You, Me & Tuscany: Black Films and The Myth of Profitability in Hollywood

Nina Lee, award-winning filmmaker and creator of The Girls Room and Sorry About That, recently posted a thread on X (formerly Twitter) where she revealed that the sale of two of her romance film projects depends on how well the new romantic comedy film You, Me & Tuscany does in theaters. She said in the thread, “A film that has nothing to do with me could quite literally change my life.”

Lee’s call to support the film has re-ignited the discourse about which films get made and why black films have a harder time being green lit in Hollywood. Why is Hollywood making a decision about future black films based on the success of one movie?

There’s an age-old myth in Hollywood that black-led films only appeal to black audiences and aren’t as profitable. Studios don’t put as much money or effort into promoting them, which reinforces the idea that one black film has to prove itself for future black films to be considered worth the investment.

Image credits to Universal Pictures

Even Ryan Coogler’s Sinners wasn’t safe. Despite the success of films like Black Panther and the Creed franchise, Variety's April 2025 article cast doubt on the film’s profitability before the opening weekend was even over. Even with a $61 million global debut, the article stated that “profitability remains a ways away.”

Black films of any genre face this problem, and rom-coms, though popular, rarely follow two non-white leads, not to mention black leads. Plus, in an era of IP-driven films, studios hesitate to greenlight original films in general.

Unfortunately, this means You, Me & Tuscany is already fighting an uphill battle even before its release, as it has the distinction of being all three: an original, black-led, romantic comedy.

Hollywood has always been cautious about the films it makes, looking at the success of prior films before making others like it. But despite theater-goers expressing their desire for original films over endless remakes and sequels, studios are still reluctant to give original films a chance.

In an era where social media platforms are constantly vying for consumers’ attention, Hollywood is still making an effort to restore theater attendance post-COVID, and franchises seem to be the best way to guarantee a return on studios’ investments.

But it seems that black-led films are held to a higher standard than films where the director or lead actors are of a different race. Instead of being judged on their own merits, the fate of future black films relies heavily on the success of the one film. Many online have pointed out the double standard, one post saying, “…if ONE black romcom fails the careers of multiple black filmmakers will be hit…white romcoms can fail, and they will still make new ones.”

Will Packer, a producer of You, Me & Tuscany, spoke out as well.

That’s not to say You, Me & Tuscany can’t or won’t be successful. Despite the double standard, black films have always been profitable.

Sinners, for example, was an original, black-led horror film that went back to theaters multiple times, and earned 19 Oscar nominations–the most in Oscars’ history. There is also the increased nostalgia online for the era of romantic comedies during the 1990s and 2000s, which studios could be tapping into.

The public has more than proven it’s ready for a change. Now it’s up to Hollywood to respond.

Being an original, black-led, rom-com might seem like three strikes against the film, but these are actually three merits in favor of it because these are all things people want to see. Nina Lee’s thread on X is not just a call to see this particular film; it’s a call for the audience to use its power to influence the kinds of movies Hollywood makes, and the audience has more power than it realizes.

That being said, You, Me & Tuscany, starring Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page, will release in theaters on April 10, 2026. Let’s go out and support!

Awards Season: Stan Twitter's Super Bowl

Everything has become stan twitter, and stan twitter has become sports fandom. Here’s how it’s affecting awards season. 

The 2025 awards season has finally come to an end. From discourse around Timotheé Chalamet’s Marty Supreme marketing campaign (and everything else about him), to stan wars erupting from the results of every major awards program, social media has become a hostile hellscape. But since when did social media have this much of an impact on major awards ceremonies? Why does the prestigious nature that these events seem to have had in the past no longer exist? 

Simply put, everything has become stan culture. While this may be a broad statement, it seems that the notion of shows like the Grammys and the Emmys have become hubs for fans of every individual nominee to fight and compare why their favorite nominee has to win and why any other nominee cannot. The Grammys in particular have become saturated with categories, leaving room for more nominees. It has become more embarrassing for your fave to not receive a nomination than it has for it to be an honor. 

