A year after Crazy Rich Asians opened No. 1 at the box office (on its way to a $238.5 million global gross) and raised Asian representation in Hollywood to new heights, its sequels have been slow to launch.
Although director Jon M. Chu had hoped to keep the creative team intact, co-writer Adele Lim no longer is involved with the project, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. At issue is pay parity: Co-writer Peter Chiarelli, as an experienced feature scribe who broke out with 2009’s The Proposal, was to be paid a significantly higher fee than Lim, a veteran TV writer who never had penned a feature until Chu hired her to work on the screenplay. (Before Chu boarded the project, producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson of Color Force already had enlisted Chiarelli to adapt Kevin Kwan’s 2013 best-selling novel.)
“Being evaluated that way can’t help but make you feel that is how they view my contributions,” says Lim, who believes that women and people of color often are regarded as “soy sauce” — hired to sprinkle culturally specific details on a screenplay, rather than credited with the substantive work of crafting the story.
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