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kleinbl00  ·  3150 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Analysis of Gender in Films Based on Scripts (Male vs. Female Lines)

There's this sense that "Hollywood" has an agenda other than "making money" and it's absurd.

Stuff made by studios these days makes about 25% from domestic release, about 35% from foreign release, about 20% from domestic distribution, about 10% from foreign distribution and 10% or so from merchandising and tie-ins. That last number can go up a crazy amount - Ang Lee's Hulk, for example, made more on Happy Meals than it did on domestic box. But the "domestic" portion of the fees is still less than half the money a film makes.

Most of the foreign market doesn't speak english, by the way, and they don't get your in-jokes, your cultural references, your obsession with Christmas, your racial humor, any of it. They're also racist as fuck. Nobody in Asia is at all interested in seeing black people (used to be "black people other than Will Smith" but even China is tired of The Fresh Prince these days). Gender roles across the world vary a bunch, but in general, women in the developing world don't have near the participation in society that women in the developed world do.

Finally, about 80% of your audience is between the age of 15 and 24 and about 70% of them are male. That's global, by the way - it actually gets worse in Asia.

So what you're left with is the reality that Hollywood makes movies for Chinese boys. Is it any wonder that they rarely enforce positive stereotypes for women or minorities? It's absurd to suppose that roles for women suck because men can't write women when the economics of the situation dictate that roles for women simply aren't given the importance they deserve.