Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
All-male productions took 39 of the 44 biggest budgets in a 30-year film study
Anja Huwiler's Frontiers in Communication study also reports 34% higher median profits for films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director, a comparison built on the 2% of nearly 200,000 films with budget data.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Anja Huwiler assembled nearly 200,000 films released between 1994 and 2023 and obtained production budgets and worldwide gross revenues for a subset of more than 4,200 of them.
- The share of films crediting at least one woman as a director or screenwriter rose from 21.5% in 1994 to 29.4% in 2023, leaving fewer than one in three with a woman in either role.
- Huwiler reports that the financial subset is predominantly U.S. theatrical releases, that women directors form a small group, and that gender was inferred from first names across the dataset.
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Why it matters
- constraint Because the ROI measure leaves out marketing, distribution and other revenue, the study can rank films by gross against production spend but cannot settle which ones returned money to a studio after a global campaign.
- contradiction The largest reported gaps come from the smallest cells, so a reader who wants the strongest number gets the weakest sample, and the two halves of the paper support different degrees of confidence.
- decision Anyone arguing from this paper for moving budget has to act on an association: it did not test what causes the allocation pattern or what would change it.
- precedent Expecting a public reckoning to speed up allocation has the 2017 case against it, since participation continued rising afterwards at roughly its earlier pace.
The biggest difference in the study sits at the top of the budget range, and it comes from five films. "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 [11]. She reports that the other 39 of those 44 were male-only productions and that none of the 44 involved a woman director [6]. Add the two groups and they account for every film in the top 1% [3]. Across the whole priced subset, the same comparison is a difference of $9.1 million, $35.9 million against $26.8 million [5][4]. The gap at the extreme is roughly twelve times the gap across the subset [5].
Profit here holds worldwide gross against the production budget. The ROI figures, 1.1 for films written but not directed by women against 0.88 for male-only films, exclude marketing and distribution costs and other revenue sources [7]. Campaign spend sits outside the comparison on both sides. Films crediting a woman in both roles matched male-only ROI while working on half the budget [8].
Larger slices of the budget distribution point the same way, with more films behind them. In the top 10%, the median profit for films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director was about $452 million against roughly $318 million for male-only films; in the top 5%, $556 million against about $470 million [12][7].
About 2% of the films in the dataset have budgets and revenues attached [1]. If 44 films make up the top 1% of that group, it numbers around 4,400 [2]. Huwiler flags the limits herself: the financial subset is predominantly U.S. theatrical releases, and women directors are a small enough group that some findings are descriptive [18]. Gender was inferred from first names across the full dataset, and she notes this may undercount women from some backgrounds [18].
The study did not examine what produces the allocation pattern [14]. "The extreme uncertainty of film financing can make familiar people and established ways of working feel safer, especially when decision-makers are risk- or loss-averse. This can reinforce the status quo even when the financial evidence points elsewhere," said Huwiler [15]. A second reading fits the same numbers. If fewer women-written projects are financed at all, the ones that get through may have cleared a stricter bar, and a higher median among survivors would not tell you what the next women-written film would earn. The design cannot separate the two.
I would take the direction of the result more seriously than its size. The budget-share figures rest on thousands of films; the $113 million difference rests on five. "I think one value of this study is that it looks at the issue through a financial lens, not only as a question of representation," said Huwiler [19].
Women's credit share moved 7.9 percentage points in 29 years, about 0.27 points a year [6]. Participation kept rising after #MeToo in 2017, and the study found no lasting acceleration in its rate of growth [16]. It did not test what would produce lasting change [20]. "I suspect it may require changing how people get their chance in the first place," said Huwiler [17].
What to watch
- Whether anyone re-runs the comparison with prints-and-advertising spend included, which would test whether the median profit gap survives a fuller cost measure.
- Whether the dataset is released in a form that lets others check the top-1% result, where the effect is largest and the sample is five films.
- Whether the annual credit share passes one in three, the threshold it had not reached by 2023 at about 0.27 points a year.