Number of women-led movies falls

Female-led films may have topped last year's box office rankings, but the number of movies with women in the lead roles fell last year, a study has said.

Last year's most popular films in the US were Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast and Wonder Woman.

But the number of films with sole female protagonists fell from 29 per cent in 2016 to 24 per cent in 2017, The Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film found.

The organisation based its research on the top 100 grossing US films, reports BBC.

The report said: "Overall, audiences were almost twice as likely to see male characters as female characters."

In the top 100 films, 58 per cent had a male protagonist - defined as the character from whose perspective the story is told. That's more than double the 24 per cent figure for women. The other 18 per cent of films were classed as having ensembles.

The study also found that 45 per cent of protagonists were female in films with at least one woman director or writer.

But films with exclusively male directors and writers ended up with females accounting for just 20 per cent of protagonists.

The study also found that female protagonists were "much more likely" to appear in independent features (65 per cent) than big-budget studio features (35 per cent).

It was the other way around for men, though, with sole male protagonists more likely to appear in big-budget studio movies (54 per cent) than in independent ones (46 per cent).

Female characters are still younger than their male counterparts.

Male characters were most likely to be in their 30s (31 per cent) and 40s (27 per cent), while more female characters were in their 20s (32 per cent) and 30s (25 per cent).

Women were given 34 per cent of all speaking roles, a rise of two percentage points since 2016. They also accounted for 37 per cent of major characters - the same as 2016.

The researchers also found that, among all female characters with speaking roles, 30 per cent were women of colour - up from 25 per cent the previous year. Sixteen per cent were black, 7.0 per cent were Latina and 7.0 per cent were Asian.

There were differences between men and women when it came to genre as well.

Women were more likely to take a leading role in a comedy (30 per cent) or drama (30 per cent), followed by action (17 per cent), horror (13 per cent), animated features (4 per cent) and science fiction(4 per cent).

Male protagonists were most likely to appear in action features (38 per cent), followed by comedy (20 per cent), animation (18 per cent), drama (13 per cent), horror (7.0 per cent) and science fiction (4.0 per cent).