Professor Paul Monticone is a historian of the media industries, currently studying the film industry’s trade association. Monticone has also been teaching for about a decade. Currently a teacher of the Movie Industry at Rowan University, he hopes to eventually teach a course in African American Cinema or Media Censorship.

I reached out to Professor Monticone and asked him about evolving representation within the movie industry.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This interview took place over email.

Q: In your opinion how has representation in Cinema changed over the past few years?

A: In same ways, yes. I think we’ve been great strides made with respect to on-screen diversity and positive depictions of characters who aren’t hetero-normatively white, especially in the industry’s premiere product — it’s high-budget blockbusters. The industry’s current leader, Disney, releases only a handful of films each year, and it’s significant that over the last year nearly half of their releases—Star Wars: The Last Jedi, A Wrinkle in Time, and Black Panther — prominently featured actors of color or centered active, female protagonists. That’s not entirely new, of course — Will Smith was a pretty big star —  but the explicit centering of nonwhite, non-male characters in some of the industry’s biggest franchise tentpoles does seem to me something unique about the moment.

Q: Can you compare what it used to be with the direction you think it is headed?

A: We need to keep in mind that the gains made in representation in blockbusters and a few highly visible and highly regarded independent productions have occurred against a backdrop of industry consolidation and retrenchment, at least in the commercial cinema.

For example, Black Panther is one black-cast, black-directed film, and, to be sure, it’s a hugely successful and very widely seen blockbuster,  but the overall number of films commercially made by the industry is declining. And so while we have one very major film, a hugely successful blockbuster seen by millions, we’ve also lost 10 lower budget films. The dozens of films that Hollywood studio took a chance on after Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989)? The industry increasingly avoids those investments, because they are thought to be riskier.

Q: How do you think social media has effected Hollywood diversity/representation?

A: I’m sure social media has had an effect, but it’s hard to quantify the effect of public pressure campaigns on the industry’s output. The size of recent social media movements to improve representation is not as large as that which pushed censorship onto the film industry back in the 1930s, but social media does have a way of amplifying voices and crystalizing demands. But I think more salient, from the industry’s perspective, the particular demographic that’s pushing the studios today — engaged, informed, and media savvy millennials — is a big chunk of the teens and twenty-somethings that compose core demographic for the studios. Ultimately, the industry is most interested in its profitability, and if diversity didn’t fulfill a economic goal, I doubt we would see it, except at the edges of the industry.

Q: What do you think contributes to Hollywood’s reluctance to use representation?

A: Hollywood’s belief has long been that minority-centered films do not sell well overseas. “Black” films, in particular, are thought to engage issues that are so unique to American culture and history that these would be illegible to audiences not steeped in that same culture. And, as the global box office has grown in importance, satisfying the overseas market has only become more important to the studios.

Of course, that’s not entirely right: “Black” films can do quite well overseas — Black Panther made just as much internationally as it did in the U.S. But you’ll note that manages to be only tangentially and thematically “about” any identifiable, culturally specific sort of non-whiteness. “Wakanda” doesn’t exist except in the Marvel Universe, and, though it’s densely designed and draws on some “real” forms of cultural difference, the film doesn’t require the viewer appreciate these to enjoy the film. To this extent, it’s an add-on to sturdy, reliably profitable formula. And that’s, ultimately, where I see the limitations of the recent turn toward “positive representation” and increased diversity in the movie industry.

Q: Movies such as Love Simon, Crazy Rich Asians, and Black Panther have all been praised critically as well as reached box office success. Do you think these movies have opened a door for better representation or do you think Hollywood will go back to what it’s comfortable with?

A: I think these films show that “positive representation” is not irreconcilable with the industry’s desire to generate robust box office returns. The worry that a black cast or culturally specific minority milieu can’t “sell” a movie overseas has been pretty well debunked — even films like Crazy Rich Asians are doing reasonably well abroad, partly because of a dynamic that India’s Bollywood cinema has long  benefited from: the world is increasingly global and a lot of the cultural barriers that the industry thinks exist increasingly don’t.

Still, the Hollywood industry is very risk adverse, so I wouldn’t be confident that a big, or even modest, box office  disappointment (perhaps a Wrinkle in Time?) won’t send the industry back to “safer” waters.

Q: What do you think young people going into the film industry can contribute to better representation?

A: I think the biggest challenge moving forward, which I hope the next generation of media creators will help meet, is to push beyond representation, or even “positive representation.” I think we should be skeptical about the industry’s commitment to better representation. It is, like much else that the industry does, a strategy that is definitely self-interested and driven by the bottom line. In some ways, “representation” becomes a marker of a certain type of quality. I suspect a lot of filmmakers whose careers have benefitted from the trend know this. So, I hope the next generation gets greedy and demands more.

I hope, in the future, rather than insisting on “better representation” within formulaic, genre filmmaking that doesn’t really capture the complexity of anyone’s identity, that young filmmakers—and media consumers!—instead demand films that are more explicitly about their specific communities, identities, and histories. As A Wrinkle in Time makes Disney skittish about even casting a multiracial group of women at the center of major film, a big, bold demand that the media industries push beyond that rather surface diversity will at least mean that diversity is the WORST we can expect of the industry. That’d be a nice worst-case scenario.