Do you feel that we have reached a balanced ratio of male protagonists vs. female protagonists?

[binary solo]

Lawlight said:

binary solo said:

Do you have some statistics so that we can have a discussion based on facts, or are you just going by your general impression from movies you know about?

And why should we exclude a significant and increasingly financially important genre? What is the obvious reason for excluding super hero movies? I don't see an obvious reason for excluding them.

Just counted the top 20-25 grossing movies of the year. Nothing scientific.

Simply because superhero movies are based on existing comics. Obviously the most popular superheroes will be made first and those are mostly male characters. I think that makes sense, not sure why you're making me explain it.

So out of those 25 movies what's the split?

I'm not sure you are correct in that, there are certainly female superheroes that are much more well known among the mainstream population than Ant man, for example, albeit most or all of those female superheroes are DC properties not Marvel properties. Arguably Marvel could have made Wasp and have Ant man be the side character who came on stream at the end of the movie. Wasp is as well known among the comic book fandom as Ant man, and deciding to set the movie after Hank Pym retired from super hero duties meant there was no essential reason for Hank's invention to get its first outing on a male character. If the first Ant man had been set back when Hank Pym was a wife beating inventor and quantum physics genius, then making him the first shrinking superhero would be the only option, but that's not what they did. I would even go so far as to say Wasp, starring Evangeline Lilly, would have been more successful than Ant man, starring Paul Rudd; as long as they still had Michael Pena of course.

So you might think your explanation is obvious, but even with you articulating it I don't agree it's a legitimate reason to exclude them from a consideration of whether there's reasonable gender balance in leading roles in 2015 movies.

I think you also need to consider target audiences. If most of the female leads are in movies that are directed at a female audience, whereas the male leads are a mix of general audience and male audiences then you could still say there's an imbalance. If Hollywod churns out three female lead $20 million budget, chick flick, cookie cutter, rom-coms and one $150 million budget male lead block buster, if you just go by number of movies then you could say Hollywood is suffering an oestrogen overdose. But if you go by investment input and expected audience demographic mix and size then things swing back in favour of the one big budget movie.