Female-Led Films Make More Money at the Box Office Than Male-Led Films

It turns out that if a movie has a female lead, it will earn more at the box office on average. This is not me making stuff up either.

The Creative Arts Agency (CAA) and shift7 have done some research and have found that between 2014-2017, female-led films made more money than male-led films. They looked at the box office data of 350 films and then averaged them based on the production budget of the film. Then, they did the same thing, but instead of looking at what gender the lead was, they looked to see if the film passed the Bechdel test. That’s the test of whether two female characters have a conversation about anything other than a man. Turns out, the films that passed did better at the box office.

If you think it’s cheating to use averages, the study also looked at medians. Turns out you get mostly the same results. If the production budget was between $30-50 million, male leads were better. Also, if the budget was between $10-30 million, the film made the same whether or not it passed the Bechdel test. Those are the only instances where things changed though. This is really interesting and may help explain why some movies are being rebooted with female casts.

Of course, the Bechdel test information may be a little off as the list of movies there did come from a crowdsourced website. This is not a perfect study, but it does show some cool data. I’d be interested in a study about how movies do based on writers, directors, and let’s also look at factors like age and years of experience, etc. I would find all of those extremely interesting points to further the study.

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