By how much male roles dominate Hollywood movies?

Kelly Reichardt - IMDb

Giver her movies a look. She's a woman director that often features women as lead protagonist.

"Maya" from Zero Dark Thirty was a real person, though it does touch on a problem I have with retrofitting women into male roles. Personally I prefer some movies to be all one gender and I don't think their are enough quality all male casts.

Let's just run through 2018

• Insidious The Last Key
• A Fantastic Woman
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Cloverfield Paradox
• Annihilation
• Fifty Shades Freed
• Throughbreds
• Blockers
• I Feel Pretty
• Disobedience

That's 10 female led or female majority major releases from Jan-April

Now looking at male led and male majority major releases you've got seven.

• Super Troopers 2
• Ready Player One
• Isle of Dogs
• Death Wish
• The 15:17 to Paris
• Den of Theives
• 12 Strong

Now if I'm looking at those two lists, not only do I see more female led films I see the male led films being more successful.


One could argue that men are being expected to supplement this political agenda of pushing female films through. And what is a political agenda in art and entertainment...propaganda.

You must be really insecure

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In what way is that happening?

I'm a man and I watch female directed movies because they are often excellent. Political agenda and or propaganda has nothing to do with my choice in what I watch.

All art is inherently (though not exclusively) political

Seriously, all films exist as cultural (and often commmercial) products we, humans, made in a real world, and the act of creating that art is inseparable from the cultural and political context it's in. Additionally, art, on a more direct level, is a form of communication. Art says something, and what it says has implications to our world, a world that is, again, deeply impacted by politics. All art, and therefore all films, communicate ideas that are political in nature (though most films do not exclusively communicate political ideas, they often have more to say than just politics).

Propaganda is not simply art with an agenda, because on some level, all art has an agenda. According to the list next to your name, Citizen Kane is your favorite film. Citizen Kane absolutely has a political agenda driving it - the film is often directly commenting on the nature of American capitalism through it's commentary on it's main character. Citizen Kane is a pretty blatantly political film, though I don't think anyone would be calling it propaganda. Propaganda is more than just 'art with an agenda'; propaganda is information (or more accurately, misinformation), often released by the state, designed to cultivate a certain worldview in those that receive it. Art can be used as propaganda (even if it wasn't created for that end, and the text of the film disagrees with what it is being used to push, as we can see with far-right MRA types using cultural reference points from films like The Matrix and Fight Club to push their position, despite the fact that those films both actively disagree with what the far-right has to say, The Matrix being a film about revolution by the oppressed written and directed by trans women, and Fight Club being a satire of American capitalism and toxic masculinity, designed to show that both are, y'know, bad) but political art is not in itself, bad.

The closest thing we have to propaganda campaigns in mainstream cinema is the US Military recruitment office (i.e. the state) pouring millions of dollars into hollywood movie productions so they can have script approval over portrayals of the military, to ensure mainstream films portray the military in a positive light. That is propaganda. That is an organized attempt by our government to ensure that the cultural work available to the public confirms a certain worldview (that the US military is good and it protects us from tyranny, rather than it being a tool of US imperialism and war profiteering by major corporations that benefit from said imperialism).

People wanting women to be better represented in films is not propaganda, and neither would be taking steps to help see that end.

I don't know if female directed films are "often" excellent I know very few of them have long careers most have small bodies of work.

But the core issue for me is a basic gender imbalance. If they made Die Hard today John McLain would have the same sour pussed disapproving female character that is also a bad ass and just as good and blah blah blah just add an extra 40 minutes to the run time.

Now if you wanted to do a female Die Hard..no problem no issues how brave are you and if it flops oh well it was the fans fault.

The new movie Solo, you've got Han Solo, Chewy, Lando and....Qi'ra played by Emilia Clarke. Now I can tell you the differences between Han, Chewy, and Lando do you think Qi'ra is going to distinguishable from Jyn and Rey?

You can't just tell a Black Panther story, you need to have three other female heroes to go with Black Panther. Did it work..yeah but it's still a cliche.

Let's run through the Summer

May 4th - Overboard - female led remake
May 11th - The Terminal (Margot Robbie Spy Movie), Life of the Party, Mellissa McCarthy comedy
May 18th - Deadpool 2 - with "Domino" who should be a Cable side character but they are making her a Deadpool side kick because that'll give her more screen time
May 25th - Solo - which I've gone into and Future World

June 1st - Adrift - Shailine Woodley saves her boyfriend on the open sea
June 8th - Ocean's 8 - remake of Ocean's 11 with women
June 15th - Incredibles 2 - (which I think is pretty clever) the only superhero the world will accept is Elastagirl
June 22nd Jurassic World - Bryce Dallas Howard is the co-lead
July 6th - Antman and Wasp - BTW Wasp nothing like her comic character who actually had a personality.
July 20th - Mama Mia II
July 27th - Mission Impossible Fall Out - Rebecca Ferguson's character is basically female Ethan Hunt
August 3rd - Darkest Minds - female led X-men rip off
August 10th - The Meg - Ruby Rose looks like Stathan's sidekick
August 17th - Happy Time Murders - Mellissa McCarthey is a cop against evil puppets
August 24th - Slender Man - duel female leads

It doesn't look like a gender imbalance to me, I doubt we'll see many interesting and distinguishable characters but their will be a lot of strong women ( yay)

Someone needs to redirect this man to the OP again and remind him of the gender imbalance through history. If you are so offended by women taking significant roles then put yourself in our position. Almost Every top movie is a dickfest . We have no movie like The Dark Knight or Rain Man or Good Will Hunting. Women are just side roles. Every good movie in the world has a male lead and youre offended by movies like Blockers and some movie where Melissa mcCarthy is chased by puppets? Don’t let me laugh

Simply comparing aggregate data to demographics is a pretty facile way to try to demonstrate systemic bias. It assumes aggregate choices across demographics are constant, even though they manifestly are not in pretty much every way we can measure.

