By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 10 years ago

Chart: Movies with strong female roles make more money

After analyzing the top 50 biggest box office movies of 2013, Versha Sharma and Hanna Sender have an innovative money-making tip for Hollywood: Make more movies starring women. Revolutionary, right?

Roughly one third of the films they looked at passed the Bechdel Test–meaning they included at least two female characters, who talk to each other about something besides a dude. Let’s take one quick second to mourn the fact that it is 2014 and people are still making movies that fail to meet this very, very low standard. Ok, now the good news: The films that passed the test brought in billions of dollars more than the ones that didn’t. Check out the breakdown after the jump. 

Chart of top 50 box office hits according to whether passed Bechel Test

Perhaps the hand-wringing about whether movies about women kicking ass will possibly appeal to male audiences can finally stop?

Maya DusenberyMaya Dusenbery is so bored of dude-centric movies.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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