Jamal Sims has spent years building the movement vocabulary of some of Hollywood's biggest projects — RuPaul's Drag Race, Hairspray Live!, Wicked — but 20th Century Studios just handed him something choreographers rarely get: a director's chair. Sims will helm Major, a Lauren Ashley Smith-scripted drama about a ballet prodigy who bristles at the rigidity of classical form. The project, which has H.E.R. attached to star and Oprah Winfrey producing, marks Sims's feature directorial debut after a career spent shaping how bodies move on screen.
The promotion is significant — and overdue. Choreographers are among the most experienced visual storytellers in the industry. They direct performance, manage spatial composition, collaborate with cinematographers, and often serve as de facto second-unit directors on musicals and dance sequences. They understand blocking, pacing, and how to extract emotional truth from physical expression. Yet the leap from choreography to directing remains one of Hollywood's most difficult career transitions, reserved for a handful of names who've had to prove themselves far longer than peers coming from other disciplines.
Kenny Ortega made the jump with Newsies in 1992 after choreographing Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Anne Fletcher moved from choreographing Bring It On to directing Step Up and 27 Dresses. Adam Shankman went from Boogie Nights choreography to directing Hairspray and Rock of Ages. The list is short, and the timeline is long. Most choreographers who want to direct end up making the case for years, often decades, before a studio takes the risk.
The hesitation reveals an industry bias that treats choreography as a technical skill rather than a directorial one. Studios will promote cinematographers, editors, and production designers to directors with relative ease — all roles that require mastery of specific craft disciplines but don't necessarily involve managing actors or shaping narrative. Choreographers do both. They direct performance. They shape emotional arcs through movement. They collaborate across departments to build a cohesive visual language. Yet the perception persists that choreography is a supporting role, not a leadership one.
Sims's hire signals that 20th Century Studios recognizes what choreographers bring to the table — particularly on a project like Major, which centers dance and physical expression as narrative drivers. A director who understands how movement communicates emotion, status, and conflict has an advantage on material like this. The script's premise — a ballet prodigy who chafes against classical rigidity — requires a filmmaker who can translate physical rebellion into cinematic language. Sims has spent his career doing exactly that.
But the broader question remains: why is this path still so rare? Part of the answer is structural. Choreographers are often hired late in pre-production, after the director is locked. They work within someone else's vision rather than authoring their own. The industry doesn't build choreographer-to-director pipelines the way it does for other department heads. There's no equivalent to the DGA's mentorship programs for cinematographers or the producing tracks that groom line producers into showrunners. Choreographers who want to direct have to build their own on-ramps, often by directing music videos, concert films, or short-form content to prove they can handle a full project.
The result is a bottleneck of talent. Choreographers like Parris Goebel, Fatima Robinson, and Laurieann Gibson have shaped the visual language of contemporary pop culture — their work defines how we see Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Megan Thee Stallion move — but none have been handed a studio feature. The industry benefits from their creative labor without offering them the same upward mobility it extends to other collaborators.
Sims's promotion matters because it proves the business case. If Major succeeds, it won't just be a win for Sims — it'll be evidence that studios can trust choreographers to deliver commercially and creatively. That's the kind of proof that opens doors for others. But the fact that proof is still required, after decades of choreographers demonstrating their directorial instincts on set, is the problem. The pipeline shouldn't require an exception. It should be the standard.
