falconhoof
Member
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas.
-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Only 9 of the top 111 highest grossing film directors in 2025 were women...
- Thread starter Men_in_Boxes
- Start date
I enjoyed Cloud Atlas.
Director Chloe Zhao has some thoughts...
"Speaking at a Women in Motion talk at the Palm Springs film festival on Monday, Zhao was asked for her response to a recent study that found just nine of the 111 directors behind last year's 100 top grossing films in the US were women.
Zhao is on the list with awards season favourite, Hamnet, a poetic exploration of the grief experienced by William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). The film won Buckley a Critics Choice award last weekend for her raw performance as mother struggling with the death of her son.
"What I've learned from making Hamnet," said Zhao, "is that feminine leadership – and that doesn't mean just women, it means the feminine consciousness in all people – is drawing strength from interdependence, not dominance. So it's drawing strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence.
"So it doesn't fit into the current model that we exist in, the container we exist in. It's difficult to come through, and I feel very lucky that I had people in power that trusted that this way of leading is needed for this story."
The annual USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative surveys the gender, race and ethnicity of directors across the top performing US films. This year's study recorded a considerable year-on-year decline for female directors, with 8.1% of the US's 100 highest-grossing films helmed by women in 2025, compared with 13.4% (15 women) the previous year.
Chloé Zhao says ‘feminine consciousness’ incompatible with current Hollywood model
Responding to new reporting finding only nine of the directors behind 2025’s 100 top-grossing US films were women, Hamnet film-maker questions industry’s capacity for inclusivitywww.theguardian.com
The bolded is a bunch of words that have no meaning at all. But dumb people will read it, nod, and say "yeah that makes sense."
newtypepilot
Member
These idiots always try to twist this as a sexism issue even though gender has nothing to do with talent level.
Add in Gale Anne Hurd and either James Cameron has magic sperm that gets his girlfriends into awesome filmmaking or he just has "the touch" (you got the touch!) for picking cool ass women.
Personally I think he was a fool to leave Bigelow, damn she fine.
kpopSuperstar
Gold Member
efyu_lemonardo
May I have a cookie?
There's no shortage of good women directors. I think most of them tend not to gravitate towards making blockbusters, and that's fine.
Last edited:
rorepmE
Member
Yup.
Female group hierarchy is covert and based on relational and not the overt dominance in establishing a visible pecking order we have. They're wired that way in everything they do.
Leadership is based on collaboration, inclusivity and all that shit.
In movie making that means making movies by committee vs a male director's individual vision of HIS movie.
Laptop1991
Member
Probably because the various agenda films most women are making now have bad scripts and dialogue, bad plots, bad acting, bad stories etc as they only care about their over used antagonistic messages and don't care about the overall quality of the film's themselves, definition of madness, doing the same things over and over that doesn't work!.
Last edited:
thief183
Member
What scare me most is that a man would probably suck better than a woman cause he knows better ( same can be said for the woman side of things)
BigDeadFreak
Member
If women wanted to make movies they could do so tomorrow. There's nothing stopping them.
Every woman now has a phone in her pocket that has a camera on it better than anything used to create Metropolis, Citizen Kane or Psycho. They have access to a distribution network in Youtube that is easier to access than Hollywood has ever been.
The fact is they don't really want to make movies. They want to access the status that Hollywood offers. It was the same with comic books and video games. Women had no interest in them until they became big business. Prior to that women tended to mock and ridicule these things and the men that obsessed over them.
This is the reason why all feminism around these issues begins with 'it's not fair...' rather than 'I've got a great idea...' or 'wouldn't it be cool if...'
Men are constantly told that we are bad at expressing our emotions. In reality we express ourselves just fine, it's just that we tend to do it vicariously via sports, engineering and culture. Women do it by sitting around talking. That is why we created the Sistine Chapel and they created Loose Women / The View. It doesn't occur to them to create comic books or movies, they are only interested in these things because men made them successful.
Every woman now has a phone in her pocket that has a camera on it better than anything used to create Metropolis, Citizen Kane or Psycho. They have access to a distribution network in Youtube that is easier to access than Hollywood has ever been.
