The (lack of) prevalence of women on the film set has been a topic of much debate. While the movie business has been making progress in the right direction on this account, true gender equality is still some way off. A study by Creative Artist Agency (CAA) and shift7 claimed to observe interesting parallels between a movie's lead gender and its success at the box office — generating headlines like "Films with female stars earn more at the box office."

At ScriptBook, we were intrigued by the strong claims these articles make, having never made a similar observation ourselves. Since we have access to similar data, we decided to dig deeper and replicate the study.

The Data

We considered a dataset of movies released between 2014 and 2017 — the same time window used by the CAA/shift7 study. We have access to production budget and box office totals for 541 movies, labeled manually with the lead character's gender across three categories: male-led, female-led, and neither (ensemble casts).

Pie chart showing movies per lead gender: 315 male, 122 female, 104 neither
Figure 1: The number of movies in the dataset for each lead gender category.

We also labeled our data with Bechdel test scores, sourced from bechdeltest.com. The Bechdel test passes for movies which have at least one scene in which two women have a conversation with each other about something other than a man.

Pie chart showing Bechdel test scores distribution across 541 films
Figure 2: The number of movies in the dataset for each Bechdel test score.

Box Office By Gender

How does lead gender influence a movie's box office performance? We investigated the difference in global box office earnings between male- and female-led movies across different production budget ranges.

Bar chart comparing average global box office between female-led and male-led films by production budget range
Figure 3: The average box office by lead gender and production budget. Error bars represent standard deviation.

Although the averages for female-led movies are slightly higher than those for male leads, the differences are too small to conclude that this is the result of some systematic gender-related phenomenon — especially given the small number of female-led examples and the large spread of box office revenues.

Only for movies with a production budget in the $30–50M range does the difference seem significant enough to warrant a closer look.

Distribution of global box office for male-led and female-led films with $30M-$50M production budget, highlighting Lucy and Fifty Shades of Grey as outliers
Figure 4: The distribution of global box office for films with a $30M–$50M production budget. The large difference is driven by just two female-led outliers: Lucy and Fifty Shades of Grey.

"Our findings show that box office revenues of male-led and female-led movies are quite similar, and that any observed differences are largely caused by the presence of just a few outliers."

The Bechdel Test

If lead gender has no obvious relation to box office, what about the representation of women in general? We compare the box office revenue of movies that pass the Bechdel test to those that don't.

Bar chart comparing average global box office for films passing vs failing the Bechdel test, by production budget
Figure 5: The average box office by Bechdel test result and production budget.

At first glance, the plot suggests that films passing the Bechdel test outperform those that do not — but error margins demand a more nuanced explanation. The top-grossing movies consistently pass the Bechdel test. However, some barely pass — Transformers: Age of Extinction is a clear example — leading us to question whether writers of large blockbusters simply add the required scene to technically pass the test.

Distribution of global box office for movies with production budget over $100M, split by Bechdel pass/fail
Figure 6: Box office distribution for films with a production budget over $100M, by Bechdel test result.

Presence of Women in Movies

Even today, we still see a large disparity between the number of female and male leads in movies. We examined the number of females among the top ten cast members for each movie and tracked this over time.

Line chart showing the average number of females in the top ten cast members from 1980 to 2018
Figure 7: The average number of females in the top ten cast members throughout the years.

The movie industry still has ground to cover before reaching gender equality, but it is reassuring to see slow, steady progress. The distribution of female presence across all films reveals how lopsided things remain: 355 movies in our dataset have eight or more males in the top cast, compared to just 18 with at least eight females.

Histogram showing number of movies by number of females in top ten cast, 2014-2017
Figure 8: The number of movies made between 2014 and 2017 by the number of females in the top ten cast members.

Breaking this down by genre reveals large disparities: action, sci-fi, and war movies are the worst offenders. Romance, horror, comedy, and drama have the most women in their cast.

Line chart showing female presence per genre (Action, Comedy, Drama) over time
Figure 9: The average number of females in the top ten cast members by genre throughout the years.
Stacked bar chart showing fraction of male-dominated movies by genre, 2014-2017
Figure 10: The fraction of movies with fewer than five vs. five or more females in the top ten cast, per genre.

Conclusion

Our results show that the data does not support the claim that female-led movies do better at the box office — but neither do male-led ones. The top-grossing movies consistently pass the Bechdel test, but we cannot exclude the possibility that this is the result of writers trying to simply fool the test. And while we still have a long way to go to reach gender equality in movies, we are making slow but steady progress.

Even though we cannot conclude that women bring in more box office revenue, we can reject the opposite claim. This means there is no reason not to cast more women — either in lead roles or supporting roles.

References

  1. Films with female stars earn more at the box office (2018, December 12). BBC. bbc.com
  2. McNary, D. (2018). Movies Starring Women Outperform Male-Led Titles at Box Office. Variety.
  3. shift7 (n.d.) Female-led films outperform at box office for 2014–2017. shift7.com
  4. Lauzen, M. (2019) It's a Man's (Celluloid) World. SDSU.