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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2910 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: An Analysis of Gender in Films Based on Scripts (Male vs. Female Lines)

There's this sense that "Hollywood" has an agenda other than "making money" and it's absurd.

Stuff made by studios these days makes about 25% from domestic release, about 35% from foreign release, about 20% from domestic distribution, about 10% from foreign distribution and 10% or so from merchandising and tie-ins. That last number can go up a crazy amount - Ang Lee's Hulk, for example, made more on Happy Meals than it did on domestic box. But the "domestic" portion of the fees is still less than half the money a film makes.

Most of the foreign market doesn't speak english, by the way, and they don't get your in-jokes, your cultural references, your obsession with Christmas, your racial humor, any of it. They're also racist as fuck. Nobody in Asia is at all interested in seeing black people (used to be "black people other than Will Smith" but even China is tired of The Fresh Prince these days). Gender roles across the world vary a bunch, but in general, women in the developing world don't have near the participation in society that women in the developed world do.

Finally, about 80% of your audience is between the age of 15 and 24 and about 70% of them are male. That's global, by the way - it actually gets worse in Asia.

So what you're left with is the reality that Hollywood makes movies for Chinese boys. Is it any wonder that they rarely enforce positive stereotypes for women or minorities? It's absurd to suppose that roles for women suck because men can't write women when the economics of the situation dictate that roles for women simply aren't given the importance they deserve.





KurtHectic  ·  2900 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So an interesting test for that hypothesis is to repeat this same analysis on a different media form that is less exposed to a young, male, global citizen's prejudice and instead identify forms that are targeted at the type of audiences who are more ready to accept strong characters no matter their gender, race, sexual inclination, age etc...

A few have commented that now the real art in moving pictures has moved to the big budget television series either made for networks or for stream services. If the transcripts for these products still show a bias towards a gender in forms that are targeted to a typically well off and educated, western audience, then we may still have structural bias.

kleinbl00  ·  2900 days ago  ·  link  ·  

They won't. At all. This is a known and done discussion - international television is a very different animal than international film and because of the licensing and ethnographic makeups of television, it's far more likely for a show concept to be exported than the show itself. Big Brother, House of Cards and other large, noteworthy shows are remakes, not exports and the media experiences changes to reflect the local environment.

Even when shows are exported, what works in the US won't necessarily work elsewhere. Germans loved Baywatch, for example, and there's a lengthy Wikipedia article about recutting The Simpsons for foreign markets. But most importantly, TV reflects the gender bias of its viewers, who are mostly women.

user-inactivated  ·  2907 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Ang Lee

Wait, the guy who made Life of Pi?

That's...interesting.