Despite Barbie's global success with its 1.4 billion dollars in worldwide grosses, the Hollywood industry is still a man's world.
A new study by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has shown that the number of female protagonists in films at the top of the box office in 2023 is at an all-time low in the last ten years.
Of the 100 biggest box office hits released last year, only 30 had an actress at the center, the worst result since 2014. "It's a catastrophic step backwards for women and girls," said Stacy Smith who coordinated the research: " Seeing a U-turn of this kind is in direct contrast to all the talk that has been made of 2023 as the 'year of the woman'."
Since 2007, with 20 films out of a hundred, it had marked the lowest percentage of female protagonists so far, that the Annenberg Initiative has been keeping track of the presence of women in the dream industry: in 2022 the 44% was the best result of Always.
There are those who have attributed the 2023 step back to the postponement of the release until this year of many films such as Luca Guadagnino's romantic drama Challengers starring Zendaya, but Annenberg experts are not convinced.
"It was simply a failure on the part of the film industry", write the authors of the study which, in addition to examining female quotas, takes into account other factors of discrimination such as ethnic diversity and ageism: "The results "show an industry indifferent to inclusion efforts. It's important to celebrate Barbie's success, but films that reflect the experiences of women and people of color shouldn't be able to be counted on one hand."
In these days on the monthly magazine W, the director of Barbie Greta Gerwig and one of her stars America Ferrera are photographed by Mickalene Thomas (Michelle Obama's portraitist) for a shoot entitled The Lady Wins, but the paradox is that, after having conquered the box office, the film denouncing the patriarchy was unable to conquer the control rooms, as demonstrated by the lack of nominations for the major Hollywood awards, including the Oscars, in which Gerwig and the protagonist Margot Robbie did not make it into the top five.
Annenberg's study comes in the wake of another study conducted by the same team on women directors: they too were decreasing with 16 percent of the top one hundred films compared to 18 percent the previous year.
As for actresses, only three films last year featured stars aged 45 or over: Cocaine Bear (Keri Russell, 47), My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (Nia Vardalos, 61) and Magic Mike's Last Dance (Salma Hayek, 57).
As a touchstone, 32 films in 2023 had a male protagonist 'over 45', and 24 of those were white.
On the inclusion front, only 14 films featured women of color
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