We’d like to think the entertainment industry is making significant progress in portraying amputee characters and reflecting amputee lives. Talents such as Zyra Gorecki, Katy Sullivan, Josh Sundquist, and Ashley Eakin have staked out new ground in the last few years, introducing authentic stories of limb difference to mainstream audiences. Just this summer, the blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer both included noteworthy amputee portrayals.
The forward momentum is real, but it’s still mostly happening at the margins of the industry. That’s the takeaway from a new report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, housed at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. According to the Annenberg study, which analyzes portrayals of disability and other factors in the 100 top-earning films from each year, disabled characters remain almost invisible in films with the biggest budgets and largest box-office appeal. Money quote: “There was no meaningful difference in the percentage of speaking characters with a disability across the 8-year timespan of the study.” In other words, we remain stuck in 2015, as far as disability representation is concerned.
It’s a disappointing finding, and it seems at odds with the evidence that onscreen amputee portrayals are increasing in frequency and authenticity. So let’s reiterate that the Annenberg study only looks at the 100 top-grossing films of any given year. That seems like a pretty comprehensive list, but it excludes high-profile disability-related films such as CODA, which didn’t crack the top 100 despite winning Best Picture at the 2022 Oscars. CODA reached millions of viewers via Apple’s online streaming platform, but it had negligible box-office receipts because of its almost nonexistent theatrical distribution. Therefore it was excluded from Annenberg’s analysis, while forgettable titles such as Jackass Forever, Paws of Fury, and Terrifier 2 were included.
That’s a limitation of the Annenberg study to keep in mind: In today’s entertainment landscape, the box-office gross doesn’t necessarily reflect the full magnitude of a film’s audience size or cultural impact. With that caveat, let’s sift through some of Annenberg’s topline findings.
Only 1.9 percent of speaking characters in 2022’s top movies had a disability. To put hard numbers to this: Of more than 4,000 characters who had at least one line of dialogue, only 81 people were portrayed as having a disability. In real life, a representative sample of 4,000 people would include somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people with disabilities. So Hollywood fell short by somewhere between 700 and 900 characters.
BTW: When Annenberg analyzes the films of 2023, neither of the amputee characters from Barbenheimer will count. The unnamed amputee in Barbie doesn’t have a speaking line, so she’s out; and the amputee character in Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, is not portrayed as an amputee; his limb difference is invisible to the audience.
Limb difference ranked among the most commonly portrayed disabilities. More than 80 percent of speaking characters with disabilities in 2022’s top films were portrayed with a physical disability such as a limb difference or spinal injury. The remainder had disabilities related to sight impairment, hearing impairment, stroke, mental health, or trauma. About one in three characters had multiple disabilities.
More than half of 2022’s top movies did not have a single speaking character with a disability. Only 46 of the top 100 films granted at least one line of dialogue to a disabled person. That’s fewer than the 52 movies in 2021 that had speaking characters with disabilities, and almost 20 percent fewer than the 55 films that included dialogue from disabled characters back in 2015, nearly a decade ago. Progress, this ain’t.
Fourteen of the top 100 films had lead characters with a disability. That’s not bad, actually. It means 14 percent of films featured disabled lead characters, which comes much closer to the distribution of disability in the actual population (~20 to 25 percent) than many of the other numbers in this study. The representation is still lopsided in terms of sex (11 disabled leads were male, only 3 were female) and race (11 disabled leads were white, only 3 were people of color). And the 14 lead characters is nearly identical to the number that appeared in 2017 (also 14) and 2016 (15), and significantly fewer than the 19 who appeared in 2019’s top 100 films. Again, not what you’d call progress.
The Annenberg study concludes with this thought: “[Our findings] reflect that storytellers have a narrow and limited conception of who people with disabilities are and how prevalent this population is. People with disabilities fill the worlds of our workplaces, our families, and our public spaces—yet remain invisible in the imaginary worlds created by filmmakers.” To read the whole report, download it from Annenberg’s website.