Dem
47
GOP
53
Representation matters. Certainly, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism thinks so, which is why they conduct an annual, exhaustive study—called the Inclusion Initiative—of the 100 highest-grossing films of the year. What the scholars look at, specifically, is every single speaking part in every single movie. They track gender, race, "major role" status, and the like, in order to see how well filmmakers are capturing the diversity of the real world.
Back when the study began, in 2007, representation of women in movies was pretty dismal. This, in fact, was the primary impetus behind the project. How dismal? It's hard to believe, but only about a third of the people with speaking parts were women. And the number of women protagonists (i.e., the character or characters driving the narrative arc of the film) was even smaller, at just 20%.
Since then, however, the number of women protagonists has slowly crawled upward. And in this year's study, released earlier this week, a rather important benchmark was reached. Across the top 100 movies of 2024, more than half featured a female protagonist. To be more precise, that was the case with 54 of the top 100 films. That's not only a high for years covered by the survey, it's the first time where the percentage of women protagonists is higher than the percentage of women in the general population (50.5%).
This is not to say that films are, as yet, perfectly representative. The study also tracks age, and film characters skew much younger than the general population. That is particularly true of female characters. There were eight Top 100 movies last year with a female protagonist over the age of 45. That's better than the one such movie in 2007, but it's rather behind the 21 such movies last year featuring male protagonists over the age of 45. If only Harrison Ford would stop making so many damn movies.
Of course, one should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Even if films are not perfect representations of the U.S. population (and probably never will be), the filmmakers are doing much better than they did even 20 years ago. So, a hat tip to them. And have a good weekend, all! (Z)