#yeah the problem is not that female led movies are bad
Emily Blunt on the Late Show
Emily Blunt,Charlize just busts in,FUCK HOLLYWOOD,FANG IT,no but honestly,it is such an unfortunate thing that movies in the early 2000’s with female leads did so poorly,that set the tone for the next decade,Tomb Raider 2 pretty much single handedly dropped the bomb on female leads,poor AJ she tried,at the end of the day though it’s all a money game,if you can’t make the bucks,Hollywood won’t pony up,it’s as much the audience’s fault as anyones,AHEM,looks at Tumblr,and it’s lack of appreciation for female characters,yup,see how it plays into the hands of Hwood,even MMFR didn’t do nearly as well as it should have,bass rants too much in tags. (via bassfanimation)
Okay, but…regarding bassfanimation’s tags:
I don’t, in fact, think that the problem starts with the audience. It’s a straight up myth that movies with female leads do worse at the box office. The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film at San Diego State University found that movies with male and female leads grossed about the same when you controlled for total budget (ie. if movies with male leads had higher grosses, it was because they had bigger budgets to begin with–more advertising, opening on more screens, etc.)
More recent data has shown an even more favorable box office landscape for female-led films. In 2013, the year of Frozen,Catching FireandGravity,female-led films outgrossed male-led films handily, both in the US and internationally. Frozen was the top-grossing film in the world that year and is the highest-grossing animated film of all time. When you divide the total gross by the number of movies in a franchise, the Hunger Games franchise is more successful than Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Fast and Furious…in fact, it has a higher average box office gross than every recent US movie franchise except the two Avengers films.
And yet, even though the economic data is there IN ABUNDANCE that films starring women can make a crapton of money, only 15% of lead characters in movies in the US were female in 2014. The reason why is both complicated and simple–I could talk a lot about the complicated feedback loop between what studios think is going to be profitable (based on sexist assumptions and not actual data); what projects agents think they can sell and how that filters down to what writers write; how fewer roles for women means fewer chances for talented actresses to get noticed and become designated as the kind of A-list stars that will make a studio feel confident to greenlight a movie when they’re attached; how lower pay, lack of interesting work and rampant sexism means women both in front of and behind the camera are more likely to drop out of the film industry instead of staying in long enough to become successful. But the short answer is that it’s just sexism.
And then what happens is an example of the scarcity problem. There are so many more movies with male leads that when one bombs, no one considers it a statement on the capacity of male characters to draw an audience. It’s just an unsuccessful movie. But every female-led movie is carrying the impossible weight of proving that any female-led movie can be successful. So when you have a movie that’s maybe okay but marketed poorly, or a movie that’s just bad–and hey, lots of Hollywood studio movies are!–that becomes proof that women can’t draw an audience instead of just proof of it being an unprofitable movie.
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