Just after Everything Everywhere All At Once had swept the Screen Actors Guild Awards, 94-year-old James Hong recalled a time when Hollywood saw Asian actors as “not box office”.
“But look at us now, huh!” quipped the star of almost 700 film and TV roles, to thunderous applause.
The largely Asian and Asian-American cast of the breakout sci-fi comedy – Hong included – has earned a long list of accolades already. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan became the first Asians to win the SAG Awards for best female actor and best male supporting actor. They are now up for Hollywood’s biggest prize – the Oscars. The film has 11 nominations, and four of those nominees are of Asian descent.
But Hollywood’s Asian moment feels long overdue. It has certainly been building up since the Oscar success of Bong Joon-ho’s darkly satirical Parasite and Lee Isaac Chung’s haunting Minari. This year, the Indian action epic RRR has also made waves. But streaming platforms have long shown the way with runaway hits like Squid Game and Pachinko.
“Hollywood is finally catching up with the rest of the world,” says Diana Othman, a Singaporean movie aficionado who watches more than 100 new films each year. She hailed Yeoh’s nomination in what she called one of the “whitest” Oscar categories. If successful, Yeoh will become the first Asian to win the award for Best Actress.
But 60-year-old Yeoh, who has been in the business for four decades, is already a superstar, whether or not the Oscar voters agree.
“If I’m being honest, her winning is better for the Oscars than the Oscars are for her,” says Filipino filmmaker Quark Henares, likening it to “the afterglow the Academy enjoyed after the Parasite win”.
In recent years, Hollywood studios have ridden on the success of Marvel blockbusters and nostalgia-driven films like Top Gun: Maverick. And cinemas took a hammer blow during the pandemic.
So audiences everywhere have turned to streaming platforms likeNetflix, Amazon and Apple TV, which are offering fresh and original content. “Asia has been having a moment for a while now,” says Henares, pointing not just to the success of films and streaming shows but also pop bands like BTS.
Revenue from digital entertainment ($72bn; £40bn) in 2021 was more than triple that of the global box office ($21bn), according to a 2021 industry report.
While Hollywood has long looked to Chinese and other Asian markets, data shows that its share of Chinese box office revenue has been steadily falling over the past decade. Reports suggest this could be because of a strong domestic industry as well as lagging interest in Hollywood blockbusters.
There is also the fact that China tightly controls screenings of foreign films, imposing a yearly quota. Hollywood films only recently returned to the country after an almost four year absence, following an apparent ban.
But it’s still a lucrative market and Hollywood studios have often been accused of pandering to it with token representation, as well as censorship.
Ironically, the Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which was made with Chinese audiences in mind, was never screened in the country.
It was a hit in the US, where studies show that increasingly diverse audiences – almost 43% of the population as of 2021 were people of colour – are hungry for diverse casts.
Seven of the top 10 theatrical films for Asian moviegoers in 2021 featured casts where more than a third were minorities, according to a 2021 study. It was the same for black and Hispanic moviegoers.
Ms Diana bristled at the suggestion by some online that the prominence of Asian-centric productions has been more about diversity and token representation than actual merit: “Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? Films are allowed to be – and have been – both exceptionally good as well as vehicles of representation, such as Get Out and Judas and the Black Messiah.”
But, experts say, the industry is not changing as quickly as the audience.
The lack of diversity in Hollywood isn’t down to the Academy Awards, reckons director Jann Turner.
“They simply expose the truth of the under-representation of women and people of colour both in front of and behind the camera. The problem isn’t going to be solved by window dressing at awards shows. It has to be addressed at the level of hiring. But for now, the studies show pale males are still getting most of the work.”
And this is despite the success of Yeoh and others, says Milton Liu, executive director of the Asian American Media Alliance, adding that there have only been “modest gains and opportunities” for Asian creatives in Hollywood.
“In addition to total Asian acting roles being underrepresented, only 14 out of 138 roles were lead roles,” he said, citing the 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report.
“Although there may be increases in Asian creatives in acting, writing and directing, we’re seeing underrepresentation in higher level positions such as lead acting roles and executive producers/showrunners.”
And that’s why Mr Liu believes an Oscar win for Yeoh would be “monumental”.
Ironically, Yeoh’s role in Everything Everywhere was originally written for a man, and first offered to another Asian superstar who blazed a trail in Hollywood: Jackie Chan.
But with major roles in blockbusters like Shang-Chi and Star Trek: Discovery, Yeoh has now long surpassed Chan.
Yeoh has been on a “long journey” from Malaysia to Hong Kong to Hollywood, says Professor Enoch Yee-lok Tam of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University.
“It is not merely a success story of a Chinese/Asian artist but also a success story of a woman from the region,” he adds.
And Yeoh knows that well. Visibly emotional, she told the audience at the SAG Awards: “This is not just for me. This is for every little girl that looks like me.”
