SUMMARY
Considering the quality, quantity, and diversity of films distributed under the Sony Pictures Entertainment banner, GLAAD has given Sony Pictures Entertainment a INSUFFICIENT grade.
There were some standouts in Sony Pictures’ slate this year; including interracial lesbian couples in blockbuster romantic comedy Anyone But You and the based on a true story dramedy Dumb Money, which both painted their worlds as casually inclusive. However, Sony profoundly missed the mark with the deeply offensive ¡Que viva México!, which was overtly transphobic, in both the casting and the story of its trans character.
Sony Pictures Classics included queer women of color in leading roles in Shortcomings and The Persian Version, which was exciting to see as API and MENA women often don’t have the opportunity to shine in queer narratives. There were once again no LGBTQ characters in Cruchyroll releases.
It is exciting to see the indie tentpoles of Sony Picture Classics and the broad comedies of Sony Pictures including LGBTQ stories–specifically those of LGBTQ women. GLAAD hopes to see this same respect and inclusion in Sony’s portrayal of trans women.
HISTORY
The film studio, founded in 1918 as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales, was renamed Columbia Pictures in 1924. By the 1920’s, the studio began to build prestige by association with director Frank Capra, producing some of the biggest films and stars of the classic Hollywood era. For a brief period in the ‘80s, the studio was acquired by Coca-Cola and launched TriStar pictures, which was its own entity until Sony purchased it in 1989. In 1992, Sony Pictures Classics was formed and has acquired, produced, and distributed independent, documentary and arthouse films since then. In 2021, Sony entered into multi-year deals with Netflix and The Walt Disney Company to host films on their streaming platforms, Disney+ and Hulu, after their theatrical runs. The following year, Legendary Entertainment reached a distribution deal with Sony to distribute its future slate of films, excluding Warner Bros.’ Dune and MonsterVerse movies. Sony currently distributes films from its many imprints including Columbia, TriStar, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony Pictures Animation, Screen Gems, and Affirm.
Columbia’s political thriller Advise and Consent (1962) and TriStar’s neo-noir Basic Instinct (1993) were denounced by LGBTQ groups, including GLAAD, for their vilified portrayals of lesbian women and bisexual men. Sony Pictures Classics has released numerous high-profile LGBTQ-inclusive films, notably including the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995), based on GLAAD co-founder Vito Russo’s book of the same name, which explores the rich history of LGBTQ representation in cinema. Additional inclusive films from Sony Pictures Classics consist of GLAAD Media Award winners Call Me By Your Name (2017), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Parallel Mothers (2021); GLAAD Media Award nominees Pain and Glory (2019), and I Carry You With Me (2021); as well as My Life in Pink (1997); Kill Your Darlings (2013); Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited! (2013); Love Is Strange (2014); Grandma (2015); The Meddler (2016); Greed (2020), Hytti Nro 6 (2022), The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile (2022), and Return to Seoul (2022). Sony has also released Our Ladies (2021), GLAAD Media Award nominee A Man Called Otto (2022), and Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022).
This romantic comedy, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, follows bickering duo Bea and Ben as they attend the wedding of their friends Claudia and Halle. Claudia and Halle are a lesbian couple who, though not the main focus of the movie, are very significant to the film, as their wedding is the entire reason that the main couple are forced to be together. Claudia and Halle’s queerness is never questioned and all the surrounding characters are rooting for them. In fact, the motivation of the main characters to get along is so that Claudia and Halle can have a peaceful and loving wedding. This lesbian couple’s inclusion in this mainstream blockbuster romantic comedy will hopefully lead to queer couples leading their own big studio films in the genre. 
Dumb Money is based on the true story of the GameStop stock squeeze in 2021, led by Keith Gill. Many of the characters in this film are ordinary people from across the country who follow Keith and take his advice. Two of those people are Riri and Harmony, college students in Texas who buy and hold GameStop stock. The two are first shown at a party when Harmony is dared to put her hand in Riri’s pants, yet over the course of their scenes it becomes clear that the two become a couple, sharing easy affection and pet names. Including a lesbian couple in this ensemble film showed that this cultural moment spoke to people of all walks of life, including queer people. Additionally, one of the investors is a Pennsylvania nurse Jenny, who is often seen confiding in her coworker Chris, a gay man.
This film follows a fictional meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis, where the two men sit down to philosophize and debate over their differing viewpoints. A key component of the character of Freud is his relationship with his daughter Anna. Anna lives with another woman, Dorothy, and is open with her father about Dorothy being her lover. Freud is very much in denial about his daughter’s sexuality and refuses to meet Dorothy. In his conversation with Lewis, he remarks that lesbianism is caused by women having issues with their fathers. Much of Anna’s character is in relation to her father, and she is rarely granted her own agency, except for toward the end of the film when she brings Dorothy to Freud’s house against his will. The film ends with text that says Anna and Dorothy lived happily in Freud’s estate after he died. It is good to see that the sexuality of Anna was not erased from real life, but the film could have gone further in showing Anna as a character with her own agency, and countering some of Freud’s more harmful theories about sexuality.
This film follows Leila, an Iranian-American woman, who is a self-proclaimed lesbian, and starts the film by sleeping with a man and gets pregnant. She is attracted to Max, the man in question, because she assumes he is a drag queen, but he is just in a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The majority of the film revolves around Leila and her mother Shireen, and their strained relationship. This strain is due to many factors, including Leila’s queerness, as she used to be married to a woman and calls herself a lesbian for the majority of the film. By the end of the film, Leila chooses to keep the baby and stay with Max. This brings her and her mother closer, with Shireen helping Leila with the birth of her child. Though there are many factors in this relationship being repaired, it is frustrating that Leila getting together with a man and having his baby helped repair this. 
Based on the graphic novel of the same name, Shortcomings follows Ben, a Bay Area film enthusiast, and his relationships with several women. His best friend is Alice, a lesbian, who spends the first part of the film single, but then moves to New York and falls in love with Meredith, and they begin seriously dating. Alice is very comfortable with her sexuality, though she does use Ben as her fake boyfriend when she has to see her parents, who she is not out to. It’s refreshing that her not being out to her parents does not monopolize the story; it’s more a footnote.
