Edit for readability:
Lower ranking is better, as in “rank 1” would be the best movie rated by that group.
The top section shows movies highly ranked by women, but lower for men. The bottom section is the reverse.
Just about all the movies in the women’s list feature either a female protagonist or prominent female characters. Quite a few of the movies on the men’s list have no major female characters.
There’s also virtually zero overlap in genre. The men’s list is full of war movies and westerns, the women’s list is predominantly kid’s / family / young adult stuff, with some historical drama. (Brokeback Mountain is about cowboys, but I don’t think it would be considered a western in the traditional sense)
The women’s list is almost all relatively modern, the men’s list is mostly from the previous century.
The women’s list is entirely American (I think) and exclusively in English. The men’s list has a fair number of movies from other countries and in other languages.
A third of the women’s list is Harry Potter. I feel like that’s gotta skew the data a bit. The closest to that kind of trend we see in the men’s list is that there are two Kurosawa movies and a remake of a Kurosawa movie.
The deltas are higher on the women’s list than on the men’s list. At a glance it looks like the women’s list represents movies that are closer to number 1 than the men’s list, but I’m not getting to deep into analyzing the numbers here.
I think the lists are less what women and men like, it’s more like what they don’t like.
We aren’t seeing the crossover of what both like, so this just demonstrates trends away from certain films by gender.
The Harry Potter films are very much British, not American, so the women’s list isn’t entirely American.
Obviously they are very British in nature, but it was produced by Warner Bros. which would classify it as an American production.
Heyday Films, which also produced them, is British. And they were filmed in the UK with British producers and predominantly British actors and crew.
They’re definitely not 100% British but I‘d argue, they’re more British than American.
My point wasn’t how American they are, just that they aren’t the kind of thing that would get thrown into a foreign films section. The cultural barriers between these movies and American audiences are almost nonexistent. Basically no one who consumes movies coming out of Hollywood is going to turn their nose up at Harry Potter the way a lot would for something like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, or Taare Zameen Par.
Oh yea, absolutely. Not arguing with that. I‘m just being pedantic for the sake of it. (After all, you did add „I think“ after saying they’re all American)
Didn’t they deny Robin Williams a role because he’s not British? I vaguely recall reading that somewhere.
There’s also virtually zero overlap in genre. The men’s list is full of war movies and westerns, the women’s list is predominantly kid’s / family / young adult stuff, with some historical drama. (Brokeback Mountain is about cowboys, but I don’t think it would be considered a western in the traditional sense)
This is a solid observation and I think that the women’s rankings favor movies where the main focus is on overcoming conflicts within close relationships (family/romantic) and mostly lean towards a happy ending to the resolution that will lead to further positive interactions and the men’s ranking favor the main focus being on violent conflict against outside groups or opponents. The men’s movies will have some camaraderie and some shallow romance too, but the main focus is on the conflict itself.
Brokeback doesn’t stand out on the women’s list to me because it is focused on a relationship, which seems to have more impact than female leads even though the latter is certainly a factor. The Harry Potter series main conflict is family based (loss of Harry’s parents) and there are tons of interactions with friends of the family and the connections the family has.
I think it’s fair to say that the women’s list has a lot of focus on relationships, but I don’t think that difference in the nature of conflicts is quite as clear between the two lists.
Harry Potter has the loss of family as a part of his motivation, but the actual conflict in the series is with the external threat that he and his friends need to overcome, generally starting as a conflict between students and faculty and ending in a forceful struggle between our heroes and actual villains. That plus Wonder Woman and Hunger Games makes a fairly sizable portion of the list where the conflict is a more direct fight.
On the other side of the equation Rashomon is a murder investigation that’s about conflicting stories rather than a direct conflict between characters. Seven Samurai is far more focused on the tension between the samurai and the villagers than the fight with the bandits. Rocky isn’t about the conflict with his opponent, it’s about struggling to follow a dream, finding self worth, and living up to your potential with a romantic relationship in there for good measure. Casino isn’t about an external conflict, it’s more of a “rise and fall of” story, where the authorities aren’t really characters at all, just an inevitable consequence of the choices the main characters made, and the fallout from their relationships with each other crumbling. Lawrence of Arabia is set during a war but is about Lawrence and the relationship he forges with his Arab allies. The Great Escape has conflict that is all about avoiding violence, I don’t think there is even a single instance of the heroes solving a problem through violence. And that’s just the ones I know off the top of my head.
I’m not saying there’s nothing to the observation, just that I don’t think it’s clear cut at all.
Did I miss where the data comes from? It’s interesting to ponder some of these.
I believe the data was from IMDB
I wonder if there’s some strong self-selection bias here, then.
I think there’s some bias for sure. Elsewhere in this thread, I pasted a chart showing that males are way overrepresented in the rating data.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that trend is even stronger with older generations, leading to the male ratings representing more classics than the female ratings.
I’d like to see the list of movies with the smallest difference
I was curious and found some more info on five thirty eight.
These are supposed to be the closest to 50/50:
Also, wow. I guess it’s not surprising, but men seem to be much louder about their opinions. Movie ratings in general are skewed heavily toward what men think of them due to this:
Fight Club? I’m surprised. That’s like the ur-masculinity movie, even if it is a critique.
When you hug onscreen with a guy called Bitch Tits and sob your heart out, I can easily imagine many women are going to be mesmerized by such a strange glimpse into the mysterious male dynamics of it all.
Fight Club may be a lot of things, but it most certainly is NOT a macho, Lawrence Of Arabia or Michael Bay-style testosterone ride.Okay but Lawrence of Arabia is supercharged with homoerotic subtext, doesn’t it get bonus points for that
Ay… thy mother mated with a scorpion!