Musicians such as Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish have developed intense fanbases that tend to believe in awards supremacy. Eilish, who holds 10 wins with 34 nominations with her career being less than a decade old, has slightly stirred the pot within the past few years of the awards. Evidently, becoming a darling of the Recording Academy rarely goes home empty-handed. In the 2025 awards, Beyoncé won Album of the Year, arguably the highest honor of the night, and stans of the 24-year-old musician were incredibly displeased. Arguments of who had more streams and track virality piled against Cowboy Carter, the winner of the award. Fandoms began to point fingers at one another, the Beyhive alleging racism against fans of Eilish for the outrage of her win, Eilish fans concluding that the award was paid for by Roc Nation. What neither seems to consider is that experts and knowledgeable members of the Recording Academy simply saw Cowboy Carter as the album of the year, plain and simple. However, fans could find some sense of peace after the 2026 ceremony, after Eilish re-released the track “Wildflower” as a single, well after its initial May 2024 release on the album. To have qualified for the 2026 Grammy Awards, music had to have been released between August 31, 2024, and August 30, 2025. Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft " was only eligible to be nominated for the 2025 Grammys, and she released “Wildflower” as a single on March 4, 2025, nearly ten months after it had already been released with the rest of the album. There are no rules against this per se, but the song won the “Song of the Year” award for the 2026 Grammys, which left some viewers upset with the snub of other songs in the category, such as “DtMF” by Bad Bunny and “Luther” by SZA and Kendrick Lamar. 

Alas, Eilish has now won a Grammy for the previously “snubbed” 2024 album. This culture of stans demanding higher numbers, more wins, and better statistics is highly reminiscent of sports culture. Variety reported that for the 2026 Oscars, betting on the awards has become a $100 million business, with bets wagered on who will win. Kalshi and Polymarket ads are difficult to ignore, with the amount of commercial time betting platforms had during the broadcast of the Super Bowl and when the latter partnered with the Golden Globes to integrate live odds into the ceremony. While online betting forums have been around for years, they gained massive popularity right before the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. Once players bet correctly on Trump’s win, sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket have entered the mainstream for various events. Online predictions do not necessarily count as gambling (which is regulated by a few states in the U.S.), which is why these sites are able to promote their platforms as heavily as they do. 

Stan culture and betting are intertwined has turned the awards season into a gamified event. Press and publicity have been around for as long as Hollywood has, but now more than ever can a potential smear campaign or just saying an ill-worded statement on ballet and opera can change the public’s perception of “deserving” the award. Chalamet’s Best Actor campaign for Marty Supreme was nothing short of interesting, to say the least. From standing on top of the Las Vegas Sphere as an orange ping-pong ball to tapping slightly into method press, becoming Marty, embodying greatness, and desiring to be at the top. Many have been turned off by his behavior as it drastically opposes his previously indie-darling persona from the late 2010’s/ early 2020s. Recently, he has found himself in hot water with his comments about ballet in opera while in conversation with former Interstellar costar, Matthew McConaughey. Major ballets and operas across the world have given their two cents on the matter, dissing Chalamet in any way they can. This event has caused a major setback in the public’s view of who should win Best Actor, leading many to one: root for and two: bet on Michael B. Jordan to win. Ultimately, the award went to Jordan, not without some ballet and opera jokes thrown Chalamet’s way during the ceremony. 

The prestige of the award remains partly in its title and the doors it may open for performers and filmmakers. However, the run and the “competition,” so to speak, is no longer a test of the “best performance,” it's a game of numbers. This is where I believe stans across the board would do well in sports fan culture. Once awards and streams became a commodity within stan culture, the direct correlation became blatantly evident. The awards season has now become an amalgamation of stan wars and morality olympics. Does Chalamet deserve an Oscar ever because of his comments? Should movies with bad characters playing antagonists win Best Picture? Can Beyoncé or Taylor Swift win another Grammy? They’ve already won plenty! 

Numbers have no place in the space of honoring art. If you want to bet on winners or compare stats, watch a sport.

Re-Visiting Andrea Arnold’s 2011 Filmed Adaptation of Wuthering Heights: A Conversation About Adaptations

Emily Brontë’s sole published work, Wuthering Heights, is not a beautiful story. It’s barely even a love story, much less “the greatest love story of all time” as the tagline for Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation goes. Brontë wrote this story to showcase the brutal ugliness of humanity by exploring the devastating fallout of generational abuse, racism, and classism. As Peter Bradshaw writes for The Guardian: “Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan strip the story ruthlessly down to its bare essentials: pain, anger and love.” 

