“We definitely are going to make billions, but we want to do it in a smart and thoughtful way”: Macro, Black-cast film distribution, and the barriers of Hollywood’s industry logics<!--EndFragment-->

During the mid-2010s and early-2020s, a series of controversies and social movements, including #Oscarssowhite, #WhiteWashedOUT, Black Lives Matter/#BlackLivesMatter, and #MeToo, brought Hollywood’s lack of diversity under greater scrutiny. Within this context, some producers, creators, and on-screen talent of color began to receive more job opportunities and gain greater attention and exposure. One figure who received exposure during this period was Charles D. King, a former talent agent who exited William Morris Endeavor in 2015 to establish Macro, a production and talent management company that has a purported mission to elevate the voices and visions of people of color in the screen industries and to cater to under-served audiences by producing work with more diverse stories. While the steady employment gains made by talent of color in Hollywood initially gave the impression that longer term changes were on the horizon, however, the greater opportunities that talent of color were finding was arguably not a corrective to historical inequalities and racism in Hollywood but was a temporary public relations solution. Accordingly, this article scrutinises notions of disruption that have cohered around King and Macro to show how public relations activities surrounding producers and talent of color can obfuscate continuities of Hollywood inequalities. To do so, the article explores some of the ways that King and Macro may depart from certain racist Hollywood industry logics, before conducting a qualitative analysis of a ‘great leader’ discourse that frames King as a disruptive figure bringing about real change through the successful execution of his ‘master plan’. The article then conducts a quantitative analysis of the theatrical distribution and box-office data of several Macro feature films to explore how they compare to White-cast productions and to what extent they adhere to longer term trends.