Male stars still lead at box office

LOS ANGELES - It’s a man’s world - or at least that’s the way it appears on screen.

According to a recent report by San Diego State University film professor Martha Lauzen, the top 100 grossing films of 2013 were overwhelmingly male. Just 15 percent of protagonists, 29 percent of major characters and 30 percent of all speaking characters were female.

The study looked at more than 2,300 characters in the 2013 films, and the lack of female representation - on screen and behind the scenes - has not substantially improved, says Lauzen, who serves as executive director of the SDSU Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

“I would say that the film business is in a state of gender inertia,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “If you take a look at the numbers, you see basically we are in the same place we were about a decade ago.”

For example, in a similar study conducted in 2002, women constituted only 16 percent of the protagonists in the top 100 films of that year. That’s 1 percentage point higher than in 2013.

“Women comprise 52 percent of population but make up only 15 percent of protagonists - that strikes me as a significant disconnect between the film world and the real world,” Lauzen says.

Some in the industry might counter that male leads only reflect box-office reality - that male-driven movies make more money. But Lauzen says an earlier study of hers found thatwhen the budgets of films featuring female and male protagonists are equalized, “there is no substantial difference in box-office grosses or DVD sales.”

“Differences in earnings are due to differences in the size of budgets, not gender,” says Lauzen, who has looked at 7,000 characters in 300 films since 2002.

Indeed, female protagonists were at the center of recent top-grossing films such as Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock; The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, starring Jennifer Lawrence; and the animated Frozen, starring the voices of Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel.

Only 13 percent of the top 100 films at the box office featured equal numbers of major female and male characters, or featured more female characters than male characters.

Lauzen said part of the reason why the film industry hasn’t changed is because guilds and studios do not see a problem.

“You don’t look for fixes for things you don’t see as problematic,” she said.

Plus, people don’t pay attention to the numbers. Back in 2010 when Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for directing for her film The Hurt Locker, Lauzen said people quickly began forecasting more opportunities for women in film, labeling it The Bigelow Effect.

“It’s really easy to be misled by a few high-profile cases,” Lauzen says. “Which is why it’s always important to actually count the number of characters or credits so that the conversation is grounded in what’s actually happening.”