I think for most of us, there’s a chunk of our childhood where we wish we could just speed up time and get through adolescence.
Being a kid sucks — someone’s always in the bathroom when you need it, all your birthday money goes into your stupid college fund, and e’erybody’s up in yo business all the time. Then one day you wake up and realize that Benjamin Buttoning isn’t a real thing and start to wonder why everyone’s looking like a Justin Bieber clone manufactured in a Disney sweatshop.
Like it or not, we have a fascination with youth and it’s reflected in the stars we place in our films. Though films like Amour and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel show us that there are worthy stories about older protagonists, mostly we want to keep AARP cardholders off the screen and quarantined in Boca Raton.
The Data of Age
I wanted to do a deeper dive into age as it relates to films, so I cobbled together the data I could to find out how old stars were when a particular movie was made.
First I wanted to look at the lead star in films and find out which age brackets were most represented. I looked at rolling 10-year brackets by both men and women. And the results weren’t surprising.
We get a nice normal distribution with the bulk of roles going to stars in the middle. But there were a few interesting things I noticed:
- Males peak about 10 years later than females; female leads peak somewhere between 30 and 35 while male leads peak somewhere between 40 and 45.
- Females have a slightly steeper rise and fall. The peak is higher, meaning those in “ideal age” bracket capture more of the starring roles. This means a female actor’s shelf life is a lot shorter.
I did the same thing looking across all the starring roles (top three billed on IMDB) and I got something not dissimilar:
What I noticed was that the peak seems to be even more pronounced for females, which means when you include secondary starring roles, you’re really casting out of this “ideal age” bucket. And conversely, the peak is lower for men, meaning there’s probably more leeway given in casting secondary male characters. It may also mean that secondary roles written for men are more diverse in age than those written for women.
I wanted to see if there were any trends by genre so I put together these charts by each major genre.
The trend basically holds across most genres: women peak earlier than men. But there were some notable graphs:
- Family movies don’t follow a normal distribution but an S-curve. This basically shows that they’re movies about kids and people who have kids, so you get a natural dip in that normally ideal age group.
- Horror seemed to have the most disparate male/female graphs. Women had a much higher peak earlier, while men had a broader distribution of age.
- Biography, history, and romance graphs aligned more closely by gender. Intuitively, it seems to make sense that true life stories dictate the actual age of actors and romance tends to have similarly aged male and female leads.
Thinking about gender and age, I also wanted to look generally at the split of male/female stars by age brackets. For simplicity I just graphed the percent of female stars (male being 100% less the female number):
From the graph we can see that looking at top billed cast of movies, men outnumber women for most age brackets. There’s one segment where this wasn’t true, however (the shaded region) — basically where women were aged somewhere between 11 and 30. I wanted to take a look at the types of movies were being made in this space.
Where Women Outnumber Men
I took all the movies where there was a female star in this magic age group and dove into the data. I started by looking at budgets of these movies (movies with female stars in that age range compared to all movies):
Unsurprisingly, films with these female stars tend to be lower budget movies. As you can see, those films are underweighted for films over $50 million.
I also compared genre breakdowns between the two sets:
These female movies tend to be well overweighted in romance, horror, and music and slightly so in sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery.
Additionally, I looked at MPAA rating:
Women overweight in G and R movies and underweight in PG-13 (generally the broadest rating category). The overweight in R-rated films seems to be due to the overweight in horror. The overweight in G-rated films seems to come from fantasy and family films.
I also looked the gender breakdown of directors.
| Movies w/Female Star aged 11-30 | All Movies | |
| Male | 92% | 94% |
| Female | 8% | 6% |
Female directors tend to direct relatively more of these films. Though obviously still a very small percentage, 6% to 8% still represents a 33% increase.
And finally for kicks, I did a word cloud for each of the groups to get a sense of what these movies are about.
As a base reference, here’s the word cloud for the entire set of films I had:
And here’s the cloud for the female group (11-30):
The big lesson for me from these two pictures is that “young” is just as prominent across the board as it is with the group of films with young female stars. It means by default, young is an important attribute of stories.
So it’s true that youth is very important for the stories we tell and thus the actors who help to tell them. But it is especially true for women.
