Films written by women most profitable

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 30/09/2026

Films written by women are more profitable than films produced by men. The ones with a manuscript written by women deliver 25% higher median ROI (return on investment) and 34% higher median profits than male-only productions despite comparable budgets, according to a study by Anja G. Huwiler, of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and published in Frontiers in Communication. Films with women as both director and writer matched male-only financial results despite having roughly half the budget.

For films with the highest-budget, woman-writer films showed 33% higher median ROI, No woman-directed or dual-role film (both written and directed by women) appeared in the top 1% of production budgets across the entire thirty-year period.

“The group that most complicates the overall picture consists of films with at least one woman director and no woman screenwriter. This group posted the weakest financial returns in the sample, with a median ROI of 0.44 and median profit of $13.8 million, substantially below male-only productions.” 

“This study documents a persistent puzzle in commercial film production, a disconnect between capital allocation and realized financial returns. Across thirty years and nearly 200,000 films, women’s participation in directing and screenwriting has grown only gradually, with no sustained acceleration following the #MeToo movement.” 

“Within the commercially documented segment, films with at least one woman screenwriter and no woman director delivered higher median ROI than male-only productions, an advantage that attenuates but persists after adjusting for genre, while films with women in both roles achieved parity on approximately half the median budget.”

“Yet across the entire study period, no film with a woman director or a woman in both roles entered the top 1% of production budgets, and audience reception offers no clear justification for this pattern. Financial performance alone does not explain where production capital flows.” 

Gender disparities widened as production budgets increased. Male-only films dominated the highest-budget categories, accounting for 74.8% of the top 10%, 78.6% of the top 5%, and 88.6% of the top 1%. 

Representation of women in directing roles contracted sharply with rising budgets. Woman-director films constituted only 1.4% of the top 10%, 0.5% of the top 5%, and none appeared in the top 1% across the entire study period. Dual-role films followed a similar pattern, present in the top 10% (3.4%) and top 5% (4.1%) but absent from the top 1% 

The woman-writer advantage persists: films with a woman screenwriter and no woman director retain a significant ROI premium over male-only films, the study states. 

A recent study by 1 900 of top-performing films in the US from 2007 50 2025 shows that only 30.4% of all speaking roles were girls and women in action/adventure films. 

The study was made by Dr Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, a think-tank at the University of Southern California. The study comprises top-performing theatrical films but no documentaries, music videos or episodic TV shows.

Key findings:

• Of the 4,333 speaking or named characters coded, two-thirds of these characters were men and boys (66.3%) and 33.6%  were women and girls. This calculates into a gender ratio of 1.97 male characters to every 1 female character. 
• The percentage of girls and women on screen has not changed over time. The percentage of girls and women on screen in 2025 was identical to 2024 (33.6%) and was not meaningfully different from 2007 (29.9%). 
• Only 14% of the 100 top movies of 2025 were gender balanced – a non-significant decrease of 4 percentage points from 2024 (18%) and an increase of 2 percentage points from 2007. 
• Roughly a quarter (24.2%) of all on screen roles for speaking or named characters 40 years of age or older were filled with women. This finding has not budged in 19 years. 
• A total of 1,559 directors, writers, and producers were employed across the 100 top-grossing films of 2025. Only 21.7% of the workforce were women and 78.2% were men. Overall, this represents an above-the-line ratio of crew at 3.6 males to every 1 female.