Hollywood’s Fraught History with Black Audiences

There has been an explosion of popular and acclaimed work from Black creators on film and television in recent years. This is no fluke—it’s the latest instance in a pattern that has repeated across film history. As the film scholar Aymar Jean Christian tells the Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele, industry players “always use the Black audience to draw people back into theaters when they’ve lost the audience in some other way.” Christian points to Blaxploitation films, which in the nineteen-seventies pulled the industry out of a viewership slump, and to the so-called ghetto pictures, which brought audiences back into movie theaters, despite the growing appeal of television. So what accounts for the current surge of Black stories coming out of Hollywood? “I really think it was ‘Django Unchained,’ ” Christian says. After studio consolidation limited opportunities for Black creators in the early two-thousands, Christian believes, Tarantino’s film reminded Hollywood that “Black people like movies, that we deserve movies.” But, for as much progress as there has been, Christian argues that there is something missing in today’s film landscape: stories about the Black experience beyond trauma. “I think we also need stories about solidarity, about how to love each other, about how to heal,” Christian says. “And I just don’t think that this hyper-capitalist, hypercompetitive environment is really incentivizing that kind of storytelling.”