The fact is they don't really want to make movies. They want to access the status that Hollywood offers. It was the same with comic books and video games. Women had no interest in them until they became big business. Prior to that women tended to mock and ridicule these things and the men that obsessed over them.
This is the reason why all feminism around these issues begins with 'it's not fair...' rather than 'I've got a great idea...' or 'wouldn't it be cool if...'
Men are constantly told that we are bad at expressing our emotions. In reality we express ourselves just fine, it's just that we tend to do it vicariously via sports, engineering and culture. Women do it by sitting around talking. That is why we created the Sistine Chapel and they created Loose Women / The View. It doesn't occur to them to create comic books or movies, they are only interested in these things because men made them successful.
Dirk Benedict
Gold Member
The public mindset has been bombarded with girl power shit for the last 10 or so years. Considered it jaded.Director Chloe Zhao has some thoughts...
"Speaking at a Women in Motion talk at the Palm Springs film festival on Monday, Zhao was asked for her response to a recent study that found just nine of the 111 directors behind last year's 100 top grossing films in the US were women.
Zhao is on the list with awards season favourite, Hamnet, a poetic exploration of the grief experienced by William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife, Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley). The film won Buckley a Critics Choice award last weekend for her raw performance as mother struggling with the death of her son.
"What I've learned from making Hamnet," said Zhao, "is that feminine leadership – and that doesn't mean just women, it means the feminine consciousness in all people – is drawing strength from interdependence, not dominance. So it's drawing strength from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence.
"So it doesn't fit into the current model that we exist in, the container we exist in. It's difficult to come through, and I feel very lucky that I had people in power that trusted that this way of leading is needed for this story."
The annual USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative surveys the gender, race and ethnicity of directors across the top performing US films. This year's study recorded a considerable year-on-year decline for female directors, with 8.1% of the US's 100 highest-grossing films helmed by women in 2025, compared with 13.4% (15 women) the previous year.
Chloé Zhao says ‘feminine consciousness’ incompatible with current Hollywood model
Responding to new reporting finding only nine of the directors behind 2025’s 100 top-grossing US films were women, Hamnet film-maker questions industry’s capacity for inclusivity
lughnasadh123
Member
I imagine that'll change over time as more women organically rise up from making more stuff people want to see. It just takes time to happen as Hollywood definitely had/has a sexism issue to work though, the process needs to happen by making good products and providing opportunity to those that best deserve it rather than just meeting an arbitrary quota.
Mengy
wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
If you look at the overall breakdown of men vs women directors in Hollywood, then the ratio actually isn't very far off. It would be statistically odd if say the top 100 grossing directors was half men / half female, because that would be a huge outlier.
In other words, seems about right give the overall ratio?
In other words, seems about right give the overall ratio?
Unknown Soldier
Member
Hollywood can keep on dying until they figure out their job is to entertain audiences not indoctrinate them I guess
rorepmE
Member
Been saying the same thing when I noticed the pattern. I remember being a comic book nerd in my teens and there was like ZERO women interested in them. The minute Hollywood started making billions off them and they became a cultural zeitgeist. Suddenly out of the woodwork they came. Same with internet. You where a loser if you were online 24/7 25-30 years ago. Same with dating apps. Same with IT, tech and programming jobs. The minute anything achieve social status and or money, they invade that space and inject non-sense into it. I'm generalizing of course, not all women but a good chunk of them.
GateofD
Gold Member
plenty of female self movie directors on onlyfans
falconhoof
Member
Marvel actor becomes highest-grossing movie star of all time
Zoe Saldaña has surpassed Scarlett Johansson at the box office
www.the-independent.com
Did Chloe Zhao bring up this and how previously it was Scarlett Johansson?
Pretty wild, Never heard of Zoe Saldana before, certainly heard of Scarlett Johansson of course.
Lord Panda
The Sea is Always Right
Marvel actor becomes highest-grossing movie star of all time
Zoe Saldaña has surpassed Scarlett Johansson at the box office
Did Chloe Zhao bring up this and how previously it was Scarlett Johansson?
