Emma Thompson in the 2022 film, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.”
Stardom has its rules, and apparently Hollywood has an unspoken one.
Don’t be an older woman.
Great Britain’s Centre for Ageing Better recently took at a look at the top 100 box office hits of the last three years. Only five featured a woman older than 60: “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” “The Substance,” “Freakier Friday” and “Allelujah” (a mostly U.K. hit which went straight to streaming here).
That’s it. Five films out of 100. Meanwhile, the survey toted up 20 films starring talking animals.
Looking for your next big-screen hit, Nicole Kidman? Want to get back in the box-office battle, Michelle Pfeiffer? Maybe it’s time to dub some cute Disney cartoons. Or rent a big furry dog costume. (Meanwhile, actors like Robert Downey Jr., 61, Brad Pitt, 62, and Tom Cruise, 63, all continue to headline big-budget blockbusters.)
“Women are half the population and we get older,” said Emma Thompson, 67, interviewed about the study by The Independent. “So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are.”
The center’s chief executive, Carol Easton, called the situation “absolutely ludicrous.”
“Up to one in five UK cinema attendees are aged 55 and above,” she pointed out. “This age group spends hundreds of millions of pounds every year on cinema … The lack of representation is insulting, frankly.”
It’s not just a lack of older women in starring roles, either. Nor is the ageism only prevalent in Britain.
American professor Stacy L. Smith has long been documenting the lack of opportunities — not only for actresses, but for female directors — for the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Its most recent report noted that only nine of last year’s 100 biggest movies came from female filmmakers.
More and more women are speaking out, however. Last month at Cannes, receiving a Woman in Motion award, Julianne Moore, 67, couldn’t help noticing the irony of being honored for her body of work even as new opportunities for actresses are vanishing.
And, she insisted, the ageism, and sexism, isn’t cinema-specific.
“It’s not endemic just to the film industry, it’s global,” Moore said. “There’s not representation in the media, there’s not representation in higher education. There are lots of places where we don’t have the representation we deserve.”
Of course, there are exceptions.
Meryl Streep with Anne Hathaway and Stanley Tucci in “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
One of the biggest successes at the box office this year has been “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” a genuinely femme-centric film with the legendary Meryl Streep, 76, leading the cast. But this is a long-awaited and heavily promoted sequel to a popular and fondly remembered hit, and Streep is a singular sensation.
Try naming other hits with older actresses and you’re quickly grasping for titles.
Younger women can have trouble getting credit in Hollywood, too, even after a major success.
“Barbie” — with a female producer and star, and female director and co-writer — made $1.4 billion in 2023. Yet it was seen as cultural outlier: a unique, once-in-a-career event.
Even though movies that feature women — “The Devil Wears Prada,” “80 for Brady,” “Book Club” — have regularly drawn large and enthusiastic audiences. Even though “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig’s typically female-forward films — “Lady Bird,” “Little Women” — regularly show a profit.
Strangely, it’s a lesson Hollywood prefers to ignore — just as they prefer to ignore female success stories.
Even after a crash-and-burn disaster, male directors often get their next project enthusiastically greenlit. But even after the major money-minting event that was “Barbie,” Gerwig had to push Netflix to give her next film, “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew,” anything but a limited theatrical release.
Of course, one reason that older women aren’t in more of Hollywood’s top-grossing movies may be that Hollywood’s top-grossing movies are, frankly, often unchallenging, as well as gratuitously violent. Slam-bang action pictures and gory horror flicks turn some veteran actresses off.
“I don’t like someone being murdered,” Moore said, of those scripts. “I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath. I mean, that actually bothers me because that’s like noise. I don’t know how to play it. I don’t want to watch it.”
But to assume that women only want to tell small, character-driven, reality-based stories is a kind of sexism, too.
Rebecca Ferguson in “A House of Dynamite.”
Catch any of director Kathryn Bigelow’s white-knuckled work, such as the recent nuclear-powered nail-biter “A House of Dynamite.” Or the regular go-for-broke performances of 50-year-old Charlize Theron, who just starred in the survivalist thriller “Apex.” Neither film fits a cozy, feminine stereotype.
But “A House of Dynamite” only got the briefest of theatrical runs before moving to Netflix, while the “Apex” didn’t even stop in movie theaters before joining it.
Perhaps Netflix, with its constant need for content and a demographic that slightly skews female, is actually a more natural fit for films with older actresses and more mature themes, like the recent “Nonnas,” with Susan Sarandon and Lorraine Bracco, or “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” with Sally Field.
Or perhaps movie theaters have been finally, fully taken over by the mostly male teenagers-of-all-ages who breathlessly await each new superhero or video-game film, high-five each other after getting the latest souvenir popcorn bucket, spend the screening cheering on every catch phrase — and then return to see them again and again.
But given the success of a “Devil Wears Prada 2” — or the sophisticated delights of a film like Thompson’s erotic 2022 comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — shouldn’t there be room on our screens for other films, too?
“I want to see more films center ageing women,” said Thompson, currently co-starring in “The Sheep Detectives.” “We are compelling, relatable and overdue for center stage. Older women don’t need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world — cinema just needs to catch up.”
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