Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu responds to controversy over writers' pay disparity
Last week, the general public learned that Crazy Rich Asians co-writer Adele Lim had dropped out of working on the film’s upcoming sequel late last year after she discovered that the other co-writer—white man Peter Chiarelli—was being paid nearly 10 times more than she was for the same job. The justification (according to The Hollywood Reporter) was apparently that the two writers were being paid within “industry-standard established ranges based on experience” and that any deviation from that would “set a troubling precedent in the business.” Lim, meanwhile, believed that she was simply being used by the studio to “sprinkle culturally specific details on a screenplay” instead of being trusted to actually do substantive work on the script, which would mean that she would never get the specific experience she would need in order to get paid what she deserved from those “industry-standard established ranges” anyway.