Hollywood's queer footprint shrinks for a third year, GLAAD finds

Hollywood's biggest films of 2025 carried fewer LGBTQ+ characters than at any point in the past three years, according to a study released on 9 July 2026 by the US advocacy organisation GLAAD. The annual Where We Are in Film report, which surveys the year's hundred top-grossing studio releases, found that the share of films containing at least one queer character has slipped to a multi-year low, that no major studio film in 2025 featured a transgender character, and that the representation of queer people of colour — already thin by GLAAD's reckoning — has continued to contract.

The findings land in a release calendar that studios themselves describe as constrained. Production cycles disrupted in earlier years are still working through the pipeline, marketing budgets have tightened, and the kinds of mid-budget, identity-driven features that historically carried most of this representation are a smaller share of the slate than they were a decade ago. Read against that backdrop, GLAAD's numbers describe an industry still reckoning with a post-2022 retrenchment.

What the study counts

GLAAD has published Where We Are in Film since 2016, tracking the share of the year's top-grossing films that contain identifiable lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer characters, and weighting those counts against US Census demographics. The 2026 edition, covering films released in calendar year 2025, finds that just over a fifth of the hundred biggest releases contained a queer character — a decline from the share recorded in 2024's report and the third consecutive year-on-year fall since the post-pandemic high.

The report's most cited single statistic — and the one likely to dominate this week's coverage — is its count of trans characters in studio film: zero, across the full hundred-title slate. GLAAD has previously counted trans characters in single digits even in years when the headline numbers were stronger, but the absence in the 2025 slate is total. The group also reports a measurable decline in the number of queer characters of colour, a category it tracks separately because the gap between on-screen and US population share has, in past editions, been the report's most-cited equity concern.

The methodology is consistent year to year, which is the report's strength. It counts only films released theatrically by major studios or their subsidiaries within the calendar year, applies GLAAD's own definition of an identifiable queer character (a character whose orientation or gender identity is established in dialogue, action or credited identity rather than left to subtext), and publishes its underlying counts in appendices. That consistency lets the year-on-year comparisons carry weight.

The studio counter-narrative

Studios do not typically publish their own headcount of queer representation, but their public comments on the GLAAD findings — where they have commented — have tended toward three lines. The first is a pipeline argument: films in production during 2023 and 2024 were greenlit in a more conservative commercial climate, and the cultural ceiling on certain stories tightened in that window. The second is a framing argument: that representation now lives in television and streaming rather than in cinema, an argument GLAAD itself acknowledges is partly true but says should not displace theatrical representation entirely. The third is a definitional argument: that some 2025 releases did feature queer characters whose identity was signalled visually or contextually rather than declared in dialogue, and that GLAAD's criteria can undercount those films.

Each line has some merit on inspection. Pipeline cycles are real, and films started in 2023 will dominate the 2025 slate. Streaming has indeed absorbed a measurable share of prestige queer storytelling that would once have reached theatres. And GLAAD's identification criteria, conservative by design, do exclude characters whose queerness is implied rather than stated. But the same arguments could have been — and were — deployed in earlier years when the report's numbers moved in the other direction, which weakens them as explanations for a third consecutive fall.

The structural frame

The deeper pattern is the contraction of the mid-budget, adult-oriented feature — the tier of film that has historically carried most of this representation. Theatrical exhibition is increasingly a binary: a small number of franchise tentpoles and awards-season prestige on one side, and a shrinking middle on the other. Queer-led features, especially those driven by writers and directors outside the most-celebrated names, have historically sat in that middle. Its erosion is an industry story told in trade-press terms (production starts, average budgets, day-and-date release patterns) but it is also, inevitably, a representation story.

A second pressure sits over the slate from a different angle. Studios have grown more cautious in the years since 2022 about projects perceived as politically exposed, a caution that has fallen unevenly across the production slate. Without putting a precise number on it — the underlying deal memos and development notes are not public — the share of greenlit projects that would once have been classified as identity-led has narrowed. The GLAAD report does not make this argument directly, but the direction of its data is consistent with that read.

A third factor, harder to quantify, is that audience behaviour has changed. Several of the queer-led features released in earlier measurement windows performed well below studio expectations at the box office, even when they received strong reviews, and that commercial signal has fed back into the development pipeline. Whether that signal reflects a real shift in audience interest or simply a market that has not yet learned how to platform queer-led mid-budget features theatrically is contested. Studios, on past form, will tend to act on the former reading regardless.

What remains uncertain

The 2026 Where We Are in Film report is, like its predecessors, an audit of what studios chose to put on screen, not a measure of what audiences wanted. The report's authors are explicit about that limitation in their methodology notes. They cannot tell a reader whether the contraction they are documenting reflects an industry pulling back from a demand that is still there, or a pullback from a demand that has softened, or — and this is the version most uncomfortable for everyone — a pullback from a demand that was never as broad as industry optimists had assumed.

The streaming question is also unresolved. GLAAD's theatrical count is, by design, a theatrical count. Netflix, Amazon and Apple do not publish equivalent breakdowns, and the major streaming services have not been audited against the same yardstick. Some of the representation missing from theatres may have migrated there; the report cannot say.

The trans-character figure — zero across a hundred titles — is the year's most striking single number and the one most likely to be quoted out of context. Read against a slate that also contains very few films that engage with trans lives in any way, it is a count that will be read as both descriptive and symptomatic. Studios have not, as of publication, offered a specific explanation for the absence, and the report's authors note that they have not seen evidence of an industry-wide ban on trans characters so much as a pattern of projects not being greenlit in the first place.

Desk note: Monexus treats GLAAD's Where We Are in Film as an annual industry audit, comparable in function to the MPAA's theatrical statistics report. The findings are reported here as the trade-press story they are, with the studio counter-arguments given their full weight and the streaming blind spot flagged explicitly. The report's direction-of-travel — a third consecutive year-on-year decline — is the news; the absolute numbers are the supporting evidence.