Arnold’s greatest strength in this film is her decided lack of romance. The Earnshaw family home is not a picturesque country house, but a grimy farmhouse smack dab in the middle of nowhere, bombarded by brutal rainstorms. According to Jeannette Catsoulis for NPR: “Captured with ravishing naturalism–from eye-straining candlelight to painfully harsh daylight…the film has a melancholy, sinister atmosphere only partly explained by its lashings of rain and banks of gray fog.” Catherine (Shannon Beer as an adolescent, and Kaya Scodelario as a young adult) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave as an adolescent, later James Howson as a young adult) do not go on Bridgerton-style promenades across a flowery, green landscape, but hike their way through harsh, windy, grassy terrains that leave them caked in dirt. 

Arnold’s aesthetic may not be the most conventionally attractive, but it shows a clear understanding of the text’s Gothic nature and immerses the viewer in the world that Brontë herself was drawing from. The Earnshaws themselves are portrayed as rough, middle-class farmers, especially in comparison to the wealthy, upper-class Lintons. There is meant to be a clear class divide between Wuthering Heights and the neighboring estate of Thrushcross Grange, as shown in scenes of Catherine and Heathcliff sneaking across the moors to peek into the Lintons’ windows. Where the Lintons are well-dressed, educated, and sophisticated, the Earnshaws must work in fields and can only afford to send one person–Hindley (Lee Shaw)--to university. 

Another highlight of Arnold’s film is the attention paid to Catherine and Heathcliff’s shared childhood. When Heathcliff is first brought to the Earnshaws, he is around six or seven years old, while Catherine is five and Hindley is fourteen. Their connection is one that is innocent of the societal divides that await them in adulthood. It may surprise newcomers to know that Catherine’s narrative action is confined to the first half of the novel until her death halfway through. Consequently, Kaya Scodelario is not given as much screen time as audiences may have expected from such a well-established actor. However, part of Wuthering Heights’ tragedy comes from the juvenile naivete of its characters. By the time Edgar Linton (Jonny Powell when younger and James Northcote when older) proposes to Catherine, she is fifteen while he is only a few years older (but likely still a teenager). Catherine’s life is cut tragically short before she ever truly gets a chance to grow up. 

Of course, the most standout choice that Arnold makes in her film is the decision to cast Black actors in the role of Heathcliff. Despite Heathcliff’s explicit description as “dark-skinned” along with numerous assumptions about his race which strongly imply that he was not white, almost every adaptation before the 2011 version–and including the upcoming movie–has cast a white actor in the role. Racism in Wuthering Heights was not an afterthought, but a prominent part of the story, especially where Heathcliff was concerned. Characters such as Nelly Dean and even Catherine herself constantly refer to his darker complexion and features, while Hindley calls him Romani slurs. Bradshaw writes that this casting choice leads to Heathcliff being “confronted with overt and brutal racism from those of his new family who resent the outsider, and are determined to treat him like any farm animal.” Heathcliff’s race is part of the overall theme of “othering” that is present throughout the story; he is not like these white people, and he is mistreated because of it.  

A major criticism of Fennell’s film is her decision to cast Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role of Heathcliff. This backlash was further fueled by her casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, defending the choice, remarking that “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life”.  However, this book is meant to reflect real life, and that includes England–and Yorkshire’s–complicated history of racial prejudice that is a catalyst for the abuse that Heathcliff suffers as a child. Frankly, it is frustrating how many filmmakers have chosen to simply ignore the explicit references to Heathcliff being non-white, considering that it is made very clear in the text. There are only so many times a filmmaker can say it’s an “interpretation” when one of the first things readers learn about Heathcliff is that he is “dark-skinned.” 

Unfortunately, for all the things that Arnold gets right in her adaptation, there are several areas in which she falls short. As Roger Ebert points out in his November 2012 review: “What she hasn’t done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel’s passages, particularly from the later chapters, it’s dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted.” Like many past iterations, Arnold cuts out the narrative framing device of Nelly Dean telling the story to Mr. Lockwood, along with the second half of the story, which follows the children of Catherine and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella. Additionally, dialogue is incredibly sparse in this film, which quickly wears out as the film goes on, which creates confusion rather than intrigue. 

Arnold’s film is far from perfect, and to an extent, it is unfair to pass harsh judgment on Fennell’s film before it comes out. However, if future filmmakers wish to adapt the challenging Gothic text, they should look to Arnold’s gritty, naturalistic version for a blueprint. Frankly, a movie that bluntly showcases the wildness of the moorlands and the intense connection between Catherine and Heathcliff is what Brontë herself would have wanted.