This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When the lights come back on and credits start rolling, it's easy to see that some of the most successful movies of the past few years—from "Avatar: The Way of Water" and "Jurassic World" to "Barbie"—were co-directed or co-written by women. These films are among those that bring in the most money for studios, a new Frontiers in Communication study notes.
"Films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director had 34% higher median profits than films with only men in those roles, despite similar budgets," said Anja Huwiler, the study's author and a researcher at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "Yet 39 of the 44 films in the top 1% of production budgets were male-only productions, and none involved a woman director." The study used a dataset of nearly 200,000 movies released between 1994 and 2023, including theatrical and non-theatrical releases. For a subset of more than 4,200 films, production budgets and worldwide gross revenues were obtained.
One clear trend was the slow pace of change. "The share of films crediting at least one woman as a director or screenwriter increased from 21.5% in 1994 to 29.4% in 2023. After nearly 30 years, fewer than one in three films included a woman in either role," said Huwiler.
In the financial subset, another—and perhaps more puzzling—pattern emerged: Films written, but not directed, by women, with budgets comparable to those of male-only productions, generated the highest median profit of around $35.9 million—34% higher than the median profit of male-only productions ($26.8 million). Films written but not directed by women also generated a higher return on investment (ROI), a measure of capital efficiency. A positive value means a project generated more money than it cost.
ROI excludes marketing and distribution costs and other revenue sources. These films had an ROI of 1.1, 25% higher than that of male-only films (0.88). Films with women in both directing and screenwriting roles achieved a similar ROI to male-only films while operating on half the budget.
Films with higher budgets were male-dominated, accounting for 74.8%, 78.6%, and 88.6% in the top 10%, 5%, and 1% of budgets, respectively. Yet no film involving a woman director reached the top 1% of production budgets across the 30-year period. "Among the 44 films in the top 1% of production budgets, the five films written but not directed by a woman had a median profit of about $113 million higher than male-only films, despite having slightly lower median budgets," said Huwiler.
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