Pitch Perfect 2 grossed a stunning $70.3 million in its debut weekend at the box office, proving movies with women, for women, and by women can be a hot ticket. The cheesy comedic musical, which follows the trials of an all-female a cappella group, is already close to outdoing its prequel, which grossed $115 million worldwide during its entire cinematic run.
The underdog story of singing group the Barden Bellas is a sideshow for the celebration of female friendship. Sure, there are plenty of fun numbers that don't quite qualify as a cappella and tasteless jokes that occasionally fall flat, but the real joy of the film is what it could mean for movies to come.
Directed by Elizabeth Banks and written by Kay Cannon, Pitch Perfect 2 is fronted exclusively by female stars including Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson. In its opening weekend, Pitch Perfect 2 drew crowds that were 75% female, and 62% under age 25. By comparison, the car-centric Mad Max: Fury Road earned $44.4 million in the same time frame, playing 70% male. By banking roughly $53 million from female moviegoers in one weekend, Pitch Perfect 2 has shown that young women are as likely to go to the cinema as their male counterparts - a point Hollywood desperately needed proven.
The sequel has scored the second-biggest opening weekend in history for a film directed by a woman, behind Fifty Shades of Grey, which clocked $85 million. Women only made up 7% of directors in the top 250 grossing films last year. Only four women have been nominated for the Best Directing Oscar; Kathry Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) is the only one to have won. As the NYTimes reported, a study found that in 2013, female characters made up just 15% of protagonists and 30% of all speaking characters in the top 100 grossing movies. Only 4.4% of the top 100 box-office domestic releases between 2002 and 2012 were directed by women.
Pitch Perfect 2, even with all its imperfections, shows that a female writer and director telling stories with women can make money. And that should make Hollywood take notice.
Reportedly produced on a budget of $29 million with several million more for marketing and distribution costs, the movie will very soon recoup its expenses. As it does so, it will become the latest film with a female lead to blow away the dated assumption that young men, who watch a lot of TV and are thus easy to market to, are the only demographic willing to leave the house for opening weekend.
Hollywood may have finally cottoned on to something the music industry has known all along: tween and teen girls are a loyal audience. Just look at Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, whose G-rated beginnings have sustained their young fans through genre transitions and growing pains to make them two of the highest-earning musicians in the world. Pitch Perfect 2 is astutely PG-13 and you can bet that young girls across the country will go see it opening weekend with their friends, then the next week with their parents, and the weekend after that with their neighbor, and so on.
From The Hunger Games to Gone Girl, a spate of movies have proven that female leads mean big bucks, but it remains difficult to get these films made. Some took matters into their own hands: Disappointed with the roles she was being offered, Reese Witherspoon, with producer Bruna Papandrea, started Pacific Standard, a production company focused on adapting books with strong female leads. Since their inception, the duo have successfully snapped up the rights to several hits, including 2013′s Gone Girl, 2014′s Wild, and now Big Little Lies, which they are turning into an HBO series.
“I think it was literally one studio that had a project for a female lead over 30,” Witherspoon, 39, told Variety. “And I thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to get busy.’”
When they do get roles, female talent is often paid less than male actors. Jennifer Lawrence, who is one of the biggest action heroes in Hollywood, was compensated less than her male counterparts for her role in American Hustle. On top of a small upfront fee, she earned just 7% of the film's profit, while co-stars Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner banked 9%, Wikileaks revealed.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union urged a state and federal investigation into the hiring practices of Hollywood’s major studios, networks and talent agencies.
“The only kind of movie where women make more than men is the porno industry,” Salma Hayek remarked this weekend at the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s simple ignorance.”
Of course, not every movie with a female director and female leads is a hit: Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara's cop comedy Hot Pursuit has been panned by critics. (It was directed by Anne Fletcher and written by David Feeney and John Quaintance.) The film has to be good, as in the case of Wild, or at the very least, incredibly fun, like Pitch Perfect 2.
Pitch Perfect 2 was produced by Universal Studios - the second most profitable studio in Hollywood - and the only one with a female head in executive Donna Langley.
Unfortunately, Hollywood's lack of diversity is not limited to gender. This year, not a single actor of color received an Oscar nomination, while a 2015 report found that just 17.5% of the 114 major studio releases last year contained characters that identified as either lesbian, gay or bisexual.
