Lilly Wachowski says her new script is finished, budgeted, and ready to shoot, but Hollywood won't put up the roughly $10 million needed to make it because the cast is entirely trans.

A Script Born of Rage

Wachowski, who directed the original Matrix trilogy with her sister Lana and later made Sense8, co-wrote The Hunted with her creative and romantic partner, Micky Ray Mahoney. The story follows two trans women whose search for a perpetrator leads all the way to the top of a government that has pushed trans people to society's margins and subjected them to violence. Wachowski has called writing it cathartic, a place to put the anger the current political climate has stirred up in her.

People like it, but they really don't want to make it because it's wall-to-wall trans cast.
Lilly Wachowski

Financiers responding well to the script but balking at greenlighting it isn't a subtle signal. It's exactly the kind of quiet gatekeeping that keeps a subject matter alive on paper while making sure it never reaches a screen.

Finding a Way Around the Gate

Unwilling to shelve the project, Wachowski says she has to "get creative" about getting it in front of audiences. That's already underway: The Hunted is developing through her own Anarchists United, an artist-owned nonprofit studio, alongside Ariadne, the indie banner run by Natasha Lyonne, Sean Lennon, and Evan Ross. Earlier this month, Wachowski staged a live table read at Los Angeles' Dynasty Typewriter theatre, framing it as a chance to build community around the work even without a green light. It's not her first all-trans project either; last year she released Dolls, an 18-minute trans-cast riff on The Stepford Wives.

The Bigger Picture

Wachowski's experience fits a documented trend, not an isolated snub. GLAAD's 2026 Where We Are in Film study found zero trans characters across 225 major studio releases in 2025, part of a third straight year of declining LGBTQ+ representation since a 2023 peak.

That contraction has coincided with studios growing skittish about anything read as DEI-adjacent since the 2024 election, from Disney reportedly swapping a trans character for a Christian one in a series to Laverne Cox saying she's lost most of her income as roles and speaking gigs dry up.

Worth Considering

It would be incomplete to say identity is the only factor at play. Wachowski's prior big-budget films, including Speed Racer, Jupiter Ascending, and Cloud Atlas, reportedly lost close to $350 million combined, and studios weighing risk on any filmmaker with that track record would hesitate regardless of subject matter. But that caution doesn't explain a zero. When an entire category of story disappears from 225 films in a single year, something more than one director's box office history is going on, and it's the trans performers and audiences who lose the most ground.

Sources: LGBTQ Nation, PinkNews, Gay Times

Cover photo: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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