Can Women Make Hollywood Blockbusters?

We are in a golden era for women in film. Or so it seems. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie smashed box office records. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance left Cannes dripping in acclaim. Studios boast about “historic opportunities” for female filmmakers.

Is it really progress? An unprecedented women’s victory? Or just a history repeating itself?

When only a few among multiple nominations turned into actual Oscar trophies, the institutional biases against female filmmakers become undeniable. Women aren’t being handed the keys to Hollywood but rather they’re just being allowed into certain rooms.

Critics have begun to recognize female filmmakers and their work in recent years, but often in carefully subcategories. Lists like BBC’s “The 100 greatest films directed by women” now proliferate, yet when critics are asked for a broader ranking, they are not bothered to take female’s work into consideration. In the list called “The 21st Century’s 100 Greatest Films” curated by BBC, less than 10 films are directed by females.

A recent study by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative underscores this exclusion: among all distinct directors who worked from 2007 to 2024, only 10 percent are female filmmakers.

The gender gap in critical reception is stark. Among best films selected by BBC, a film directed by women receives 12 awards and 15 nominations on average, while those by men earn four times as many nominations and almost five times as many awards.

The number of awards and nominations hardly explains viewers' ratings. “Male directed fare was not evaluated any more or less favorably than female directed fare,” wrote Dr. Stacy Smith, the director of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Top films by women average 7.3 on IMDb, compared to 7.8 for films by men, and only a weak positive correlation has been found between the number of awards and the rating.

Gender is a significant factor in the types of stories told by directors, as revealed in a study by Sundance Institute and Women In Film Los Angeles. Despite genres represented fairly equal in both genders’ filmwork, the top three genres tagged within well-recognized films made by men are action, thriller, and sci-fi films. For women directors - they are comedy, documentary and coming-of-age.

Male filmmakers do not necessarily direct fewer romantic comedies, explained by Patricia White, the professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, but they are far less likely to be defined by them. But when a superwoman movie comes out, the feminine theme becomes a defining marketing sale point. What women can be entrusted is still a calculated effort in Hollywood, as Professor White noted, they can helm searing dramas, feminist horror, or coming-of-age tales, but without a gendered angle women are rarely “being entrusted in enormous tenpole movies.”

While men move fluidly between genres - from superheroes franchises to Oscar dramas - women directors often find themselves pigeonholed, their careers constrained by industry assumptions about what kinds of stories they should tell.

In terms of box office, female-directed films earn a significantly less portion compared to male-directed films. Male directors dominated the highest revenue brackets, with their films frequently reaching the 8 to 10 million range, while female directors’ work barely reached 9 million.

Women are celebrated when they conform to expectations. Until women can fail as freely as men - flopping at the box office, pivoting between genres, or directing a $200 million bomb without derailing their careers - the golden era remains a gilded cage. The system isn't just slow to change; it's designed to keep women in their place. And for now, that place is still narrowly defined.