Get Ready for More of the Same

This link, via Kottke.org, points out how few women/women films masses of human beings will shell out money for. An interesting tally:

Two Female Leads

Quick, name a few recent popular movies where the two top-billed stars are female.

Here’s a miscellaneous survey I just did, tallied by gender of top billed/second billed star:

	M/M	M/F	F/M	F/F
20 biggest movies of 2007	10	10	0	0
20 biggest movies of 2006	11	7	0	2
20 biggest movies of 2005	11	7	2	0
20 biggest movies of 2004	10	9	1	0
20 biggest movies since 1977	15	5	0	0
IMDb Top 20 of All Time	15	5	0	0

There were about 110 movies with a male lead and 5 with a female lead. Of the second-billed females, nearly all are written as love interests of the first-billed man. There were over sixty movies in the sample with two male stars top-billed. The only movies with two top-billed female roles, on the other hand, were The Devil Wears Prada and Scary Movie 4.

My cousin has been working on tallying (by hand!) all movies with two top-billed female stars. She reports that there are staggeringly few of them, and the roles fall mainly in two genres: mother-daughter bonding movies and horror films. Hollywood is not creating female heroes.