Teens Say These 'Fatal Flaws' Can Ruin A Movie — & Impact Box Office Performances

Teens have always been a lucrative yet hard-to-capture market that Hollywood has spent decades trying to understand. In the early 2000s, LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein ran an annual series of focus groups with teenagers to gauge their interest in the buzziest summer films, dubbing them the “summer movie posse.” The goal was to understand how, and if, studios were successfully appealing to this fickle demographic, a goal still eluding Hollywood’s studios today.

Goldstein’s focus groups were conducted during a period in film that teens today might look back on longingly thanks to cult favorites like Jennifer’s Body, Napoleon Dynamite, or Mean Girls. Yet even then, teens lamented that studios were out of touch with what teens actually care about.

That complaint is still top of mind for teens who participated in a newly released study from the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA. The group of over 20,000 adolescents aged between 13 and 24 largely expressed a desire for more authentic stories in film and linked authenticity to diversity and inclusion.

The teens were asked to assess the quality of representation in a popular film franchises. For every point higher adolescents rated the representation of people of color, women, or LGBTQ+ people in a franchise, the franchise made $175.5 million more at the box office.

But how these minorities are represented is essential for teens to retain interest in films. This generation is not interested in tokenism or box-ticking when it comes to diversity.

“When writing characters, especially characters who are not white, cis, straight, or able-bodied, there seems to be a lack of depth given to them,” one 19-year-old participant says in the report, which is titled Real Recognizes Real: Adolescents on Authentic Inclusive Representation in Film Franchises.

“These characters meant to ‘represent’ us end up coming off as flat, squeaky-clean versions of our communities, when in reality, no one is like that! Diversity is about authenticity and truth. And sometimes that’s messy. Show us the mess!”

According to participants in the study, there are three things can doom the representation of an identity. The study identifies these things as “fatal flaws” that threaten a movie’s popularity among teens: A lack of cultural representation, minimal roles for diverse characters, and unrelatable diverse characters.

Instead, what adolescents want is more focus on relationships between diverse characters, which can help bring cultural representation to life.