Saturday 2 January 2016

Was 2015 cinema sexist?

Top 30 box office films this year:
Colours by sex of lead actor (female actors are still actors have you ever heard of a doctoress for example):
Pink - Female
Blue - Male
Orange - Co Sex Lead
^ Is that sexist ... this is already getting ridiculous
This isn't the final box office of the year but whos got time to wait (2/1/16)
  1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (predicted spot)
  2. Jurassic World
  3. Furious 7
  4. Avengers: Age of Ultron
  5. Minions
  6. Inside Out
  7. Spectre
  8. Mission: Impossible - Rouge Nation
  9. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
  10. The Martian
  11. Fifty Shade of Grey
  12. Cinderella
  13. Ant-Man
  14. San Andreas
  15. Hotel Transylvania 2
  16. Terminator Genisys
  17. Kingsman: The Secret Service
  18. Home
  19. Mad Max: Fury Road
  20. Taken 3
  21. The Spongebob Movie
  22. Maze Runner
  23. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
  24. Pitch Perfect
  25. Paddington
  26. Pixels
  27. Spy
  28. The Good Dinosaur 
  29. Ted 2
  30. Tomorrowland
Image result for rey star wars

In all three orange cases the female lead is the main lead namely, Ray more then Finn, Furious more then Max and whoever Bryce Dallas Howard's character was over Chris Pratt. The tally comes to:

18 Male lead 
9 Female lead
3 Co-lead

or at the very best
18 Male lead 
12 Female lead

but that is still 2 thirds of films are male lead

Ok now that looks pretty bad, interestingly Terminator Genisys, Mission Impossible and Ant-Man all fail the Benchdel Test:
1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
However I would question how many of these movies would pass the opposite, not sure if Inside Out, Spy, Tomorrowland, Pitch Perfect or Fifty Shades of Grey would for example ( I don't know I haven't checked).

This all looks pretty damming however it could be that that Hollywood might not be sexist but simple a robot, could it be that there is little evidence of female lead films being successful at the box office so they simply aren't made, irrespective of how good the films were and so they will only make male lead films and if they thought that they would make more money only making female leads then they would only do that. But hopefully now that more big budget successful films with female leads are being made ... more will be made.





Some of those films are trash
2 are female lead
6 are male lead 
so that's something ? ...

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