains out of reach despite the mountain of evidence showing that such change is good business. That reverse trend has only accelerated amid pressure from the Trump Administration to eliminate DEI policies.
As Hollywood retreats from that diversity push, Black indie filmmakers like Lee and others who spoke to TheWrap said they find themselves facing the same need to prove what has already been proven just to get the opportunity to further their careers, all while movies like “You, Me & Tuscany” find themselves having to carry the hopes and dreams of all Black filmmakers rather than just be an entertaining and modestly profitable romantic comedy.
“It does feel like the goalposts keep moving,” Lee said.
But if “You, Me & Tuscany” does become a box office success — the film is projected for a $12-15 million opening weekend against a modest $18 million production budget — and proves to execs like the one Lee pitched to that there is an appetite for films with more diverse casts and creative voices, it’ll be a reaffirmation of what so many creatives of color already understand.
In the decade since #OscarsSoWhite put Hollywood on notice, hit films from “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Girls Trip” and “Coco” to more recent titles like “KPop Demon Hunters,” “Nope” and “Sinners” have rewarded Hollywood’s push for more diverse voices. Researchers at universities like UCLA, USC and San Diego State publish annual studies that lay out this argument.
But those studies have been met with equally startling stats showing a retreat in films from women and people of color. And on the ground, top Black creatives like Issa Rae say they’ve seen firsthand how Hollywood is pulling back.
“I’m seeing it. Just blatantly. People aren’t investing like they were before. Even executives who are of color are tiptoeing around saying ‘I can’t sign you, because I’ll lose my job,’” the “Insecure” creator said at TheWrap’s Creator Summit. “You have to be smarter about how you package and market [projects]. You tell them ‘It’s not a show about Black women. It’s a show about class!’ As icky as that feels, it gets the show sold.”
Numbers don’t lie
Last week, Lee was invited to a special advance screening of “You, Me & Tuscany” in Atlanta. She said she thought it was the best rom-com she’s seen since “Crazy Rich Asians,” and her desire to support the film was part of the reason why she sent out that social media post in the first place. But in terms of any comparison to “That’s Her,” she noted that her film isn’t really like the destination rom-com starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page.
“I would say it’s actually closer to ‘One of Them Days’ than ‘You, Me and Tuscany,’ in terms of my comedy style and my shooting style,” she said, referring to the 2025 buddy comedy starring SZA and Keke Palmer which got rave reviews and became a low budget hit for Sony Pictures, grossing $51.8 million against a $14 million budget.
On its opening weekend, “One of Them Days” had an audience breakdown of 69% female with 46% Black, 24% Latino and Hispanic, 22% Caucasian, and 4% Asian. Though they are from different subgenres of comedy, movie theater execs told TheWrap they would expect “You, Me & Tuscany” to have similar demographics this weekend and easily turn a profit given the film’s low break-even point and a marketing campaign that included ads prominently shown during this year’s Milan-Cortina Olympics.
Beyond just these lower-budget examples, studies like the annual UCLA Diversity Report have regularly made the case for hiring diverse actors and filmmakers being good economic sense.
In their survey of 2025 films, authors Ana-Christina Ramon and Darnell Hunt found that even as women, people of color and LGBTQ+ filmmakers and actors lost ground in representation compared to their white, male counterparts, theatrical films with casts that were 41-50% BIPOC had the highest median global and domestic box office grosses. They were also, on average, released in the most theaters, had the highest opening weekend rank and were released in the most international markets.
Nineteen films released in 2025 fell into that 41-50% subset, including “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” and “Wicked: For Good,” films that featured POC actors like Zoe Saldaña and Cynthia Erivo and were marketed as four-quadrant event films. In contrast, films with casts that were from 11-20% BIPOC were the poorest performers.
Meanwhile, a series of studies performed by consulting firm McKinsey at the urging of BlackList founder Franklin Leonard estimated how much more money entertainment companies could make if they closed the inequity gap facing artists of various ethnicities. They estimate that the lost revenue could amount to as much as $10 billion from properly valuing Black artists and audiences, $12 billion for Latinos and $2.4 billion for Asian and Pacific Islanders.
