From: martinw@bigmoviecompany.com
To: all-staff@bigmoviecompany.com
Subject: We Need To Make Some Changes in 2019

Hi all,

Luckily, I found an incredible opinion piece in The Hollywood Reporter that I’m certain is going to guide us to success. It’s called “It’s Time to Retire the Phrase Diversity is Good for Business” by Rebecca Sun. I vision quested on this for a while, and I’ve come to the following conclusion – Rebecca is right, because in fact, diversity is no longer good for business.

Consider “Black Panther”. This was the highest grossing film of the year - you would expect that if diversity truly played a role in this, then the cast would be exceptionally diverse, right? Wrong. Of the 22 cast members that show up when you Google for the cast of the film, only two races appear. Can you imagine! A movie with only two races! Even more shockingly, 19 of the 22 cast members, or 87%, were exactly the same race. That means “Black Panther” scores a dismal 13% on our in-house diversity index.

Repeat the same exercise for the movie “Crazy Rich Asians”, which grossed 240 million dollars this year, and you’ll find an even more startling result. Every single cast member that shows up is Asian, which makes for a diversity index score of 0%. Not a single other race was even considered for any roles in the film. Now, look – I understand that there are a lot of different races in Asia. But insofar as our extremely complex diversity index scoring algorithm goes, all Asians pretty much look the same.

The lesson here is crystal clear: films with low diversity scores are the secret to massive box office success. To incorporate this insight, all new films produced by us will be single-race movies. How are we going to choose the race for each movie, you ask? Well, I think we can all agree that representation matters. And given that we are an American company, I think the best way to choose is to pick a race modeled off of America’s population. So that’s 72.4% White, 12.6% Black and 4.8% Asian. If 2018 is any indication, nobody really cares about the other 10.1%.

In addition, we’ll be remaking some of the most popular movies in the last few years to capitalize on this opportunity. Our shortlist includes:

  • An all-Asian version of “Black Panther” called “Yellow Panther”. Jackie Chan will play the lead – a half human, half transformer – so you know we’ll capture the entirety of the Chinese market.

  • An all-Black version of “Crazy Rich Asians” called “Crazy and Rich Blacks”, because if Kanye West taught us anything, it’s that audiences love to see rich black men do and say ridiculous things.

  • An all-White version of “12 Years a Slave” called “12 Years a Slave Owner”, to capture the Neo-Nazi Confederate audience that’s been growing strong right here in America.

Hollywood is changing. We’ve gotta stay with it if we’re going to stay alive in this dog eat dog world. Let’s make sure that 2019 is the least diverse year Hollywood has ever seen.

Sincerely,
Martin Whiteman
Executive Producer