Opinion: Last year, Hollywood managed to create at least one level playing field
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42-16-42.
That may sound like ever more outlandish measurements for the Barbie doll that inspired 2023’s top-grossing film, but it is in fact good news for real women in Hollywood in 2024: Last year — and for the first time in the decades it’s been studied — the number of female protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films equaled the number of males.
Forty-two films featured female protagonists, 16 featured female and male co-leads, and 42 featured male leads. The kicker: The top money-maker featured a cartoon hockey-playing girl turned “inside out” by puberty. Who would have guessed?
Well, perhaps anyone in the 2023 “Barbie” audiences, which skewed far more heavily female than those deciding what films to make. The fans pushed it to No. 1 in a year when it was the lone female-driven movie in the top five.
That’s another difference in 2024: Female-centered “Wicked” and “Moana 2” were the third and fourth top-grossing movies despite late November releases. As with “Inside Out 2,” their successes were propelled by female audiences.
‘Moana 2,’ Disney’s sequel to the beloved original film, is expected to break Thanksgiving weekend box office records with as much as $200 million in ticket sales.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the Hollywood-think that young men drive ticket sales?
And to those who might object that 2024’s most popular movies are not populated with real women characters but rather two cartoon girls and a pair of witches, the males rounding out the top five were two comic book characters and a Minion. American moviegoers, faced with the current reality, are opting for fantasy.
“We have always known that female-identified leads would make money,” Stacy L. Smith, founder of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, says. She is a co-author of one of two studies just released showing gender parity in lead roles for the year. In Smith’s view, this new parity “is not the result of an economic awakening but is due to a number of different constituencies and efforts — at advocacy groups, at studios, through DEI initiatives — to assert the need for equality on screen.”
Also released in 2024: A “Women in Film” set of Barbies that includes a director, a movie star, a studio executive and a cinematographer. That lineup is more hope than reality, unfortunately. Top-grossing “Inside Out 2” was female-written and directed, but women accounted for only 11% of the directors and 16% of the writers of last year’s top 100 films, both statistics down by 3% compared with 2023.
You read that right: Despite a woman being responsible for the most popular film of 2023, the bulk of 2024’s female film protagonists were put in the directorial hands of men. Similarly, when it comes to this year’s Oscars, half the 10 best picture nominees feature female leads, but only a single best-director nod went to a woman, and a mere four of the 21 writers nominated are female.
‘Barbie’ is one of the most successful and well-reviewed female empowerment films in history. So, of course, its director and star weren’t nominated for Oscars.
Does it matter who is behind the scenes if we’re seeing women’s stories on screen? It does.
Overall, film females continue to be substantially younger than males, and they are far less likely to be portrayed as leaders, or even at work.
“Female characters are more likely to be identified in relation to males, whereas males are more likely … to be identified by what they do,” says the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film’s Martha M. Lauzen, whose 2024 study results mirror Smith’s. But in women-directed films, females tend to be portrayed less stereotypically and with more agency. When women are involved behind the scenes, female characters tend to speak and interrupt others more, both “powerful language behaviors,” she says. Her study also finds that female-directed films employed women as editors, writers and cinematographers twice, four times and seven times more often, respectively, than exclusively male-directed films did.
At the very top? The studio leading 2024’s pivot toward female-centric films, with a full two-thirds of its movies (including “Wicked”) centered on girls and women, was Universal Pictures — led by Donna Langley. She credits this change in part to Universal’s Global Talent Development & Inclusion department, started in 2017. Female-led films create a ripple effect. The set overall, says Langley, becomes “this sort of friendly environment for women to work in.”
Both Lauzen’s and Smith’s studies concentrate on Hollywood’s top-grossing, theatrically released films, as they have for 23 years in Lauzen’s case and 18 in Smith’s. That methodology has its limits. As Lauzen notes, with only 100 films, small fluctuations alter the numbers dramatically, and the streaming world — which wasn’t responsible for much creative content when either began studying gender in film — may look a little different in the numbers of men and women in various roles. Still, as Smith’s report points out, the top-grossers shown in theaters “reflect major studio releases and the agenda-setting films of the year.” They are a reasonable marker of who is getting hired and what roles they play.
When that marker is graphed over the decades, the message is more ups and downs than an outright win for women. Nonetheless, 2024’s “measurements” — 42-16-42 — are a milestone. Equality on screen and behind the scenes in Hollywood may be elusive, but it’s not impossible.
Meg Waite Clayton is the author of nine novels about women in history. Her latest, “Typewriter Beach,” about screenwriters and actors, will be published this summer.
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