"Films by Women Don't Perform." Hollywood Has Been Running This Scam for a Century.

Let's talk about the oldest excuse in Hollywood: the risk argument.

You've heard it. Studio executives have been running this argument since before talking pictures. "Female-led films don't travel internationally." "Women directors don't draw opening weekend." "The foreign market isn't there." It's been invoked to keep women out of the director's chair, off the DP list, away from greenlight decisions. And it is, in the most literal possible sense, a story the industry keeps telling itself so it doesn't have to look at the actual numbers.

International Women's Day is Sunday. I wrote this morning about the technical invisibility — the cinematographers, editors, and production designers doing the best work in the industry right now while male counterparts get the profiles and the household name recognition. But I want to go somewhere different this afternoon: the economics argument. Because if you crack that one open, what you find is not just bad faith. You find a century of carefully maintained mythology built on top of a woman who helped invent cinema and then got written out of the history of it.

Alice Guy-Blaché Helped Invent Narrative Cinema. You Probably Didn't Know Her Name Until Right Now.

Let me start here because it matters.

In 1896, a 23-year-old secretary at Gaumont film company in France watched the Lumière Brothers demonstrate their new technology and had an idea: what if you used it to tell stories? Her name was Alice Guy. Her boss, Léon Gaumont, told her she could experiment with the equipment in her off-hours. She made La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) — widely cited by film historians as among the earliest narrative fiction films ever made, with scholars including Alison McMahan dating it to 1896. She went on to direct or supervise over 1,000 films before 1920. She built Solax Studios in New Jersey, one of the largest production companies of the silent era. She was operating at an industrial scale, producing features and shorts at a pace that drew direct comparison with Griffith in her own era.

By the time the studio system had locked in and set its defaults, she had largely vanished from the history books. Attribution in the silent era was inconsistent across the industry — but the result for Guy-Blaché was particularly severe: a significant portion of her Gaumont work was filed without directorial credit, and researchers documenting her career in the decades after her death found many of her films attributed to other filmmakers or simply unattributed entirely. The Solax company folded; her prints deteriorated; and the canonical narrative of cinema's origins — the one that gets taught — was written without her name in it.

The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché came out in 2018. Jodie Foster narrated it. It was very well received and watched by a relatively small number of people. The history of cinema still doesn't lead with her name.

She didn't fail. She got written out.

The Box Office Myth Doesn't Survive Contact With Actual Data

Here's the argument: female-led films and films by women directors underperform commercially, so studios are just following market logic when they don't greenlight them.

Here is reality:

Wonder Woman (Patty Jenkins, 2017) made $822 million worldwide on a $149 million budget — the highest-grossing live-action film directed solely by a woman at the time of its release. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) cost roughly $10 million and made $78 million; more importantly, it holds a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and generated an awards campaign that punched far above its weight. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019) cost $40 million and made $218 million — a 5x return in a mid-budget environment that Hollywood has mostly abandoned. Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023) made $1.44 billion against a $145 million production budget. Wicked (Jon M. Chu, 2024) crossed $700 million; cinematographer Alice Brooks shot it.

These are not outliers that survived despite female authorship. These are among the best-performing films of the last decade. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked for years that films with strong female representation generate higher returns on investment per dollar spent — particularly in the mid-budget range Hollywood decided to stop making. Their 2023 report noted that female-led films in the top 100 consistently outperformed male-led films on ROI.

The risk isn't in hiring women. The risk is in the assumption itself. When studios don't greenlight female-led projects, they're not following data — they're following the received mythology of what "the market wants," passed down from executives who inherited their assumptions from the last generation of executives, who inherited theirs from the generation before.

It's not market logic. It's confirmation bias with a balance sheet attached.

The "International Market" Excuse Has Rotted Through

Here's the current version of the risk argument: okay, maybe domestically female-led films can work, but the international market — specifically China, specifically the Gulf — won't support female protagonists or female directors. The foreign market demands different things.

