The news website "Vocativ", when subjecting the top-grossing films of 2013 to the Bechdel test, concluded that roughly half of them passed (although some dubiously) and the other half failed.
(meta data) TITLE: Hollywood Movies With Strong Female Roles Make More Money - Vocativ 80 captures 07 Mar 2014 - 20 Oct 2022 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. Collection: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20140307111753/http://www.vocativ.com:80/culture/celebrity/hollywood-movies-strong-female-roles-make-money/ Email Newsletter ## Social ## Sections ## Vocativ Streams © Vocativ 2014. All Rights Reserved # Hollywood Movies With Strong Female Roles Make More Money ## The biggest blockbusters of 2013 scored pretty well on the Bechdel Test, a measure of quality onscreen time for women—but even better at the box office AUTHORS: Versha Sharma and Hanna Sender POSTED: Jan 02, 2014 09:36 EST Dear Hollywood: We know how you can make more money in 2014. Put more women onscreen. We analyzed the top 50 biggest box office movies of 2013 to see if they passed the Bechdel Test, which evaluates whether a movie has two or more women in it who have a conversation about something other than a man. It's named after cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who wrote about it in her popular comic Dykes to Watch Out For. (Bechdel actually credits her friend Liz Wallace with the rule.) ### On Our Tumblr Check out the highlights of our Facebook chat with the authors about Hollywood and the Bechdel test. The three-part criteria for a movie to pass: It has to have (1) at least two women in it, who (2) talk to each other about (3) something besides a man. Out of 50 total movies we looked at, 17, or 36 percent, passed with flying colors. An additional seven technically passed, but are deemed "dubious" by Bechdel-watchers because of the dialogue (some of it was about a man, some of it wasn't, but not much). What we found is this: The grand total domestic box office number for the movies that passed is significantly higher than the domestic box office total for the movies that didn't. We're talking billions. ### How We Know Bechdel resources are widely available on the web. We scraped test scores and data from BechdelTest.com, online forums and blog postings. IMDB's list of the top-grossing feature films of 2013 in the U.S. can be found here. ### N/A The following films did not have Bechdel scores (let us know if you've seen them!). Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa The Best Man Holiday UPDATE: A reader tells us The Best Man Holiday passes the test. Now you know. (Its box office gross doesn't change the totals by much.) Perhaps even more shocking is that every single director was male. We repeat: 50 movies, zero female directors. Maybe some more women behind the camera would be a good start, eh? (UPDATE: An astute reader informs us that Frozen was actually co-directed by Jennifer Lee, so make that .5 out of 50, with apologies to Ms. Lee.) One huge caveat: As listed on the Bechdel Test website, Gravity technically fails. We did not include it in the fail list, as it's a special case: There are only two main characters onscreen in the movie, and Sandra Bullock is one of them. She's also onscreen way more than co-star George Clooney. It grossed $254.6 million domestically, so even if we had included it in the fail total, the clear victor would remain the same. ### NOW READ THIS Movies That Passed If G.I. Joe can do it, anyone can (you would think). Fast and Furious 6? We're impressed. (And RIP Paul Walker.) The Heat is one of our favorites—classic cop duo schtick with two badass women: Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy. They inspired many a female pair to dress up as cops for Halloween, which the movie's official Twitter account documented in detail. ### NOW READ THIS Hunger Games: Catching Fire is another standout, inspiring little girls everywhere with Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss as the heroine of her world, but the sequel has the added bonus of Jena Malone's fierce Johanna Mason, who some would love to see replace Peeta and Gale as a love interest. ### The Twitter Games #### Dec 31, 2013 11:06 UTC@Gossip_Central_ Women Warriors and Soft Men: Lessons from The Hunger Games, Hobbit and Other Fantastic Offerings - The... http://t.co/EbBItRPUIu ### Dec 31, 2013 02:52 UTC@mikaeluhhh "I like this because it's about women's rights" - my stepdad on the hunger games #### Dec 13, 2013 06:42 UTC@hungergamesnet Jennifer Lawrence, Suzanne Collins & Nina Jacobson make Women in Entertainment Power 100 List: http://t.co/eZxOvx7PGV http://t.co/t1K2EY6t3O #### Nov 22, 2013 16:07 UTC@filmdotcom Girls on Fire: Katniss Everdeen and the Revolutionary Women of Film: http://t.co/H0CBAD5eOk Movies That Technically Passed, But Need Some Work Iron Man 3! It had such potential. Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a strong female lead but this time around, she didn't have Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), to bounce ideas off of. Same with Thor 2: Natalie Portman's Jane Foster stands her own against Thor's rather intimidating father (Anthony Hopkins), but most of her conversations with MILF Frigga (Rene Russo) or her intern Darcy (Kat Dennings) are, well, about Thor. ### Now Read This One thing the Thor filmmakers did do: Marvel partnered with the National Academy of Sciences to sponsor a contest for young female scientists, inspired by astrophysicist Foster in the movie. The "Ultimate Mentor Adventure" picked 10 winning girls out of 300 entries to visit Hollywood, meet the cast and get mentoring from real-life women scientists. Movies That Failed Ron Burgundy and Captain Kirk, we need to talk. ### NOW READ THIS We want to give Peter Jackson some credit for snubbing purist Tolkien fans and adding in an entirely made-up character to The Hobbit just so there would be a woman onscreen (there isn't one in the book). The she-elf Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly, is able to slay orcs just as well (and dreamily) as Orlando Bloom's Legolas, but she's also stuck in the middle of a love triangle. For her part, Lilly says she wasn't a fan of the idea and that it was added in later reshoots. As for the stoner epic This Is The End, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg get some points for Rihanna slapping the shit out of Michael Cera and for Emma Watson standing up for herself against rapey talk. But still a pretty stunning fail by Bechdel standards. Here's to a better 2014. ##### Now Read This: #### The Face of Pro-Russia Ukraine Respond Now Post It Show More AUTHORS: Versha Sharma and Hanna Sender POSTED: Jan 02, 2014 09:36 EST ### More Stories #### Bulls, Blood and Rum Toby Muse #### Trolling Oldies: Retirees Take to Reddit Elizabeth Kulze #### Guys and Dolls Vocativ Staff #### Mexico's Cartel Brats Brag About Themselves on Social Media Duncan Tucker #### Is This Mafia Group Responsible for Naples' Skyrocketing Cancer Rate? Gianclaudio Angelini #### How LinkedIn Tricks You Into Spamming Your Friends Eric Markowitz #### What Do Our Selfies Say About Our Selves? Emily Levy #### Brooklyn's Cruelest Crossroads Gianclaudio Angelini Please enter a comment. Please Wait ... Join the Fray Obamacare Is Actually Good. No, Really Join Vocativ Sign up to receive the best of Vocativ in your mailbox. Thanks for signing up. Get social with Vocativ below.
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Bechdel test
Application.:Pass and fail proportions.
The website "bechdeltest.com" is a user-edited database of some 6,500 films classified by whether they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be "named" characters. As of April 2015, it listed 58% of these films as passing all three of the test's requirements, 10% as failing one, 22% as failing two, and 10% as failing all three. 
 According to Mark Harris of "Entertainment Weekly", if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of the 2009 Academy Award for Best Picture nominees.