Every year, there’s one big studio film with a Black cast that we’re told will be the make-or-break film for the future of Black Hollywood. This one film, we’re told, is our opportunity to show up to the theater and prove to Hollywood that Black films can be profitable. This mission, should we fail to accept it, will not only determine the career of those involved with that one film. Oh, no. This one film will also give studio executives permission to either greenlight more Black films or turn them down. And either way, their choice will be our fault.
This year’s film appears to be the Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page rom-com You, Me & Tuscany, coming to theaters on April 10. From Universal Pictures, this Italian-set love story will be the first Black rom-com with a studio release since American Fiction grossed $23 million at the box office on a $10 million budget and garnered 5 Oscar nominations for its cast and crew in 2023. But 2026 is a new year! So we must “show and prove” again.
As soon as the film was announced, social media was flooded with (well-meaning) demands of the Black audiences: “Y’all understand the assignment, right?!” We have our marching orders, we must make this movie a success. Not because we love rom-coms, or Italian getaways or Halle and Regé as actors, but because it is our Black duty to support Black films in theaters— otherwise they won’t “let us” have another one. The “they” of course, being Hollywood studio executives. It’s an annoying call-and-response I see often as a hyper-online person and I’m not sure how much the average, less-online Black viewer is bombarded with this. But it absolutely gives the impression of a relentless, tired holy charge that’s been foisted upon us and can never be removed.
You, Me & Tuscany looks cute. I like Regé-Jean and Halle and I’m going to an early screening next week. I hope it’s good! And I resent that, if it’s not, or people don’t show up to watch it, the studios will use the response to a film that’s written and directed by white people to pretend to determine the future of Black studio films. We’re not making that up. It’s not just in our heads. This is what Hollywood explicitly tells us.
“1. Met with a studio about my already shot romcom and they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does [sic],” tweeted award-winning Black filmmaker Nina Lee yesterday. The rom-com in question, That’s Her, stars Bel-Air’s Grammy-award winning lead Coco Jones and comedian Kountry Wayne. The film is produced by They Cloned Tyrone producer Stephen “Dr.” Love and wrapped production in December 2025, according to Black Film & TV.
“2. Met with an exec about a romance script I have, they won’t buy it until they see how You, Me & Tuscany does. 3. Go see this film! [sic]” She followed up: “A film that has nothing to do with me could quite literally change my life.”
I hope it’s true. I hope we see all of Nina Lee’s films on screen soon and that all Black filmmakers have a chance to make their art and share it with the world. I also have an incredible Black rom-com script with a dream-team package behind it that I hope you’ll get to see soon!
The gag is: Hollywood is lying to us. Hollywood is gaslighting us.
For decades, we’ve heard that Hollywood only wants to make money, so if Black movies don’t make money because white people don’t want to see them and Black audiences don’t show up in droves, then the fault is ours. And then a Black movie will make a huge amount of money at the box office, and they’ll call it a fluke.
In 2013, when another Universal picture The Best Man Holiday raked in $30 million over the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, going toe-to-toe with the Marvel film Thor, breathless headlines from the trades could not believe its luck. They tracked the film much lower, therefore the film was labeled as “over-performing.” In an infamous headline from USA Today, they labeled the rom-com “race-themed,” whatever that means. Steve Harvey’s Think Like a Man had made $91 million at the box office the year before, but The Best Man Holiday’s success was still a head-scratcher for them. And guess what? There was no grand influx of Black rom-coms in theaters after these successes. The Black rom-com Baggage Claim did flop that year, too, so! That counted more.
More than a decade after the backlash to the backlash of The Best Man Holiday’s success, what’s changed? Just last year, Ryan Coogler’s Black vampire epic Sinners rose past projected box office placement and earnings to open at No. 1 with $48 million domestically and $63 million worldwide in ticket sales. While this was the biggest opening weekend for an original film since the pandemic began in 2020 — an encouraging sign that audiences will show up to the movies for an original story if it’s a cinematic event — white Hollywood media just couldn’t let a Black director have his well-deserved flowers.
“Sinners Overperformed at the Box Office, But Only Made $60 million,” said Business Insider.
“Sinners Is a Box Office Success (with a Big Asterisk),” wrote the New York Times.
