“Our industry has caught up with reality; the majority of the world is actually Asian,” said Bing Chen, president of Gold House, a non-profit collective that promotes Asian Pacific Islander voices.

“Audiences are craving things they’ve never seen, never heard of.”

“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”, the first Marvel movie to star an Asian superhero, surpassed US$400 million (RM1.7 billion) at the box office less than two months after its mid-August release.

“The Eternals,” which opened in November, features a diverse cast including Marvel Studios’ first deaf superhero and the first gay kiss in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The proliferation of audience data debunks much of Hollywood’s conventional wisdom that had devalued women and other minorities, said Liz Jenkins, chief operating officer of Hello Sunshine, the women-led media company co-founded by actor Reese Witherspoon.

“American audiences will watch stuff with subtitles. It’s not just about ticking a box for DE&I (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), about being the right thing to do. It’s really being great business.”

Global megahit “Squid Game”, which debuted in September, helped Netflix win more new customers than expected to the world’s largest streaming service. “Hellbound”, another South Korean series, followed with a global debut at No. 1 on Netflix last month.

Chen credits decades of work by executives like Miky Lee, an early DreamWorks investor who was a lead producer and funder of “Parasite”, the first non-English-language film to win the Oscar for best picture. Through her CJ E&M company, Lee helped propel K-pop idols such as BTS to the world stage.

“This is about minorities founding different companies and trying to reshape what media looks like,” Chen said. “It’s about incumbents who’ve always been doing twice as much to get half as far. It’s just good that we’ve finally arrived.”