Sapphic Film Can be Profitable

For decades, Hollywood chanted “Diversity doesn’t sell.” There couldn’t be a female James Bond because male viewers wouldn’t watch. There couldn’t be a black superhero because white audiences would pass. There couldn’t be LGBT storylines or characters because China would rebel and ban any film that dared show it. According to the white men who rule Hollywood, the best way to guarantee a profit prior to about 2018 was to make sure a movie was headlined by a straight, white male.

But the funny thing about movie revenues and budgets is they’re trackable. They create publicly available metrics that we can use to verify those Hollywood honchos’ claims. And the metrics tell a different story. Diversity? It absolutely sells.

Looking at the top 20 grossing movies of all time, they’re almost exclusively ensemble casts, full of diversity. Avatar (2009), a CGI movie with a disabled protagonist, women, and people of color, tops the list even 11 years after its release. At number 12, Black Panther (2018) absolutely destroys Iron Man 3 (20), Captain America: Civil War (22), and Aquaman (23). Captain Marvel (26) tops both James Bond (Skyfall, 28) and Batman (The Dark Knight Rises, 30). The numbers are clear and undeniable: audiences don’t just endure diversity, they enjoy it.

This applies to LGBT content as well.

AWARDS SEASON AND LGBT CONTENT

Hollywood has a love-hate relationship with LGBT content. When it comes to awards season, it loves queer content. In the last decade and a half, LGBT movies have won big at the Oscars, from Brokeback Mountain (2005) to Monster (2003) to Moonlight (2016). In fact, LGBT storylines have become reliable Oscar bait, drawing best picture nominations for films such as Call me by Your Name (2017) and The Kids are All Right (2010), not to mention scores of Best Actress nominations.

But when it comes to films Hollywood believes should be massive tentpoles like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, or Frozen, however, Hollywood hates queer content. Hollywood executives claim the economic cost of including LGBT characters or storylines would be unbearable. Audiences would rebel. China and Russia would ban the movie. Therefore, for this reason, their hands are tied—they can’t risk including even a hint of queer content. If they’re not outright lying, at the very least they’re not telling the full truth. While not every sapphic film has produced stellar returns, many have. Here are just a few examples:

Emma Stone and Olivia Colman in The Favourite (2018)

MONSTER AND THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

Monster has done the best of the A List, sapphic-tinged films, garnering $60.3 million from its budget of $4.5 million (13.4x returns). The Kids are All Right —made with a mere $3.5 million—brought in $34.7 million (9.9x returns), the next best performance.

THE IMPACT OF INCLUDING QUEER ELEMENTS IN MOVIES

One thing these box office numbers tell us is that there’s little difference between the performance of a movie with a queer element and one without a queer element. For example, Atomic Blonde, an action movie about a bisexual female spy in Cold War Germany, tripled its budget, while Red Sparrow (2018), also an action movie about a female spy, just barely doubled its budget of $70 million. This pattern holds true for shoestring independent films as well. Queer indie Signature Move (2018), for example, recouped $31,551 from airing in two theaters, according to box office mojo, but heterosexual fellow 2017 Midwest Independent Film Festival entry Dave Made a Maze (2017) made only $34,117 despite playing in 17 theaters.

INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCES 

Just as domestic audiences don’t mind LGBT content, foreign audiences don’t either. Here are just a few examples:

Deadpool 2 (2018) made $785 million (a 7x return on its $110 million budget) despite the fact that Negasonic Teenage Warhead is shown in a same-sex relationship with fellow student Yukio. According to the Times of India, while seven scenes were cut for the Indian version, none of them involved references to their relationship. And when Once Upon a Deadpool was released as the China-safe PG-13 version, the lesbian relationship stayed. So much for the argument that foreign censors will refuse the content.

More than half of the $346.1 million revenue for XXX: The Return of Xander Cage (2017) came from China, even though out queer actress Ruby Rose’s character Adele Wolff was openly lesbian (her character doesn’t appear to have been censored in any international version).

Finally, 46% of the revenue for Atomic Blonde came from foreign sales, including almost $3.5 million from Russia and Central Asia, $1.8 million from Brazil, and more than half a million dollars each from Ukraine, Romania, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. (India and the Arab countries did censor out the movie’s sex scene.)