An uphill battle
But despite these studies, UCLA found that after peaking three years ago, the percentage of roles given to BIPOC actors has fallen from 29.2% in 2023 to 23.1% in 2025. While still higher than the percentage recorded for any year in the 2010s, it shows how Hollywood at large has slowly abandoned its commitment to expanding the variety of filmmakers who get invited into its system amid the industry-wide downturn in overall production spending and green lights, as well as pressure from the Trump Administration and FCC Chair Brendan Carr to shut down DEI departments.
“When you look at our industry, there still isn’t a person of color with greenlighting power, and that limits the lens through which Hollywood measures success and what audiences want to see,” said Karen Horne, executive director of the talent development program Writers Colony and former SVP of diversity, equity and inclusion for Warner Bros.
“Look at a film like ‘Barbie,’ the highest grossing film ever from a female director and a movie that talks about female empowerment. After its success, the discussion was, ‘What’s the next toy IP we can make into a movie?’ rather than, ‘What’s the next film that can talk about female empowerment the way ‘Barbie’ did?’”
As part of her work on the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, Ana-Christina Ramon has researched the history of diversity pushes in Hollywood going back to the 1970s, when then-president of the Motion Picture Association Jack Valenti fought against attempts by Congress to investigate discrimination in Hollywood.
“In the late 90s, you had racial advocacy groups call the studios out, which led to diversity officers being hired, but that was phased out by the early 2000s,” she said. “Then they came back in the last decade but once again, they’re out amidst the political pressure. There’s just been no way to hold the studios accountable, and that has to be a permanent part of the system for there to be any lasting change.”
In its 2021 report, McKinsey laid out a series of “pain points” where Black filmmakers of color often face difficulty at various stages of the filmmaking process, from being discovered by talent to securing financing, marketing and distribution for their projects. While the study was focused on Black artists, later studies pointed to similar hurdles for artists of other ethnicities, including “risk aversion and experience bias” that leads white execs to give fewer chances to BIPOC filmmakers and a lack of connections in a predominantly white C-suite industry.
Finding their community
This affects even filmmakers who manage to do all the “right” things and get their work noticed in the festival circuit. One such filmmaker is Natalie Jasmine Harris, who has directed several scripted and documentary shorts that have been picked up by streamers and have screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
One of those films is called “Pure,” a Black, queer coming-of-age short about a closeted 17-year-old poet whose life is changed when she finds love at a cotillion ball. The short was recognized at DGA’s Student Film Awards and screened at several festivals, including OutFest, before getting picked up by HBO Max.
Now Harris wants to develop “Pure” into her first feature-length project, but she told TheWrap that despite the awards, festival screenings and panels, and a résumé that includes a Time Magazine-commissioned short on Kamala Harris’ selection as Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate in 2020, she still has only been able to get one executive producer to come onboard the project.
“I would often meet with executives and production companies and the thing I often get told – which is much better than what Nina [Lee] gets told, is like, ‘Oh, we’re tracking you. We can’t wait to see what you do when you make your film. Let us know how it all comes together,’” Harris said. “And I often am left feeling like, ‘OK, well, thank you for your support, I guess. But I need someone to want to actually invest in me and take a chance on me … because I feel like I’ve already proved myself.”
With her two lead roles cast, Harris’ next plan is to hold a live script reading for “Pure” in New York and invite producers and studio execs to attend. She has also considered expanding her scope to financiers outside the United States and staging a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter.
But through her travels showing her short films, Harris has found a community of fellow queer filmmakers and cinephiles that have become her basis of support. It’s something that she believes is key for any filmmaker to build as they fight to show a predominantly white C-suite that there’s an underserved audience hungry to see their work.
“Outside of film, you look online and there’s excitement when queer artists break through,” she said. “There’s going to be a lesbian couple on the next season of ‘Bridgerton.’ There’s artists like Chappell Roan who are out there selling out shows and winning Grammys and they’re out and proud. But with film executives, they just don’t seem to understand that the interest for those artists will translate to interest in queer films.”
