Story highlights Clay Cane: Jordan Peele is first black director and writer to have his debut film hit $100 million at the box office

"Get Out" captures the culture's racial fears, a horror story told from a perspective Hollywood lacks, he says

Clay Cane is a New York-based journalist. He is the author of the forthcoming "Live Through This: Surviving the Intersections of Sexuality, God, and Race." Follow him on Twitter: @claycane. The opinions expressed here are his.

(CNN) Jordan Peele is the first black director and writer to have his debut film reach over $100 million at the box office. This is big, yes. And an impressive feat, all the more so considering that the film, "Get Out," is also one of the first horror films with a plot explicitly driven by racism.

But the significance of "Get Out" speaks to another fundamental truth: Hollywood has no idea what audiences want to pay for.

Clay Cane

I saw "Get Out" just before it opened, and it was easy to see this was a film that would blow up the box office. I imagine it was the same feeling people experienced when they first screamed through the original "Nightmare on Elm Street" in 1984 or 2004's "Saw," both films that set box office records for horror films and created standards for the genre that would be copied for many years.

Last year, I sat through many films -- and I'll bet you did, too -- wondering, "Who in Hollywood thought this would be a good film?" Some of the epic flops of 2016? "Gods of Egypt," "Snowden" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass." What did these have in common? A-list talent, gargantuan budgets -- and little diversity in front of and behind the cameras.

This isn't the fault of the actors or directors as much as the executives whose word controls the green light. "Get Out" and several other films in the past year prove audiences want the America they know or would like to know, which is nuanced, complicated and unpredictable. Jordan Peele proves this is even true for fans who go to see horror movies, arguably the genre most riddled with stereotyping.

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