An Analysis of Biopics: Gender’s Effect on Box Office Revenue
By: Katerina Johnson and Lydia Reiner
The submission of women into a secondary role is commonplace in the entertainment industry. Women are underrepresented in the film industry, a notion corroborated by statistics showing that 77% of subjects in biopics are men (Fingerhut 2015) and data showing that 22 of 30 Disney films have majority male dialogue (Anderson and Daniels 2016). Through our research, we have undertaken a closer examination of the role of gender in film, examining gender disparities in relation to box office revenue. Box office revenue is used to measure the success of a film, relying upon ticket sales as its determinant. While it is acknowledged that there are gendered differences in film, examining box office revenue in relation to gender allows us to see whether the public disproportionately attends films featuring a particular gender.
The dataset used in our analysis stems from Hannah Fingerhut’s collection of 676 biographical films from 1915 to 2014. Utilizing IMDb data, Fingerhut broke the data down into numerous categories such as release year, country, director, subject race, subject sex, box office, number and type of subjects, and more. Fingerhut examined the role of race and of gender in the film industry in her piece titled “‘Straight Outta Compton’ Is The Rare Biopic Not About White Dudes.” Our research closely examines two of the many categories: box office revenue and subject sex.
While the data is fairly complete, there still remain a few missing pieces and ethical dilemmas. One piece of missing information stems from the fact that Fingerhut focused on biopics aimed at a United States’ audience, limiting any international analysis. Films also may have been incorrectly classified in IMDb (as a genre other than a biopic), resulting in some biopic films potentially being left out. Further, Fingerhut searched for films that were at least minimally based on a real person and from there did research to both identify the subject and their demographic information. This presents some issues — particularly with biopics that are loosely based on, but in no way actually reflect the accurate actions, background, and context of a historical figure. We would be curious to look into this data ourselves, examining whether white males are more heroically or accurately portrayed or, on the other hand, if women and people of color’s accomplishments are diminished by an inaccurate storyline. While there remain some issues within the dataset, the data provided still boasts numerous opportunities to explore gender dynamics in the film industry.
For the purpose of our research, we focused on gendered differences within box office revenue. In our data, we discovered that out of 761 subjects, 177 or 23.26% were female and 584 or 76.74% were male.
We then turned to an analysis of box office revenue by gender. Attached below is a graph detailing our findings titled “Box Office Revenue by Sex.” This graph shows little difference in box office revenue by gender when accounting for the fact that men dominate biopics. Out of the total sum of all box office revenues for the biopics in the dataset, female subject biopics grossed 20.09%, a number close to proportional to the 23.26% of female subjects in biopics. Interestingly, the blue bars which represent men seem to peak both in the bottom and top quartiles of the data (<25th percentile and >75th percentile). While gendered differences in box office revenue are minimal (male counts for the bars from left to right are 84, 75, 83, and 87 and female counts for the bars from left to right are 28, 32, 27, and 21), we would still be interested in understanding why female biopic offerings are underrepresented given that they obtain proportional box office revenue when compared to their male counterparts.
We further analyzed gender differences in box office revenue by examining maximum and minimum values in box office revenue by gender. Through this examination, we discovered that the maximum box office revenue for males was $350 million and for females was $163 million. The minimum box office revenue for males was $315,000 and for females was $1.08 million. Interestingly, the film that grossed the highest box office revenue for males was American Sniper starring Bradley Cooper and for females was The Sound of Music starring Julie Andrews. While there weren’t significant disparities in the minimum and maximum box office revenues by gender, it is notable that the highest grossing films by gender are both consistent with sexist societal views of gender — Andrews plays a governess and Cooper plays a deadly United States military sniper.
Our analysis — consistent with that of Fingerhut’s findings — suggests that there are massive disparities in terms of gender in the film industry. Interestingly, male and female biopics — after accounting for this disparity — perform similarly in the box office. This appears to suggest that the public, who control box office revenue, are not discriminatory of gender when viewing biopics. Rather, it indicates a lack of availability of female biopics, perhaps stemming from a lack of director interest, limited funding for female biopics, or a belief that incredible women are an uncommon occurrence. While this is promising data, we suggest examining differences in box office revenue and race to better understand how the intersections of race and gender may play out in the film industry. Further, we encourage data collection on actor and actress payment, to learn more about discrepancies in payment based on gender and race.
