Prometheus Award-Winning Sci-Fi Author Questions Whether Hollywood's Writer Demographic Shift To Female Minorities Is Responsible For Low Quality Films

Many have questioned why Hollywood seemed to take such a radical turn in the mid-2010s to push the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda above storytelling. Now, Prometheus Award-winning sci-fi author Travis J.I. Corcoran posits whether a demographic shift toward female screenwriters in Hollywood might be to blame for the lack of quality.

Over the last several years, the entertainment industry has been pushing for more women across books, comics, film, and video games. The intention has been to try to push women writers over male ones, which can be seen in the way mainstream action-adventure and sci-fi stories have gone in recent years.

There are numerous examples of strange women being unable to write traditionally male properties and genres, such as Star Wars: The Acolyte under showrunner Leslye Headland, who led one of Disney’s largest failures this last year in terms of both a bloated budget and lack of viewership.

But the trend seems to occur across properties as more and more women’s names are attached to these failing films that push diversity, feminist lead characters, and perhaps worst, incompetent plots on viewership.

We’ve seen Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim, helmed by Phillippa Boyens, fail. On the Star Trek front, Lauren McGuire took beloved characters Elim Garak and Julian Bashir, turning them gay in some of the worst fan-fiction created. It seems to be an industry-wide trend.

X User @data_depot posted a graph that shows this doesn’t appear to be a coincidence. Hollywood demographics have shifted tremendously between 2011 and 2020, which may account for the drop in quality. He posted, “There was a dramatic change in the demographics of screen & television writers b/w 2011 & 2020. The % of male staff writers (65%-36%), story editors (61%-39%), co-producers (68%-54%) & producers (68%-43%) fell dramatically. These trends were even more pronounced for whites.”

Prometheus Award-Winning sci-fi author tied this graph to the quality of Hollywood’s output with a poignant retweet, saying, “Wow, what a coincidence that this is just when everything turned to sh**.”

His post was met by echoes of several science fiction authors taking notice of thow this demographic shift is obviously a large part of why films have decreased in quality in recent years. Diversity, it appears, is not anyone’s strength but a severe weakness, especially when it comes to storytelling.

It appears professional writers, especially ones who write works revered like The Powers Of The Earth, understand that demographics do impact destiny.

Hollywood doesn’t seem to have the logical ability to put two plus two together on this matter. Kate Winslet gave a recent interview to Variety talking about the situation and trying to brand it a good thing, saying, “We’re so lucky that we are living in a time where perhaps things are changing, in terms of the culture shifting towards our industry and audiences wanting to hear female stories more than ever before.”

The audience doesn’t seem to want to hear it, looking at recent film data on these properties. Every Disney MCU movie is in decline, along with Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings getting poor viewership as they’ve moved to the strong, female lead model. It seems the audiences are tuning out despite Hollywood pushing harder than ever.

A lot of this comes down to the bad writing as fans reject these offerings, and many of them get terrible reviews. It doesn’t appear to be a coincidence at all that the demographics of writers’ teams have changed, but rather a correlation to quality.

What do you think of Hollywood’s writer demographic shift and sci-fi writer Travis J.I. Corcoran’s assessment of the situation? Become a paid member to leave a comment and support our journalism.

For a great alternative science fiction story with thriller action, read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

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