“The Warner Bros. release has a $90 million price tag before global marketing expenses, so profitability remains a ways away,” tweeted Variety. The outcry from Black audiences — and Ben Stiller — was swift.
“In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?” Stiller quote-tweeted Variety, which earned more than 300,000 likes.
Everyone in Hollywood knows this is not usually how the media discusses these achievements — particularly for a film that garnered a 98% Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score and a 97% audience score and the first-ever A CinemaScore for a horror film. If there’s any doubt about the fact that this framing of “non-profitability” on opening weekend is blatantly anti-Black racism, compare it to the headlines for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That 2019 film also had a $90 million budget (which, adjusted for 2025 inflation would be well over $112 million), pulled in less than Sinners’ $48 million domestic haul with a $41 million domestic opening, and it didn’t even hit No. 1 at the box office, falling behind its Disney live-action remake competitor, The Lion King.
“Disney’s The Lion King might still rule everything the light touches, but Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood certainly held its own this weekend at the domestic box office,” wrote Variety’s Rebecca Rubin, the same author of the Sinners piece. Rubin went on to praise the second-place, B CinemaScore film as a “win for original content.” Though the film’s $90 million budget is mentioned, there’s neither a hem nor a haw about how far away the film was from being “profitable” in its opening weekend — just celebration for setting a personal opening weekend record for Tarantino. Qwhite the difference.
White media — from its Hollywood studios to its propaganda journalism arm — have always conspired to spin the narrative about Black films, Black filmmakers, undermining their financial wins or painting them as unrepeatable anomalies that should be individually studied. We are defined by our flops, and our successes are flukes. How can we win, when they keep moving the goalposts?
“What does it take for people in Hollywood to realize Black audiences will come out to see a movie?” Lee Daniels asked in a 2013 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “Does ‘The Butler’ need to make $100 million?” The film went on to win a worldwide box office total of $177.3 million. It has not changed a thing for how Black films and filmmakers have been received or championed as a whole.
In response to white folks underestimating the Sinners box office last year, Black folks (who make up 13% of the U.S. population) showed up at 49% on opening night, leading to the film’s incredible success. As soon as white media played in Coogler’s face after his success, countless Black folk on social media declared that we must go back to the theaters and “prove them wrong again!” Again.
As someone who literally saw Sinners 15 times in the theater: Aren’t we tired?
But, we did it, bros! Sinners grossed $370 million on a $90 million budget. Where’s the influx of studios greenlighting original Black horror films? In 2018, Black Panther grossed $1.8 BILLION. Though 2022’s The Woman King and 2027’s Children of Blood & Bone were both said to benefit from Black Panther’s success (both films by only one amazing director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, by the way!), where’s the influx of Black sci-fi/fantasy epic tentpoles? Two films for one filmmaker and a sequel and an original film for Coogler in a decade is all $1 BILLION can buy? Oh.
So, what’s the number that would make You, Me & Tuscany a success? Cause it’s not making a billion dollars, no matter how much Black folks pack the theaters. We’re all writing these scripts; there’s plenty of Black filmmakers and actors who want to star in them, so what’s the number that gets us a regular influx of Black romantic comedies in theaters? Inquiring minds want to know!
But here’s a damning number, $10 billion.
In 2024, conservative consulting firm McKinsey released a report that Hollywood studio executives leave $10 billion on the table every year by not investing in Black stories. That’s right, the same studios that cry about “profitability” and enact mass layoffs as their executives pocket tens of millions in salaries and bonuses, shrug off the near-assured additional profit of $10 billion. Why? Because they’re racist.
There will never be a high-enough opening weekend or a diverse enough audience or enough history-making achievements to change their mind about us. As Toni Morrison forewarned: there will always be one more thing. It’s time to accept their anti-Black racism for what it is: a distraction.
Let’s lock in on what matters: creating art that we like and supporting art because we like it — not because we believe one Black person’s success will equal Black success in general or that Hollywood will let it trickle down to the rest of us. It won’t. This industry must be dismantled, not begged.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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My debut feature film ABANITU: A FAMILY DOCUMENTARY is having its international premiere at the Coal City Film Festival in Lagos, Nigeria today! Check out my interview with Carolyn Talks on my filmmaking journey:
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