Female-Led Movies Have Outperformed Male-Led Movies for the Last Three Years

This may come as a shock, but movies starring women do well at the box office. Really well. So well ..

admin December 12, 2018 9:41 am

This may come as a shock, but movies starring women do well at the box office. Really well. So well that a new study from the Creative Artists Agency and Shift7, in conjunction with the anti–sexual harassment organization Times Up, found that female-led movies dominated the box office from 2014 to 2017. In addition, movies that passed the Bechdel Test—you know, the simple measurement that asks whether two named-female characters on-screen talk to each other about something other than a man—performed better at the box office than movies that didnt pass the test.

“The perception that its not good business to have female leads is not true,” said Christy Haubegger, a C.A.A. agent who was part of the research team, in an interview with The New York Times. “Theyre a marketing asset.”

This is yet another myth-busting piece of data refuting the old stereotype that studios often use as an excuse for not green-lighting female-led films. Its especially fascinating in the wake of a 2017 study by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at U.C.L.A., which analyzed the top releases in 2015 and found that films with more people of color in their casts performed better at the box office than films with fewer people of color. Similarly, TV shows earned higher ratings if they had more diverse casts.

The C.A.A. and Shift7 study based its methodology on information provided by Gracenote, an entertainment data and technology company owned by Nielsen, as well as information provided by Bechdeltest.com. In order to determine whether a film was male-led or female-led, researchers looked at the performer listed first on Gracenote. For example, Star Wars: The Force Awakens would be considered male-led because Harrison Ford is listed as the lead, rather than actress Daisy Ridley. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, meanwhile, is led by Megan Fox. The study examined 350 film, 105 of which were led by women. When broken down by budget, the study found that tentpole films made for more than $100 million were, no surprise, dominated by men; 75 male-led vs. 19 female-led.

However, the study also found that no film was able to hit the $1 billion mark at the box office without passing the Bechdel test, a streak that actually began in 2012. That is one silver lining to glean from this situation, even if it is the thinnest, faintest bit of silver. Plenty of studies have shown how dire female representation is in film, including one released earlier in February that analyzed the 100 top-grossing films of 2017 and found that the number of female protagonists actually decreased by five percent from 2016 to 2017. So, even with home runs like Wonder Woman and Beauty and the Beast, parity is still a long way off. But perhaps cold, hard facts about the bottom line will be what ends up jump-starting true inclusion.