PROFITABILITY IN TELEVISION

The profitability of sapphic content isn’t limited to movies. In television, too, audiences have embraced rather than rejected sapphic themes. The BBC’s Gentleman Jack (2019-), for example, averaged 6.8 million viewers across its eight-episode run, making it the BBC’s top new drama for 2019. Two years later, Vigil (2021-) smashed BBC viewership records with an audience of 10.2 million viewers. Lesbian couples regularly top TV fan favorite lists, while Syfy’s Wynonna Earp (2016-2021) survived four seasons powered primarily by support for the show’s queer female couple.

SO WHY DOES SOME SAPPHIC CONTENT SUCCEED WILDLY?

The same reason heterosexual content succeeds: Audiences find the subject matter appealing. It’s not queer themes in a project that make it profitable or unprofitable, but rather its genre, plot, and attractiveness to its intended audience. What’s the most popular sapphic movie? It’s impossible to tell, but we can identify some of the least popular movies with sapphic themes based on their box office to budget ratio. The movie Freeheld (2015), for example, could perhaps have been the lesbian version of Philadelphia (1993). But while Philadelphia turned its budget of $26 million into $206.7 million, Freeheld was a complete box office bomb, returning only $1.7 million for its $7 million budget. Why? According to the middling critical reviews it received, the acting was flat and the film full of clichés. Per user reviews, the movie felt aimless and like an after school special. Oops.

Viewers can only watch what they know exists. 

The content has insufficient distribution. Viewers can only watch what they know exists. Each year, dozens of sapphic-themed movies are made (over 100 sapphic feature films were released between 2019 and 2021 for example!). For the most part, all but one are shoestring independent films. And with few exceptions, their intended audience never hears about them. This is because most of them don’t appear on major streaming platforms…or on any platform! According to a review by Lesflicks, of the 99 sapphic-themed movies that were released in the last three years, eight received a limited UK theatrical release, twelve made it onto Netflix, three made it onto Amazon Prime, and twelve are available on LesflicksVOD. The rest are scattered around the internet on various platforms with limited/no marketing.

THE POWER OF DISTRIBUTION

Insufficient distribution can act as a drag even on well-publicized A-List movies. Disobedience (2017), for example, should have performed as well as Carol. Both movies had Oscar-winning/nominated lead actresses and directors. Even more than Carol, the plot of Disobedience was attractive across a spectrum of gay and straight audiences. By the numbers, however, Disobedience underperformed, making only $8 million from its budget of $6 million. What went wrong? The answer may lie in distribution.

When the net gross for Disobedience is divided by the number of theaters in which it was screened to derive the average income per theater, Disobedience actually did extremely well. But according to Box Office Mojo, Disobedience aired in only 247 theaters. For comparison, Carol aired in 790 theaters, while Atomic Blonde was in 3,326 theaters. If Disobedience had aired in as many theaters as Carol, it could have made millions of dollars more, a clear success.

What does all of the above data mean? It means there is ample evidence that sapphic content can return a considerable profit, the bogeyman of “conservative audiences” or “China” be damned. In the upper echelons of Hollywood, in the land of the A List, it means Valkyrie can easily have a girlfriend without alienating Marvel fans. It means there could be a sexy, lesbian Jane Bond (or else, at the very least, a sequel to Atomic Blonde).

For small-scale, indie creators, however, it means content must have a solid distribution plan and robust marketing. This, of course, is not easy. These creators face limited options: try to get on a VOD streaming platform like Netflix, use a free streaming platform like YouTube, or upload the content to their own website. While each of these options has its positive and negative attributes, one thing is clear: creators should never expect or even hope to reap financial dividends from placing their content on free streaming sites like Youtube. Although YouTube can potentially expose content to a large audience, the upside of this exposure is questionable. With an average YouTube advertiser pay rate of $2 per 1,000 views, even a web series or film that generates 50 million views will only make $100,000. And that’s assuming nothing happens to cause the channel to be demonetized, an event that occurs with startling regularity to LGBT channels.

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