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Hollywood is a slave to the box office on the most cutthroat industry there is. Film producers and screenwriters will portray men and women in whatever roles and whatever extent sells tickets.
How women are represented in the movies is determined solely by the preferences of the audiences willing to buy tickets. It’s a buyers market out there. Film producers would do whatever it takes to finance films that sell tickets, as even Five Thirty-Eight realised:
“Movies that are female-driven do not travel,” said Krista Smith, West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, describing the broader sentiment in Hollywood. There are almost no women who have sales value in multiple international territories, maybe with the exception of Sandra Bullock, she said.
Times change, and film producers change with the times. Consumers are both sovereign and change their minds, and in the case of movie audiences, constantly demand novelty and surprises, as even Five Thirty-Eight picked up on:
Hollywood is the business of making money. Since our data demonstrates that films containing meaningful interactions between women do better at the box office than movies that don’t, it may be only a matter of time before the data of dollars and cents overcomes the rumours and prejudices defining the budgeting process of films for, by and about women.
This moral panic over gender wage gaps between millionaire actresses and actresses dare not say that for want of offending the audience that is actually the main driver of any gender gap in movies.

Hollywood activists complaining about the gender wage are to business minded to dare insult the audiences that pay their wages.
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