Despite being popular with queer fans, Disney has done virtually nothing to include LGBTQ characters in its movies, according to a new analysis released by GLAAD.
For the last eight years, GLAAD has rated each of the major film studios on their representation of queer charcters, and Disney has ranked near the bottom every year. Only in 2013 did the studio manage to rise to the level of “adequate,” before falling back down to a “failing” rating for several years that followed.
In 2019, the studio released 19 films, but only four included any LGBTQ characters at all, and zero passed GLAAD’s test that requires queer characters to be tied to the plot.
The movie Avengers: Endgame contains a brief mention of a same-sex partner, a moment that could easily be edited out for international exhibition. At the time, director Joe Russo told the press, “it was important to us as we did four of these films, we wanted a gay character somewhere in them.” Technically, the gay character is “somewhere” in the film, constituting about 10 seconds of screen time, but he is not named or a significant part of the story.
Disney also released Frozen 2 in 2019, and although many fans have determined that the character of Elsa is queer, the film contains no confirmation of that fact.
Also last year, The Rise of Skywalker was rumored to contain a gay character, with director J.J. Abrams telling interviewers that “it was important to me that people who go to see this movie feel that they’re being represented in the film.” That representation amounted to a momentary kiss between incidental background characters.
Similarly, Toy Story 4 contains a glimpse of two women with their arms around each other. They are not named and are not connected to the plot.
GLAAD releases its annual analysis in the hopes that studios will improve, and while Disney has so far failed to do so, there are opportunities for better representation in the future. The upcoming Jungle Cruise movie is said to include a gay character, and Tessa Thompson, who played the character Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok, says that in the next Thor movie she’ll be seeking a queen. But considering how pre-release promises around Marvel movies have turned out, it’s hard to set expectations very high.
Disney is also working on an X-Men spinoff called The New Mutants, which includes two explicitly queer characters in a relationship.
But the most encouraging news is coming from Marvel’s print division. The company just released a new comic by writers Chip Zdarsky and Anthony Oliveira that focuses on a romantic same-sex relationship. While it’s too early to predict how that storyline might be adapted into a big-budget Disney film, it’s one of Marvel’s most promising storylines to date, and with any luck, it’s a glimpse into the studio’s future.
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