Jennifer Lopez in Kiss of the Spider Woman, one of the studio-backed LGBTQ titles released during the period GLAAD's study covers.
There is a particular kind of statistic that does not need interpreting. GLAAD’s latest film study counted zero trans characters across every film released by the ten largest studio distributors in a full calendar year — 225 films, and not one of them.
The finding sits inside a wider decline. Of those 225 releases, 46 contained any LGBTQ character at all, or 20.4 percent. That is the third consecutive annual drop, and it is now well below the high-water mark the study recorded three years earlier.
The Numbers the Study Actually Reports
GLAAD’s report tracks the quantity, quality and diversity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer characters in films released across a full calendar year by ten major distributors: A24, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV+, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Skydance, Sony, The Walt Disney Studios and Warner Bros. Discovery, along with their subsidiaries.
The year-on-year comparison is stark, as The Hollywood Reporter set out. The previous cycle had 59 inclusive films out of 250, or 23.6 percent. The peak was 28.5 percent. And the raw character count fell harder than the film count: 112 LGBTQ characters, down from 181 the year before, a drop of well over a third.
Two further findings sharpen the picture. Characters of colour fell 36 percent year on year. And bisexual representation slipped too — of the 46 inclusive films, 10 had a bisexual character, 22 percent against 25 percent previously.
What Zero Trans Characters Means in Practice
A count of zero is different in kind from a decline. A percentage falling from 23.6 to 20.4 describes an industry doing less of something. Zero describes an industry that stopped entirely — across every genre, every budget tier and every one of ten distributors, for a whole year of theatrical and streaming output.
The animated and family finding runs parallel. GLAAD reported no LGBTQ characters at all in the 19 films it categorised as animated or family releases rated PG and under. For a young audience, the studios’ combined output contained nobody.
It is worth being precise about scope. This is a study of ten major distributors, not of every film made. Independent cinema, festival titles and international releases sit outside it, and trans stories continue to be made there. What the report measures is the mainstream pipeline — the films with marketing budgets, wide bookings and a realistic shot at a mass audience.
The Warning From GLAAD’s Leadership
GLAAD framed the findings as a commercial problem as much as a cultural one. “If the industry doesn’t prioritize investing in films with LGBTQ characters, it risks losing a generation that will go elsewhere to find entertainment that does include our community,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the organisation’s president and chief executive.
Megan Townsend, GLAAD’s senior director of entertainment research and analysis, put the arithmetic behind that. “Gen Z represents the largest share of moviegoers in North America,” she said. “Gen Z also has the highest percentage of people who say they are part of the LGBTQ community, with Gallup reporting that more than one in five (23 percent) of Americans under the age of 30 are LGBTQ.”
Her conclusion is the sharpest line in the report: “If studios want to stay relevant with younger audiences and bring in box office dollars, they can’t afford to ignore nearly one-quarter of their most enthusiastic ticket buyers.”
Where Inclusion Is Still Happening
The study is not uniformly bleak, and the bright spots are revealing about how the industry works. GLAAD singled out horror as a genre where LGBTQ inclusion held up, flagging titles including I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Parenting, Companions and Weapons.
The other pocket is budgetary. Mid-budget films in the $15 million to $90 million range, GLAAD found, continue to be a place where significant representation of LGBTQ stories shows up. That band is precisely the one the studio system has spent years hollowing out in favour of tentpoles and micro-budget acquisitions.
Read together, the two findings say something specific: LGBTQ characters are not being written out because audiences reject them. They are disappearing from the parts of the slate that are themselves shrinking, and surviving in genres where risk is cheap and creative control sits lower down the chain.
The Blank Space in Family Films
Of all the figures in the study, the animated and family result may be the most consequential over time. Nineteen films rated PG and under came out of these ten distributors, and none of them contained an LGBTQ character of any kind.
That category is where audiences form their first sense of who exists in a story. It is also, commercially, the most protected part of the slate — the films built for the widest possible booking, the longest tail and the most international sales. A blank result there is not an accident of one year’s development choices; it reflects what a risk committee believes a family title can carry into every market it sells to.
Set against the trans finding, the two results describe the same instinct from opposite ends of the slate. At the family end, inclusion is treated as a commercial variable to be minimised. At the trans end, it was reduced to nothing at all. In between sit the horror titles and mid-budget films GLAAD flagged as bright spots — the two zones where a studio has least to lose.
GLAAD’s own framing keeps returning to that mismatch: the audience skews young and disproportionately queer, while the slate built for it does not.
A Renamed Report With a New Method
This is the 14th edition of the study, and the first under a new name. What was the Studio Responsibility Index is now Where We Are in Film, aligning it with GLAAD’s long-running Where We Are in TV research.
The methodology changed with the title. Characters are now categorised by narrative significance — lead, significant supporting, supporting or background — rather than by screen time, which is a better test of whether a character matters to a story or merely appears in it. GLAAD has also dropped the letter-grade system it previously issued to each studio.
Losing the grades removes an annual headline, and with it some pressure. What replaces it is a cleaner data set, which makes the zero trans characters finding harder to argue with rather than easier.
Why This Lands Now
Representation counts are sometimes dismissed as bookkeeping. This one is not, because the drop is not a plateau or a rounding error — it is three consecutive years of decline, a 36 percent fall in characters of colour in a single year, and a complete absence of trans people from 225 films.
For queer audiences the practical effect is simple. The films that reflect their lives are increasingly the ones they have to seek out, at festivals, on smaller distributors, in the horror aisle. That is a real cost, and it lands hardest on the youngest viewers, who are both the largest cinema audience and the most likely to be LGBTQ. It is the same pattern we traced in the closure of physical queer spaces, where demand held steady while the venues serving it kept vanishing.
The full study, including the per-distributor breakdowns, is published on GLAAD’s website. The next edition will show whether the year of zero trans characters was a floor or a step.
This article was AI-assisted and edited for accuracy.
