The Oscar-winning Disney unit that Black Panther director and Oprah work with, where people of colour make the decisions
- Its first project, Summer of Soul, with Questlove, won an Oscar and it works with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Kerry Washington, Mahershala Ali and Ryan Coogler
- Led by former AMC and Netflix executive Tara Duncan, Disney’s Onyx Collective is telling diverse stories at a time when Hollywood’s inclusivity is in question
When Oscar winner Mahershala Ali and his producing partners made the rounds last year, pitching an adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s bestselling novel The Plot, it sparked a bidding war.
The buzzy thriller about a failed author who engages in an “act of literary theft”, forever changing his life, is primed for success.
In addition to executive producing, Ali is starring in the series.
Two years earlier, another Korelitz novel was adapted into the acclaimed HBO series, The Undoing.
“The response was overwhelming. Every single place we pitched made an offer,” says Layne Eskridge, president of POV Entertainment, who, along with Ali, brought the project to six networks and streaming platforms under her deal with TV production company Endeavor Content.
In the end, Onyx Collective – a relatively new brand focusing on creators of colour and under-represented voices – won out, ordering an eight-episode limited series to stream on Hulu.
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Operating much like a mini studio and network, Onyx is a content arm for Disney, developing, producing and acquiring projects exclusively for Hulu and other Disney platforms.
But the fledgling brand also brought something else to the table: during the pitch meetings, Duncan and nearly every member of the executive team involved was a person of colour. Moreover, they all had the power to greenlight the project.
The goal is to create entertainment first, broadly accessible content for Disney from a culturally specific point of view
“We knew we weren’t going to get that anywhere else,” Eskridge says. “That is unique to Onyx. It’s super special, and we wanted that.”
Although those events occurred after the initial discussions surrounding Onyx, they did accelerate and inform its development.
Also, the six-part docuseries The 1619 Project premiered recently on Hulu.
The series is an adaptation of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ seminal work in The New York Times Magazine that reassessed America’s history and narrative surrounding slavery and the contributions of Black Americans.
Onyx is a creative partner, overseeing the series produced by Lionsgate, Harpo Films and The New York Times for Hulu.
“The goal is to create entertainment first, broadly accessible content for Disney from a culturally specific point of view,” says Duncan, who is also president of Disney’s young-adult cable network Freeform.
“She was just really sharp and had a clear vision on how to build a company that tells great stories and can offer things in the marketplace that people would be excited about.”
Coogler found a natural alliance of values and mission between his production company and Onyx in making event-driven films and television shows “that bring audiences into closer proximity with stories or types of characters that are present in society but often overlooked”.
At Sundance this year, Coogler announced a pair of projects as part of Proximity’s overall deal with Onyx.
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The second is the drama series Sheba, an exploration of the life of Africa’s first queen and her rise to power.
The idea for Onyx began in 2019 when Dana Walden, chairman of Disney General Entertainment Content – Disney’s television division – began talking with Disney chief executive Bob Iger.
“I was relatively new to Disney, and Bob mentioned that he had been giving a lot of thought to creating an environment on Hulu that would be a destination for subscribers of colour,” Walden says.
She adds that Iger pointed to the success of the Undefeated (later renamed Andscape), a multimedia brand formed under media conglomerate ESPN that focuses on storytelling at the nexus of race, sports and culture from the point of view of journalists of colour.
“He wanted to try to do that with creators of colour for Hulu,” she says.
When Walden tapped Duncan to run Onyx in 2021, Duncan had already cemented her reputation at Disney as someone with great instincts, experience in building programming and numerous relationships with filmmakers.
A year earlier, Duncan had been named president of Freeform.
In 2014, Duncan landed at Netflix as one of the streaming platform’s first creative executives. Four years later, she left, taking a personal sabbatical, she says.
After a year and a half of travelling, Duncan returned to Hollywood and landed an overall deal with Hulu, quickly gaining notice at Disney.
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Prentice Penny, a writer, director, producer and a former showrunner on HBO’s Insecure, said he was immediately drawn to Onyx.
“At some other places, you might feel like you have to explain why this story is relevant,” he says. “Or you have to go through a lot of stuff to convince people that our art is valid and that we want to see true realisations of ourselves on-screen.
“What really affected me was that [Onyx] was going to be run by people who look like me and who understood things like me.”