I have hereby ruined the rest of your day’s productivity by once again linking to TV Tropes. Sorry about that.
goodbye world, im going in
I suspect part of this is that your classic “film buff” is probably significantly overrepresented here, and that that demographic skews male.
That would certainly explain a lot about the two lists. The women’s list is much more modern and mainstream popular movies, while the men’s list has a lot of classics that I think it’s fair to say the average person today is far less likely to have seen. The type of person who watches a lot of old classic and foreign movies is probably likely to be the same kind of person who has a lower than average opinion of most mainstream movies coming out today.
I’m surprised to see Return of the King on there, tbh. Much as I like LotR, the severe lack of female characters is pretty pronounced.
Anecdotally, all the women I know love fantasy and LOTR specifically.
Yeah and Eowyn’s dirge wasn’t exactly enticing to anyone either.
They probably needed more Rosie Cotton
damn blade runner 2049 is for the people. ryan don’t deserve to be caught up in this
I like it too, but it is mainly our boy Ryan moodily staring and awful lot.
It makes me wonder whether the age average of women ranking there was lower than the men’s average.
The distribution seems odd, yeah. Most of the women ranked movies are from after 2000, whereas the men ones are pre-1990
Damn, I’m feeling really unusually in touch with my gender here. I count only 4.5 good movies on the top list (Pride & Prejudice, Tangled, Brokeback Mountain, Beauty and the Beast; Sound of Music gets a .5 because I don’t care for it but acknowledge it’s a classic).
Das Boot, Rashomon, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Thing, M, Seven Samurai, and Lawrence of Arabia on the other hand, are all indisputable classics, while Blade Runner 2049 is excellent modern cinema.
I’ve seen all the Harry Potter Films, and liked them okay. I thought Wonder Woman was decent; not great, but enjoyable as far as DC movies go. I haven’t seen very many overall. OTOH, I’ve seen about half of the films on the male list. Blade Runner 2049 was an outstanding film, a modern classic that’s severely underrated. I walked out of the theater completely emotionally drained.
It appears that the movies men prefer are generally older movies as well
It’s not about movies that men prefer. They might prefer other movies that are liked by women at the same time. It tells us that these older movies are those men view more favourably than women. But their real favourites might be different, those that women like too, like Shawshank redemption and Godfather (which are older too).
*All queried participants are eligible for Social Security
Huh, first time I hear that women really don’t like the Harry Potter movies. Is it because they think the books are better, and most men have not read the books?
Edit: ahh, wait. The rank is reverse order, so women like Harry Potter, but men to not. At least the rest of the ranking makes more sense like that.
I had the rankings system backwards and came to the conclusion that women are haters. I guess men are haters.
Really though, since this isn’t a matter of giving bad scores to things, it’s not really haterade.
Seems like men prefer movies that fail the Bechdel-Wallace test.
15 Movies from the lower list fail. 5 movies pass: Dangal, Unforgiven, M, Blade Runner 2049 and Double Indeminity.
From the upper list, 19 movies pass. Brokeback Mountain fails.
American Pie 2 passes that test, for anyone who thinks passing it actually means anything, lol.
Thank you for pointing this out. It’s a terrible measure of anything. At least it’s a conversation point I guess.
What a stupid thing to say.
Passing it does not mean that its not an otherwise stupid movie.
It’s about the representation of women, nothing else.
Most of those movies on the bottom list are outside the top 100. Go look at the billboard top 200 songs and tell me if any Americans prefer songs listed at 155 or something.
The lower list was women preferred, though…
EDIT: No, sorry, higher number means worse lol mb
It’s not women prefered, it’s women liked much more than men. It’s not about real preferences, it’s about the greatest differences.
Its not that they preferred it but that they (definition of the term preferred) it.
Ah, yeah, I get the meaning now, thanks!
Brokeback mountain could argue for qualified immunity.
I’m just sitting here wondering what kind of goddamned animal ranked Blade Runner 2049 and not the original. Like, really?
you totally misunderstood the data
Perhaps women also rated Blade Runner higher, but didn’t for 2049?
Is lower or higher better in the ranking?
I think higher means “The gender gap is larger”
Gender rank, I think, is how high in the list they’d put the movies with 1 being the best movie.
So, a movie that women rank 40 and men rank 400 means women liked it much more—delta of 360.
The far left Rank is the one with the biggest delta for depending on gender preference. The top list is female preferred, bottom male preferred.
Holy shit, the dates on these!
Old movies are men’s favorites, new movies are women’s favorites.
Maybe this tracks well with the political polarization, rise of fascism, etc: the past was a man’s world, and women hated it, the present is a woman’s world, or at least parts of it arr, and men hate it, so there are angry men all over trying to turn the clock back to the days when men were men and women were unhappy.
Yeah it’s just movies, but they are a product of and reflect the changes in culture.
All things being equal, two of the movies in the men’s list are in the top 100 for men. It’s not so much that men like old movies but of the old movies that men rank in the hundreds, women don’t like those.
Who knows what men and women’s “number one” movie is and what the Delta is there.
If someone asked you to name your top 100 ~ 150 movies but not the top 100, you’d be confused and just throw some shit up there that you vaguely recall looking. Like, I’d probably be scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time I got to sixty, let alone one hundred. This chart by no means represents a longing for male dominated classic cinema - just that men recall liking things that are regarded as classic. This chart just says that men don’t like The Blindside and they’re right for that.