Feels like people are kinda talking past each other here, too. For example:

Isn't this the exact same point? Siddon is annoyed by what he sees as perfunctory roles given to women not because they're good, but simply because it reads as progressive and might capitalize on the zeitgeist. Bihotza is saying pretty much the exact same thing, but for some reason it's styled as a disagreement.

I gave out three five star films last year two of them were female led films, I,Tonya and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (third one was Logan). But those films had flawed well defined characters they told challenging stories and they were well-made.

But you bring up Citizen Kane..we would never see a female Citizen Kane. A movie that tries to find humanity in a corrupt female political leader who is not redeemed at the end. That sort of story would never be told and if it was it would be criticized for being misogynistic.

Another one of my favorite films is The Thing...they remade the Thing. Put a woman in, inserted a love story it took away from the concepts and themes that made the 1982 version so good.

We shouldn't go into films, counting lines or pushing for characters to be "equal", art should be judged without gender bias.

I just like movies for themselves (the combination of all the arts) - and every one has an agenda, but few qualify as propaganda to anyone with knowledge and common sense. Mainstream movies today suffer from a lack of new ideas. It happens no matter who the filmmakers are. New ideas are good though, wherever they come from.

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Andrei Tarkovsky disliked this.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Well going by boxoffice and the winner per decade if you could kindly point out the "dickfests"

1930's - Gone with the Wind
1940's - Bambi
1950's - The Ten Commandments
1960's - The Sound of Music
1970's - Star Wars
1980's - ET
1990's - Titanic
2000's - Avatar
2010's - A Force Awaken's

And you get those "Dark Knights', Rain Man's, and Good Will Huntings"

but when they are done with female characters they come off as derivative, insulting, and forgettable.

Perfunctory roles are better than nothing
And i have a feeling he has a different notion of what is ‘interesting and distinguishable’ which for him seems to signify men

I guess that male role domination is not purely the consequence of lack of female directors. It's true that there are very few female movie directors, the reason for that is that movie directors is kinda like being a leader in making something: it's not a mostly solitary job like being a writer or a manga artist and so it requires that the person has strong active leadership qualities and one has in a certain sense to be quite aggressive. Men are much more often endowed with these qualities while women tend to be more endowed with mainly passive agreeable qualities, hence, it's natural for there to be a lot more male directors.

For example, the biggest box office film series success of the 21st century is the Harry Potter film series, that series is an adaption of novels written by a women. However, the 8 movies have been all directed by men (4 different directors).

So, isn't it a great female achievement to be the original author of the biggest literary and movie box office series success in this generation?

Anyway, the lack of women in movies is a different thing from lack of female directors. Because in manga, for instance, it's very often that women are the main characters in manga aimed at males and written by males. Think of Miyazaki's Nausicaa, a movie written and directed by a man featuring a women main character but whose public is also mostly male.

This is a different thing: in Western movies males are often the lead character because in Western mentality if you are making a fictional narrative if you are male and it's aimed at males then it's main characters will automatically be males. Since most film directors are male we mostly get movies featuring male main characters and most lines are spoken by males.

What could change is not that there are too few female directors but this assumption that males can only identify with male fictional characters and vice versa: how about a movie made up of just pretty boy male characters aimed a women for instance? Then we will have greater gender diversity in movies both in terms of roles but also in terms of gender expression, that is, allowing character's gender to not DETERMINE how they are portrayed in movies. As today the "strong female character" has also become an artificial cliche as well.

I think that lack of new ideas is not due to the people working in movies it's the inverse: it's due to commercial pressure in conforming to what the public expects from the movies. The current public is just very conservative and wants to same stuff from their movies that they already saw a thousand times before.

One place where I agree we need less male dialogue and more female dialogue: Pornography.

please read up on every book of the 21st century because it seems you took a psychology class in 1950 and never opened your eyes for anything ever since.
people like you who keep perpetuating the myth that women are neurologically inherently different than men are what keeps humanity from evolving. have you never heard of the nurture vs nature debate hun

Are they? Because it seems like they would feed right into whatever misogyny is out there, disproportionately associating female actors and filmmakers with lower-quality films.

Even if this were true, it's not really mutually exclusive with what he was saying.

Maybe, but I think the customary thing to do is disagree with what people actually say (and ask them what they mean when it's ambiguous), rather than make uncharitable assumptions and insult them for something they may not even believe. Particularly when your ostensible disagreement ends up sounding nearly identical to the thing it's responding to.

The idea that women are inferior is a myth. The idea that they're different is not. That's why diversity is so valuable in the first place; there'd be little point to it if there were not marked differences between groups.

I've heard of it, and I'm pretty sure the evidence didn't end up coming down on the "everything is nurture" side.