It has come to light that the Crazy Rich Asians sequel lost one of its writers some time ago and it all comes down to her not getting equal pay compared to her white male counterpart.
Adele Lim left the forthcoming sequel when she found out she was making nearly eight to ten times less than her fellow co-writer, Peter Chiarelli, who happens to be a white man. Chiarelli was hired to adapt Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians into a screenplay for the original film, and Lim was later hired to co-write by director Jon M. Chu.
Lim apparently walked out on the sequel last fall when she learned of the pay disparity and this led to Color Force, the studio behind the project, to subsequently spend about five months fielding other writers of Asian descent for the job. The issue at hand is that this very tactic makes it look like the studio tokenized Lim and was willing to find any Asian writer who would take the fee given.
Jon M. Chu apparently tried to keep Lim on but it was clear the writers were not equals from the start and the pay disparity drives this fact home. Warner Bros. starting offers were $800,000 to $1 million for Chiarelli and $110,000+ for Lim. According to a source that spoke with “The Hollywood Reporter” “these numbers were industry-standard established ranges based on experience and that making an exception would set a troubling precedent in the business.”
In Chiarelli’s defense, he offered Lim half of his salary after she walked away to reach some semblance of fairness but Lim still refused to come back. Lim said this about her decision to not return for the sequel:
“Being evaluated that way can’t help but make you feel that is how they view my contributions. Pete (Chiarelli) has been nothing but incredibly gracious, but what I make shouldn’t be dependent on the generosity on the white-guy writer. If I couldn’t get pay equity after Crazy Rich Asians, I can’t imagine what it would be like for anyone else, given that the standard for how much you’re worth is having established quotes from previous movies, which women of color would ever have been hired for. There’s no realistic way to achieve true equity that way.”
For now, work on the sequels, which are being shot back-to-back, is slowing moving forward. Chiarelli is writing with Chu and they delivered the first draft of a 10-page treatment to the studio in late July, and they’re still exploring how much of the source material to adapt.