Pretty wild, Never heard of Zoe Saldana before, certainly heard of Scarlett Johansson of course.
Honestly, Zoe Saldana pretty much steals every scene she's in throughout the Avatar films.
YCoCg
Member
Star Trek, Avatar movies and Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy as well as Avengers Infinity War and Endgame. Just that list alone puts her in the highest grossing running.
MisterFalcon
Member
Zoe Saldana was just lucky to be the only main actor in two mega cash making franchises.
Comparing directors to actors to see who made most money is also a very tricky thing. Dozens of actors all are counted as making the box office by themselves. But due to guild rules there can be only one director for a movie as if James Cameron did every single thing by himself.
But tons of assistant directors will have done as much as Zoe Saldana to shape the movie.
Look at Way of Water for instance:
Harry Ashby third assistant director
Richard Baneham second unit director: virtual
Maria Battle-Campbell first assistant director
Andrew Burfield second second assistant director
David Champion second second assistant director: performance capture
Ant Davies on-set second assistant director
Bruno Du Bois second assistant director
Laura Hutton third assistant director
Matt Johnston second second assistant director
Simeon Jones second assistant director
Jamie Landau virtual camera assistant director
Anja Lill additional second assistant director: performance capture
Narbeh Nazarian second assistant director: second unit / second second assistant director: performance capture
India Power set / cast PA
Brian Relyea first assistant director: second unit
Billie Ruck third assistant director
Michelle Schrauwers additional photography
Jaime Warner assistant director intern
Garrett Warren second unit director
Stephanie Weststrate additional second assistant director
Ngaire Woods second second assistant director
We have no idea of knowing who did what. In modern CGI spectacles it becomes even more distant from classic movie directing on set.
By box office, AD Chris Castaldi's movies made more than Spielberg or Cameron by 5 billion. And that's not close to casting director Sarah Halley Finn whose movies made over 30 billion dollars.
www.the-numbers.com
Comparing directors to actors to see who made most money is also a very tricky thing. Dozens of actors all are counted as making the box office by themselves. But due to guild rules there can be only one director for a movie as if James Cameron did every single thing by himself.
But tons of assistant directors will have done as much as Zoe Saldana to shape the movie.
Look at Way of Water for instance:
Harry Ashby third assistant director
Richard Baneham second unit director: virtual
Maria Battle-Campbell first assistant director
Andrew Burfield second second assistant director
David Champion second second assistant director: performance capture
Ant Davies on-set second assistant director
Bruno Du Bois second assistant director
Laura Hutton third assistant director
Matt Johnston second second assistant director
Simeon Jones second assistant director
Jamie Landau virtual camera assistant director
Anja Lill additional second assistant director: performance capture
Narbeh Nazarian second assistant director: second unit / second second assistant director: performance capture
India Power set / cast PA
Brian Relyea first assistant director: second unit
Billie Ruck third assistant director
Michelle Schrauwers additional photography
Jaime Warner assistant director intern
Garrett Warren second unit director
Stephanie Weststrate additional second assistant director
Ngaire Woods second second assistant director
We have no idea of knowing who did what. In modern CGI spectacles it becomes even more distant from classic movie directing on set.
By box office, AD Chris Castaldi's movies made more than Spielberg or Cameron by 5 billion. And that's not close to casting director Sarah Halley Finn whose movies made over 30 billion dollars.
Top Grossing Assistant Director at the Worldwide Box Office
This list shows the highest grossing Assistant Directors based on the worldwide box office of the movies they worked on.
www.the-numbers.com
Journeywalker
Member
…And some people wonder why women may not want to try to penetrate male-dominated spaces. Maybe someone characterizing women in general as societal parasites (and then several people agreeing) almost guarantees that any woman who breaks through is going to have a chip on her shoulder. Imagine if board rooms, where the money decisions are made, were as male-dominated as NeoGAF. Guess what? They are! Well, at least until the past couple decades. There's not even a token woman on this forum. It's not about the technical aspects of making a movie, it's about which directors get the money to make the movies that have the highest grosses.