Can Hollywood survive another 10 years of wokeness?

From increased queer representation to films with casts of colour, the movie business has come a long way in the past decade, but it can’t stop there, writes Alexandra Pollard

Last year’s ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ was the first major film to feature a majority cast of Asian descent in a modern setting since 1993 (Getty)

Joker director Todd Phillips has made four attempts to make a good comedy this decade. The films – Due Date, The Hangover Part II, Project X and The Hangover Part III – failed in that regard, each more spectacularly than the next. The culprit? Society, apparently.“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he told Vanity Fair this year. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore – I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’”

Booksmart, Game Night, Long Shot, Blockers, Toy Story 4, Girls Trip and Paddington 2 – all made in the past few years, with generosity and a whole lot of wit – would probably refute the idea that comedies “don’t work anymore”. But there is some truth in Phillips’ words: society has evolved so quickly over the past 10 years that cinema has often had to scramble to keep up.

In large part, this has been a good thing. Social media has greatly increased accountability; anyone, from anywhere in the world (unless they’ve been living in Iran for the past few months), can make their feelings known if they are offended by a choice made by Hollywood. Which means that films can’t so easily get away with thinly drawn female characters or LGBT+ people; cisgender people can’t expect to take on trans roles without some pushback, and white people can no longer barrel into roles written for people of colour and expect to get away with it.