You keep making this into a merit thing and implying they are giving these artistic opportunities to less deserving people due to their gender or skin color. Who is going to make the best movie, or write the best script, or act the best are not measurable pieces of data. You don't have a bunch of directors take a standardized test than hire the person who got the highest score. The best directors, writers, actors on earth make movies that financially bomb constantly. You can use the history of these creatives as one variable to measure- this actor on average brings in this much money, this director on average brings in this much money, etc. This is already happening, but due to the inconsistent nature of how complicated it is to make a successful movie there is no clean process to guarantee success. There is a tiny handful of creatives that you can truly bank on to give you a hit, and Christopher Nolan can't make every single movie. Sometimes huge established artists make hits, sometimes they are financial disasters, sometimes relative newcomers make hits, sometimes they make bombs. The truth of the industry is there are hundreds of people in any of these disciplines, directors, actors, writers, etc that are all relatively equally talented and it just comes down to a few people at the top of the company following their gut. It's subjective opportunity. I'm friends with this person who is friends with this person, I personally like this persons work, I personally would want to see this movie and therefore I think it will be successful- and also, balancing that with whatever qualitative data they have at their disposal. None of these decision makers have all the answers, thats why they still greenlight movies that become financial disasters. The unconscious biases of these decision makers has lead to many of these opportunities going to the same groups of people. This is fact not opinion. There is no political spin to this. To constantly jump to a thought process of- EVERYTHING SHOULD BE GIVEN BASED ON MERIT, AND THIS ISN'T BASED ON MERIT- is due to you misunderstanding of how an industry based on art works. It is impossible to give out opportunities in this industry based only on merit. They don't make decisions looking solely at spreadsheets. Ok this director has done this many movies, he had this average budget, and had this average return. Ok lets do a cost analysis and thats how we will rank every opportunity. If you want to make the argument it should work like that, fine- but thats not how it works, or has worked and the majority of all the opportunity has ended up in the same people's hands without strictly making decisions based on data. Someone like you, always demanding merit to be the only variable weighed, should actually be primarily frustrated at the stats quo, because they haven't been doing that.