Christian Nolan Jones is another Black filmmaker who has faced the same goalpost-moving while building an audience of his own for his feature debut, “Kinfolk.” Similar to Harris, Jones is basing “Kinfolk” on one of his short films, “Glitter Ain’t Gold,” a film about a sixth grader from the East Side of Atlanta named Jibril who sells candy and washes cars to get his first chain to impress a girl.
“Kinfolk” follows Jibril in his high school years in the early 2000s and already has a cast lined up that includes RJ Cyler, who worked with Jones when he directed an episode of Issa Rae’s HBO Max series “Rap Sh!t.”
For Jones, Atlanta remains at the heart of all of his filmmaking as he seeks to honor his home and the people who live there. His shorts have screened at local film festivals in the city and have allowed him to collaborate with the likes of Rae and hometown rap superstar 2 Chainz.
“I get to not only shine a light on my community, but get to shine a light on the people who’ve supported my film career,” Jones said during a visit to Los Angeles to showcase his work. “And unfortunately, it’s been a little inconsistent when it comes to Southern filmmaking. It’s been 20 years since ‘ATL’ came out, and that’s the last film I can remember from Hollywood that was really about Atlanta.”
When he ventures outside of the South to try to get financing for “Kinfolk,” Jones said he faces many of the same hurdles that Lee and Harris describe: Praise and platitudes for his short films but no willingness to financially commit. This is in spite of the success of films from a variety of genres featuring Black characters and set in the south like “Moonlight,” “Queen & Slim,” and most recently, “Sinners,” all of which immerse the audience in Black culture in specific times and places in various states along the Gulf Coast, and which struck a chord with a wide audience.
Jones wants “Kinfolk” to be the same. Though Atlanta is his focus, he is confident from the reception for “Glitter Ain’t Gold” that “Kinfolk” can resonate broadly, particularly with Black Millennials who will have memories of what it was like growing up in the 2000s.
“I know that people want to see more of Atlanta because of its popularity and its place in pop culture,” he said. “Its eccentricity, sensationalism, trends in music. There’s all these different factors in what makes it a unique place that needs to be explored, but for whatever reason, it’s just not connecting in the pitch meetings.”
Reversing the reversal
Karen Horne left her DEI position at Warner Bros. in 2023 following the completion of the studio’s merger with Discovery. When asked about her time at the company, she said she had nothing but good things to say about the colleagues she worked with there, particularly current film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy who were hired by Warner Bros. Discovery in July 2022.
But when it comes to Hollywood’s backslide in diverse hiring and greenlighting over the past three years, she points to a combination of factors. And Trump’s crackdown on DEI policies is one of them.
“It’s given studios the ability to say, ‘We don’t want to do this, so we don’t have to do it anymore.’ It benefits them as a business not to have these policies anymore,” Horne said. “Now, not only are talent development programs being pulled back, there’s also the threat that if they don’t, there is this administration that will take action against them.”
With studios continuing to contract and searching for surefire hits as they cut costs, the mid-budget films that often are the domain of filmmakers of color may continue to fall by the wayside save for a precious few exceptions like “One of Them Days” and “You, Me & Tuscany,” as well as the films from the likes of Coogler and Peele who have secured a four-quadrant audience for whatever movie they put out.
In the meantime, indie filmmakers like Lee, Harris and Jones keep putting in the work outside the Hollywood system, cultivating an audience in their communities and film circles that is invested not just in their work but in themselves as filmmakers.
Meanwhile, Jones implores Hollywood to look at their films — and for that matter, the films from established producers like Will Packer — not as films for Black audiences but films for everyone.
“Maybe that’s where part of the problem stems, that just because these films have Black leads doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s only aimed towards audiences of color,” she said. “I watched ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ the first weekend, and I’m not Asian, and it was one of my favorite movies. And it was a hit because it wasn’t presented as a film that only Asians would get. It was just a great film.”
