Movies Passing the Bechdel Test for Sexism Earned More in 2013

[StewShearerOld]

Movies Passing the Bechdel Test for Sexism Earned More in 2013

Blockbusters that passed the Bechdel Test did better overall in 2013 than those that failed.

It's fairly well accepted that popular Hollywood films tend to suck when it comes to portrayals of women. Often, if a woman isn't treated like a goal or a prize for a man, their sole purpose in life is the pursuit of one. It's an ugly habit of the film industry that somehow persists despite the fact that women (half the freaking human race) are just as deep, intellectual and complicated as men.

That being the case, if 2013 was any indicator, the reign of the vapid film female may be coming to an end. A recent analysis of the year's 50 most successful blockbusters revealed that movies featuring women in more substantial roles by-and-large made more money than their more masculine counterparts. The analysis involved running the included films through the Bechdel Test. For those not in the know, the Bechdel Test simply asks whether a movie has two or more women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man. Popular 2013 films that passed the test included The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Man of Steel and Elysium. Among the failures you can count Star Trek: Into Darkness, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and Pacific Rim.

It's worth noting that both the successes and failures were split into two tiers depending on just how well/poorly they did in the test. Thor: The Dark World and Iron Man 3, for instance, both just barely passed. A special exception was also granted to Gravity on account of it only featuring two characters with the primary focus being on a woman. Altogether, the films that passed the Bechdel Test managed to gross a $4.22 billion. Comparatively, the failures only accumulated $2.66 billion. It should be noted that the test isn't perfect, of course. For instance, while Pacific Rim technically failed, you could make a good case for it possessing one of the coolest female leads for an action film in ages. Likewise, The Desolation of Smaug actually added a completely new female character to a story that otherwise would have been a Dwarven Sausage fest. Nonetheless, the results are certainly interesting and we'll be eager to see how 2014 stacks up comparatively.

Source: Vocativ [http://www.vocativ.com/01-2014/hollywood-movies-strong-female-roles-make-money/]


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[Agayek]

Well, at least it's not videogames that have to put up with the continuous sexism debates.

 

[An Ceannaire]

The thing is, what is the relevance of posting these stats? No Hollywood producer is going to so naive as to believe CERTAIN movies were successful simply because they had two female characters who talked to each other for a certain amount of time on something other than the topic of a man.

Have we reached a point where we stop judging a film based on it's cinematic merits and moreso on whether it has a completely equal, Captain Planet-esque cast? Because that's also starting to creep into video games.

 

[Baresark]

A pointless thing that makes the folks in Hollywood feel good about themselves. The test is shallow and nearly useless, as the article explains in much nicer language.

 

[Namewithheld]

The Bechdel Test is a great place to start when writing female characters and stories in general. But, like Wikipedia, it is not where you stop.

Have we reached a point where we stop judging a film based on it's cinematic merits and moreso on whether it has a completely equal, Captain Planet-esque cast? Because that's also starting to creep into video games.

The issue isn't as confrontational as that...

Basically, games have been pretty darn good at this whole "game" thing for a rather long time. Graphics and gameplay, those are both advancing (or regressing, in some cases) at the normal rate for an entertainment medium. Some games have better of both, some have worse of both, some have a mix.

That's good!

What games lack is really good storytelling. But, to be fair, MOST forms of entertainment have this issue. Loads of movies and TV shows and books are badly written.

Speaking as an author (as in, I've actually published a novel and worked in the novel writing business for a few years), diversity is merely one of the many ways to make your books better and more awesome. The reasons are manifold, but some just plucked from the top of my head...creativity (new cultures and ways of looking at the world inspire new stories, new design, new ideas), inclusivity (if you have a lot of well written, well rounded characters of various backgrounds, then all us real people of varying backgrounds are drawn in, and that means a bigger fanbase, a more diverse fanbase, and that means a better fanbase in my opinion.)

Oh, and lets not forget, getting into the heads of someone other than the author is good FOR THE AUTHOR. It makes you more creative, empathic, and...generally a nicer person.

So, basically, I want games to keep the awesome fun gameplay, the badass graphics...I just want them to be better written. And I want that to be true of every single medium, to be honest...

 

[Namewithheld]

I miss the glorious days of classics like Postal 2, Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck Rampage...

...Saints Row 4?

(Which, by the way, passes the Bechdal Test.)

 

[Rutskarn]

The thing is, what is the relevance of posting these stats? No Hollywood producer is going to so naive as to believe CERTAIN movies were successful simply because they had two female characters who talked to each other for a certain amount of time on something other than the topic of a man.

Have we reached a point where we stop judging a film based on it's cinematic merits and moreso on whether it has a completely equal, Captain Planet-esque cast? Because that's also starting to creep into video games.

