Highlights
- Films written and directed by women achieved similar returns to male-only films on about half the budget.
- No film with a woman director reached the top one per cent of production budgets between 1994 and 2023.
- Bollywood and British cinema have produced several commercially successful films led by women.
FILMS written and directed by women can deliver higher financial returns than films made entirely by men, while women remain largely absent from the biggest production budgets, according to a new study of almost 200,000 films.
The research, published in Frontiers in Communication, examined 199,656 feature-length narrative films released worldwide between 1994 and 2023.
A separate financial sample of 4,245 films, mainly US theatrical releases with verified budget and revenue data, was used to compare production costs, profits and return on investment (ROI).
Indian cinema provides several examples of women working across different budgets and genres.
Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, directed and produced by Rao with Sneha Desai as screenplay and dialogue writer, was made on a relatively modest budget. Zoya Akhtar co-wrote and directed Gully Boy, while Payal Kapadia wrote and directed All We Imagine as Light, which won the Grand Prix at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Gully Boy, released in 2019, grossed about £18.7 million worldwide, according to Bollywood Hungama. All We Imagine as Light, a much smaller independent production, grossed about £2.6m worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.
Laapataa Ladies, released in 2024, was also selected as India's official entry for the Academy Awards. Its theatrical run was modest compared with major Hindi releases, but it later reached a much wider audience through streaming.
Greta Gerwig's Barbie, co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, became a global blockbuster in 2023. The film was directed by Gerwig, whose work provides a high-profile example of a woman filmmaker being given a major commercial platform.
Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie pose during the pink carpet for 'Barbie' at Plaza Parque Toreo on July 06, 2023 in Naucalpan de Juarez, Mexico. (Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty Images)
Jennifer Lee, meanwhile, wrote Frozen and Frozen II, two of Disney's major animated hits. Geneva Robertson-Dworet was among the writers of Captain Marvel, which also became a billion-dollar global release.
Britain has also produced commercially successful films under female directors. Phyllida Lloyd's Mamma Mia! remains one of the clearest examples. The 2008 British-American musical, directed by Lloyd, made more than $600m internationally, according to reports.
Sarah Gavron's Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter and Meryl Streep, was made on a £10m budget and went on to take about £35m at the box office, according to the BFI.
Women writers and returns
The study found that films with a woman screenwriter but no woman director had a median profit of $35.9m, compared with $26.8m for films with no women in either role, reported the Times.
The median ROI was 1.10 for films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director, compared with 0.88 for male-only productions, a difference of about 25 per cent.
Researchers stressed that this is an association rather than proof that having a woman screenwriter causes a film to make more money.
The figures become more notable when women were both writers and directors. Such films had a median production budget of $19.9m, or about £14.9m, compared with $39.2m, or £29.4m, for male-only productions.
Yet their median ROI was 0.89, almost the same as the 0.88 recorded for male-only films. In other words, the two groups recorded similar median returns despite a large difference in the amount invested.
Films with a woman director but no woman screenwriter had a median ROI of 0.44 and a median budget of $30.4m. The researchers caution that this category contained only 83 films in the financial sample.
Biggest budgets remain male-dominated
Across the 30-year sample, none of the 44 films in the top one per cent of production budgets had a woman director. Five involved a woman screenwriter, while 39 were male-only productions.
At the top 10 per cent of production budgets, films with a woman screenwriter recorded a median ROI 33 per cent higher than male-only films in the study's exploratory comparison. The researchers warned that some of these high-budget categories contain small numbers of films.
Overall, women were involved in at least one of the directing or screenwriting roles in 26.2 per cent of the films in the full dataset, while 73.8 per cent had no woman credited in either role. Women were both writers and directors on 10.5 per cent of films.
More Indian examples
Other Indian films show how women-led stories can work across different commercial models.
Gangubai Kathiawadi, led by Alia Bhatt but directed and co-written by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, grossed roughly £16.5m. Crew, starring Tabu, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Kriti Sanon, was directed by Rajesh A Krishnan and grossed about £12.2m worldwide.
The distinction matters because the study examines who wrote and directed films, rather than simply whether women were prominent in front of the camera.
The study does not establish why women remain less likely to receive the industry's largest production budgets. It found, however, a difference between the level of investment allocated to films involving women and the financial returns recorded by those productions.
