15% in 2020?!: Female Directors Show No Gains on This Year’s Studio Release Slates
Despite widespread attention on gender disparity in commercial filmmaking, the six biggest Hollywood studios are set to release just 15 films directed or co-directed by women in 2020 — the same number as last year, according to an analysis by TheWrap. While the raw number is the same, one big change is what kind of films women are getting the chance to direct. While Disney was the only studio last year to have women direct major tentpoles like “Captain Marvel” and “Frozen II,” this year Disney and Warner Bros. have five big-budget franchise films directed by women: Niki Caro’s “Mulan,” Cate Shortland’s “Black Widow” and Chloe Zhao’s “Eternals” for Disney; and Cathy Yan’s “Birds of Prey” and Patty Jenkins’ “Wonder Woman 1984” for Warner Bros. “It looks probable that last year’s increases in the percentage of women working as directors may be sustained in 2020,” Martha Lauzen, executive director of Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, told TheWrap. In her most recent “Celluloid Ceiling” study, she found that women comprised a record 12% of directors working on the top 100 domestic grossing films in 2019, up from 4% in 2018 and 8% in...
Read original story 15% in 2020?!: Female Directors Show No Gains on This Year’s Studio Release Slates At TheWrap
