GLAAD’s annual film study is out, and the headline finding is that LGBTQ characters in movies have declined for the third year in a row.
GLAAD is framing the numbers as a warning to Hollywood.
From where we sit, they read like a lagging indicator of a course correction that is already well underway, one we have been reporting on for months.
The GLAAD Numbers
Per the 14th edition of the study, now called Where We Are in Film, 46 of the 225 movies released in 2025 by the ten largest studio distributors featured an LGBTQ character.
That works out to 20.4 percent, down from 23.6 percent in 2024 and a record 28.5 percent in 2023, via THR.
The character count fell even harder, dropping to 112 from 181 the year before.
GLAAD also counted zero LGBTQ characters across the 19 animated and family films rated PG and under, and zero transgender characters across all 225 movies.
LGBTQ characters of color declined 36 percent, and bisexual representation slipped from 25 percent of inclusive films to 22 percent.
The distributor list covers everyone: A24, Amazon, Apple TV, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony, Disney, and Warner Bros., along with their labels and streamers.
One more detail worth flagging: GLAAD renamed the study from the Studio Responsibility Index and dropped the letter grades it used to hand out to studios. The report card era is over in more ways than one.
Follow The Greenlight Calendar
The peak year tells you everything. Representation hit its record in 2023, which means those movies were greenlit in 2020 and 2021, the height of the message-first era.
The 2025 slate GLAAD just counted was assembled after Lightyear got banned across more than a dozen overseas markets and flopped anyway, and after Strange World handed Disney a loss reported near $200 million.
Studios did not have a change of heart. They had a change of accountants.
The Report’s Own Poster Child Grossed $2 Million
You do not have to look far for the disconnect. The trade coverage of GLAAD’s report is illustrated with Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Bill Condon musical picked up out of Sundance.
That film opened in October in more than 1,300 theaters and could not clear $1 million for the weekend, with a per-screen average that landed among the worst ever recorded for a release that wide. It finished with around $2 million against a $30 million budget.
GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis warns that Hollywood “risks losing a generation” if it does not invest in films with LGBTQ characters. Lionsgate invested. The audience answered.
Zero In Family Films Is Not A Mystery
The stat generating the most headlines is the shutout in animated and family films. There is no mystery there either.
Family audiences are exactly where the backlash hit hardest, and family films are where studios lost the most money finding that out.
It is the same audience Disney is now openly trying to win back.
As we reported in our exclusive, Disney is targeting other studios to recover the males and families that Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar bled off, while the company rests and resets legacy IP ahead of the coming Paramount-WBD war.
Disney is not alone. Netflix is also eyeing other studios despite the public denials, with insiders pointing to the library and a faith-and-family lane Hollywood spent a decade pretending did not exist. The trend also lines up with Netflix’s leaked internal content mandate, which spelled out that exact faith-and-family fare Dan Lin’s studio is now chasing, as we first reported.
We’re also told Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison has been collecting his own receipts on Hollywood’s message-first era, with family audiences, faith-based viewers, and the Middle America crowd all part of the lane legacy studios abandoned while chasing online approval.
Nobody in those boardrooms is asking how to add more checkboxes. They are asking how to get the lost audience back in seats.
Even The X-Men Got The Memo
The franchise most associated with the outsider metaphor is making the same pivot in real time.
Marvel’s X-Men movie writer Lee Sung Jin just confirmed the reboot is going character first because the X-Men are for everybody, leading with what is universally relatable before plots and world stakes.
Days earlier, John Byrne told The New York Times that the X-Men were never created as a civil rights allegory in the first place. Readers saw themselves in the mutants because the mutants were outsiders, and that feeling belongs to everybody.
That is the model that works: a mirror anyone can look into, not a lecture aimed at a slice of the audience.
GLAAD’s Own Bright Spot Proves The Point
Here is the part of the report that deserves more attention. GLAAD calls horror the bright spot for inclusion, citing films like Weapons and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and notes that mid-budget movies in the $15 million to $90 million range continue to carry most of the representation.
Weapons was one of the biggest hits of 2025. Nobody boycotted it.
That is because those movies are stories first (the gay couple actually gets killed). The characters serve the horror instead of the marketing, and the budgets are sized so the films only need an audience, not a movement.
GLAAD’s Megan Townsend argues studios cannot afford to ignore Gen Z, pointing to Gallup polling that more than one in five Americans under 30 identify as LGBTQ.
But Gen Z is already showing up, and it is showing up for exactly the movies GLAAD flagged as its bright spot: genre films that earn the ticket on story.
It is the same course correction studios have been making all year across every franchise that matters.
The counting will continue. The grades are already gone. And the studios stopped studying for this test the moment the box office started grading them instead.
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