I ran a projection booth for years. I know what it looks like when the gate's dirty and the image is a lie. This argument is a dirty gate.

The China market has been shrinking for Hollywood for years — Chinese domestic productions improved, geopolitical friction made American studio releases harder to move, and the whole "optimize for the Chinese market" playbook that drove 2010s blockbuster decisions has caved in on itself. Studios softened storylines, shuffled casts, cut scenes — for a market that's now largely closed to them anyway.

Meanwhile: Frozen (co-directed by Jennifer Lee, 2013) crossed $1.27 billion internationally. Frozen II crossed $1.4 billion. Moana traveled. Brave traveled. Hidden Figures earned wide international release across dozens of markets. The idea that global audiences have some uniform hostility to female protagonists doesn't survive contact with what global audiences actually spend money on.

And here's what that creative freeze actually produces: you make the same tentpole seventeen times and wonder why people stopped showing up. The audiences who left went looking for things that felt alive and specific. The streaming platforms, for all their own problems, had enough volume to test what actually had an audience. Turns out: weird, specific, female-authored things had plenty of one.

The Mid-Budget Window

Here's something the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative data has documented over multiple years: women directors are concentrated in the mid-budget and prestige space — the $10M to $50M films that Hollywood largely walked away from in favor of franchise tentpoles and micro-budget genre. And in that range, the ROI numbers hold up.

This makes sense to me in a way that's almost obvious once you've spent time around working film people. The mid-budget space requires directors who can work lean — who can build strong ensemble performances and use limited resources to make something that feels real and specific. You can't hide behind a $200 million effects budget. A muddy grade or sloppy coverage will kill you because there's nothing covering for it. The story either holds or it doesn't.

Women have been directing in prestige television at higher rates relative to their theatrical representation for over a decade — the DGA has tracked this annually. Some of that reflects lower barriers to entry in TV, and union-scale productions that constrained how far informal networks could dominate hiring. That television work has trained a generation of directors in exactly the skills that matter in spaces where there's nowhere to hide.

The throughline is pretty clear: when a talent pool faces a higher proof-of-concept threshold, the directors who break through tend to be the ones who've already solved the hardest version of the problem. You don't get to coast on franchise inertia. You build something that actually holds together or you don't get another shot.

What A Hundred Years of Mythology Actually Costs

Alice Guy-Blaché was working with synchronized sound in 1906 — nearly two decades before it became standard — and had a technical command of the medium that was exceptional by the measure of anyone working in it. And she spent the last decades of her life fighting to get her work correctly attributed, to be recognized in the history of a medium she helped build from the ground floor.

Think about that from a pure craft angle. You build a production company from the ground up. You figure out how to tell stories in a medium that's six years old. You're solving the synchronized sound problem before anyone else is. And then the official story just doesn't include you — films go unattributed, prints deteriorate, archives fill in blanks with whoever else was in the room. The negative's gone. The attribution's wrong. And the correction takes fifty years.

She died in 1968. The Be Natural documentary came out fifty years later.

That's what the mythology costs. Fifty years at minimum. Maybe a hundred. And then a documentary and a few more rounds of "did you know" before the name actually sticks.

The industry's risk argument isn't based on what audiences actually want. It's based on a century-old story that kept the defaults in place — and that story was built on the erasure of a woman who helped invent the form.

The 23% figure — women in key above-the-line creative roles on the top 250 films, according to the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's most recent annual report — is not the result of a pipeline problem or a talent shortage. It's the result of decades of an industry that built its default assumptions around keeping that number low, and then told itself stories about why that was just the market.

The market, when it actually gets the product, doesn't seem to have the same objection the executives do.

Sunday is International Women's Day. Notice faster.

Previously: She Built Every Frame You Loved. You Just Don't Know It. — The technical craft argument: cinematographers, editors, and production designers doing the best work in the industry right now.