It was November 2021, and Chloé Zhao was facing disappointment. The Academy Award Winning director had garnered widespread excitement for her latest film: Marvel Studios' The Eternals. Yet the movie underperformed dramatically at the box office, earning only about 160 million USD — the second lowest of any Marvel film to date, and not enough to make back its budget.

Zhao's case was not unique. Since 1980, films directed by women have earned significantly less at the box office than films directed by men, a divide that has only steepened in recent years, according to more than 10,000 film records scraped from the rankings site Rotten Tomatoes.

This profit gap persists despite the fact that audience reviews of the same films remain largely uninfluenced by director gender, varying by only a handful of percentage points.

Yet this is only half the story. A director may guide the artistic vision of a film, but its stars are the face of the project. Since Rotten Tomatoes does not list whether a film is primarily about men or women, we'll need to take a closer look at the film's descriptions to approximate that gender divide. Consider these synopses for The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Hunger Games (2012). Both descriptions provide subtle cues we can use to approximate the gender data we need.

Not all synopses so clearly categorize themselves as 'the story of a man', nor do all include the main character's first name. But most do include a pronoun — 'her life' or 'his story' — and usually the first pronoun mentioned will refer to the film's primary lead, if one exists. By extracting those first pronouns from each synopsis, we can compare the profitability of films about both men and women.

In the 2010s, films about women grossed 64 cents at the box office for every dollar grossed by films about men. And since 2020, that number has dropped to only 41 cents on the dollar, the lowest since 1980.

Those also directed by women earn even less.

Films made by female directors about female protagonists earn less than every other category — grossing less than half the average earnings of films made by men about men.

Films made by male directors about women earn 10 million dollars less, on average, than those about men. While such films are less common, they still make up nearly 30% of the available data for male-directed films.

By contrast, female directors – their work already underearning – face an additional loss of only about 2 million dollars for projects starring women. That such a significant profit gap exists even for male directors suggests that the gender of a film's protagonist has a significant effect on its profitability, regardless of the creative team behind the project.

Yet ultimately the most significant profit gap remains for a film's director. For films starring men – the most profitable category – female directors can expect to earn an average of 20 million dollars less than their male colleagues.

That profit gap can have real economic consequences. Of the 778 films in the dataset released since 2020, only about a third described women in their synposes, and only one in five were directed by women. Without more enthusiasm from audiences, such films may find it difficult to get off the ground.