To get directly into why representation in big-budget films matters: it’s partially because movies are a product people consume a limited amount of. Even if we assumed I made coding errors and missed a couple of films, that’s 2% of films including any major queer character/character who expresses any sort of queerness.Īnd then, to further check my lack of knowledge, I tried to include every film that made US box office returns and also had the IMDB keywords “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual,” “transgender,” “transsexual,” “lgbt,” or “queer,” unless it appeared that “queer” was being used in its pre-contemporary sense. I found just under 100 movies to include from 2010-now. For instance, The Old Guard is famously a streaming-only release, it has a budget but no known profits, which means that I can’t include it in a lot of my figures but I can include it in counts of how often the criteria is actually met, whether or not that’s financially profitable. So I used a multi-part strategy of painstakingly reviewing every entry for a feature film on IMDB that had any recorded US box office return and also including films which I knew by overwhelming reputation definitely met the criteria.
