Celeb pay gap under scrutiny
Here’s why leading ladies are worth more to the film industry than box office takings alone
The gender pay gap in Hollywood is still supersized: the top 10 male actors combined earn three times that of their female counterparts. Last year, the best-paid actress and actor were Emma Stone and Mark Wahlberg. She made $26 million (Dh95.4 million), and he made $68 million. She won an Oscar, and he did not.
While it’s hard to weep for multimillionaires, that $42 million pay gap gives an A-list stamp of approval to a culture of inequality, which resonates elsewhere. In this year, of all years, as women (and men) have called for equal pay, the picture beamed out of Hollywood seems particularly egregious.
It was suggested recently that the Hollywood gender pay gap “is a manifestation not of sexism, but the brute reality of economics”, according to researchers at North Carolina State University, who found that having a male star in a film adds 12 per cent to box office, while having a female star adds nothing whatsoever.
The only response to that is an irritated shout of “Mamma mia! Here we go again” — because what people seem to have failed to realise was that the survey was undertaken between 1990 and 2010, and since then there has been an earthquake in Hollywood, and the tremors are still being felt, particularly in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein case.
Women are making millions
The public prominence of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements in the past year has also brought change.
for the studios at the box office — the Mamma Mia! sequel is outperforming the first film, and has taken $49.8 million from UK audiences so far, ready to leapfrog the new Mission: Impossible offering. But female contributions are not yet being properly recompensed, and international smash hits tend to be superhero films, starring Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Ant-Man and anyone else with an XY chromosome.
Hollywood has always followed the money, and around 10 years ago a tipping point occurred as Twilight and later The Hunger Games proved that female-led young adult series were box office gold. Kristen Stewart and Jennifer Lawrence were anointed as stars and began their brilliant careers.
Over at Disney, the first two animations co-directed by women, and featuring feisty heroines — Brave, and the super-successful Frozen — raked in far more than the pastel-princess formula previously served up by men. Meanwhile, The Incredibles 2, in which Mr Incredible babysits and Mrs Incredible (Holly Hunter) fights villains, is the most successful children’s animation to date. Could it be because cinemagoers are 52 per cent female anyway, and that ticket-buying mums love that role swap?
As Screen International’s Charles Gant says: “Hollywood studios used to assume that female audiences would go and see a movie about a man more readily than male audiences would go see a movie about a woman. In other words, a movie about a man is just a movie, but a movie about a woman is a movie about a woman. Then they’d be surprised when female-driven films turned out to be hits.”
But the real eureka moment for Hollywood executives was Star Wars: The Force Awakens
in 2015, the highestgrossing film of all time at the UK box office, which starred Daisy Ridley and John Boyega as joint leads. The studio had so little faith in their female star that merchandisers at first failed to make an action figure of Ridley’s character, Rey, and just supplied Boyega’s Finn and Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, thinking small boys would eschew a girl heroine. But when Rey was added to the pack, her figures flew off the shelves.
The public prominence of the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements in the past year has also brought change. The British group Equal Representation for Actresses is demanding more roles for women with its “5050 by 2020” campaign.