The Hollywood Divide

‘The Hollywood Divide’ website takes a creative approach to understanding and comprehending the discrimination interwoven within the global film industry, with specific interest in looking into the inherent privileges afforded to those fitting within specific gender and race demographics.

This page critically analyses this concern through a range of data visualisations and critical analysis of these that display data with an aesthetic movie style drawn up by our group. The Hollywood Divide aims to visually display the discrepancies within the worldwide sphere of film and cinema and the actors that work within it through visionary means.

We have formed this dataset using research into the ‘Forbes’ highest paid actors by year information on their website. This has then been drawn into a spreadsheet and then will be formed into visual datasets to gain a greater understanding of the celebrities within these datasets and their individual background.

We have furthermore made the decision to not only look individually at the years themselves but explore the years through a timeline (specifically using data from the years 2015, 2019 and more recently 2024). This timeline will help viewers to see a visual depiction of any specific forward change or hinderances as the years have gone by alongside the influence of important social context at the time of the rankings and whether these events can be understood to have had any specific direct influence on the data itself.

Examples of specific social happenings at the time of these rankings that we are interested to see their impacts on our data include the Harvey Weinstein scandal and its catalytical outcome on the #MeToo movement as well as the #TimesUp movement founded by female actors within Hollywood.

Why ‘The Hollywood Divide?’

Despite our data collection being worldwide, social media campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite (Ugwu, 2020, cited in Bennett and Kiah, 2024, p.32), raised commentary around the ‘whiteness of Hollywood’ ‘gaining mainstream attention in 2020’.

Often the discrimination within the film industry is flagged up and publicised within Hollywood and its film and TV industry due to its heavy worldwide exposure and publicity. The film and television industry supposedly responded to catalysing social media campaigns such as #OscarsSoWhite and events such as the murder of George Floyd shedding light on white supremacy in the US in its efforts to commit ‘to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) within its ranks, at its award ceremonies, and in its televisual and cinematic outputs’ (Bennett and Kiah, 2024, p.32).

Industry responses and their consequential outcomes have potential to be seen when it comes to the Forbes ‘highest paid actors’ ratings, shown in our bar graphs from differing years.