The message here isn't that films aimed at something besides a scrupulously masculine viewpoint are *good*. This isn't a "social responsibility" chart; it's a SALES chart. The point is that there's money in broadening your audience.

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Is this whats going to happen now, a writer writes an original script and the producers tell him to rewrite it to pass the bechdel test? I know that its just a way to see how woman are portrayed in cinema. But are we going to have this for people of colour? Gay and trans people? Or actors of certain ages? A film is what it is, its telling a story that the writer wanted to tell and how the directer sees it and if it took into account every little thing the movie would be a mess. If it had an all female cast would it be judged badly for its lack of male characters? No. Wish they would just allow film makers to make the movies they want with out all these hassles.

How did Pacific Rim fail, they had a female Kaiju.

 

[Kargathia]

I miss the glorious days of classics like Postal 2, Duke Nukem 3D and Redneck Rampage...

...Saints Row 4?

(Which, by the way, passes the Bechdal Test.)

Saints Row funnily enough is probably one of the less macho games in its genre - it's very inclusive homicidal insanity.

 

[Kolyarut]

Is this whats going to happen now, a writer writes an original script and the producers tell him to rewrite it to pass the bechdel test? I know that its just a way to see how woman are portrayed in cinema. But are we going to have this for people of colour? Gay and trans people? Or actors of certain ages? A film is what it is, its telling a story that the writer wanted to tell and how the directer sees it and if it took into account every little thing the movie would be a mess. If it had an all female cast would it be judged badly for its lack of male characters? No. Wish they would just allow film makers to make the movies they want with out all these hassles.

How did Pacific Rim fail, they had a female Kaiju.

No, but what might happen is that writers who created scripts and plots that managed not to marginalise 50% of the global population actually get their scripts picked up a little more often, rather than the ones who didn't even manage to put in two or more female characters by accident (seriously, law of averages).

There's another argument to be had about representation of various minorities, but women aren't even a minority and they're struggling for representation, and the goal of things like this is (presumably) to prove that that's ridiculous.

 

[Erttheking]

Is this whats going to happen now, a writer writes an original script and the producers tell him to rewrite it to pass the bechdel test? I know that its just a way to see how woman are portrayed in cinema. But are we going to have this for people of colour? Gay and trans people? Or actors of certain ages? A film is what it is, its telling a story that the writer wanted to tell and how the directer sees it and if it took into account every little thing the movie would be a mess. If it had an all female cast would it be judged badly for its lack of male characters? No. Wish they would just allow film makers to make the movies they want with out all these hassles.

How did Pacific Rim fail, they had a female Kaiju.

You know, I think you're seeing massive problems where there aren't any to be found. Seriously, who is talking about that anywhere? If fact, the inverse seems to be the bigger problem, that producers are forcing movies to be about white men most of the time because it'll sell better. Remember that whole controversy about Edge of Tomorrow where it stared Tom Cruse despite being based off of a work where the main character was Japanese? And my friend said that the main female character in the last Percy Jackson movie was supposed to have a rough look to her, but the actress who played her ended up being very good looking. I don't know where you're getting the idea that the PC police are going to start stopping all movies from being the way they want to be. Producers are already mucking them up with the safe and well traveled path instead of letting them take risks, so really the problem is the opposite of what you're talking about.

Yes, but did the female Kaiju talk to another female Kaiju about something other than men? If no, then it still fails.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

I'd argue correlation =/= causation in this case; not many of the movies that passed openly used women in the promotional material and I highly doubt they used them passing the Bechdel test in advertising.

I do like the Bechdel test as a good way of demonstrating lack of female representation in movies, but it isn't an objective measurement of how sexist a movie is as it really lacks all context on the nature of the characters (see Gravity technically failing despite the main character being a woman).

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

This strikes me as some pretty big correlation = causation bullshit.

Actually, the point is to show the viability of female characters that have opinions not involving men visibly on screen, not to imply causation. It is to push back against general perceptions by producers about what they think will sell.

 

[Kinitawowi]

I always suspect whenever I hear talk of Bechdel-based assessment of media that it says more about the test itself and the people applying it than it actually does about the media. As noted, The Hobbit created a whole new character to try and deal with the issue of the lack of females in the original work, and they still got slammed by the test for not doing it "right".

On top of that, I don't really get how the test is supposed to be applied. If a film has four women in it, and two of them talk to each other about not-a-man and the other two talk about a man, or do so sometimes but not all the time, or...? And then there's rot like assessing A Good Day To Die Hard, a movie with absolutely sod all to do with gender politics and a hell of a lot about the disconnect between generations.

In conclusion, most places that discuss the results of any given Bechdel test do so while acknowledging that it isn't the be-all-and-end-all of assessing media - and this isn't one of them.