A talking animal beats a woman over 60 in the movies

The results are grim reading: twenty movies starred a talking animal and six featured a male actor named Chris. Only five films out of a hundred had a woman over 60 in an important role.

There were lead actors named Chris Chris Pratt, Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth.

The study also revealed that a talking animal is four times more likely to be seen in the lead role of a film than a woman over 60 years old.

The results of the study are reported among other things The Guardian and The Independent.

Oscar-winning British actress Emma Thompson67, comments on the results of the study. Thompson calls on the film industry to improve the visibility of older women.

“Women make up half the population, and we’re getting older. So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are,” says Thompson.

Thompson demands that filmmakers take into account the diversity of the audience better than at present.

“Older women don’t need permission to be on the big screen. They already exist in the world — the film just needs to catch up,” says Thompson.

Research organization CEO Dr Carole Easton describes the situation as ridiculous.

“Up to a fifth of British cinema-goers are over 55,” notes Easton.

According to the survey, a third of Britons feel that there are not enough films starring women over 60. Almost two out of five women would like to see more such films.

Centre for Aging Better published in 2023 of the Cast Aside studywhich analyzes nearly 50 popular films from 2010 to 2022. The research revealed that only a third of the speaking characters were over 50, despite almost half of British adults being in this age group.

Female characters over 65 were more than three times rarer than men of the same age. Older female characters also spoke 14 percent less than older men.

The researchers found that empowering and multidimensional older female characters were rare. Older women were often portrayed as passive and sidelined.

Oscar nominees on the basis of which it can be concluded that Hollywood’s however, it would seem that the spirit of youth has been broken in some respects.

According to the BBC’s report, the average age of the nominees has increased since the 1940s, when the nominees for best actress were on average 27 years old. In the 2020s, they will be 47 years old on average.

Despite this, the most successful films still show a clear difference between the sexes.

Among the top-grossing Hollywood films of the last 100 years, only four women over the age of 45 had a leading or supporting role, and one of them was a voice actress. All of them were white. For men, the same figure was 31, according to the Annenberg think tank from the research appears.