Why are there so few female action directors?
In recent years, there has been a considered push within Hollywood to address the gender disparity in the entertainment business. Female actors, writers, and executives have been outspoken about how roles for women have always been hard to come by, and when they do get hired for those roles, their male counterparts are often paid much more than them. Talking about the issues has made people very visible, though, and the ship has slowly started to be turned around.
While all this has been happening, the conversation surrounding female directors has been fascinating. A 2020 study by San Diego State University and the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that only 18% of all working directors in Hollywood in the previous year were female. In the four years since then, female directors have been making a bigger splash than ever before, with names like Greta Gerwig, Emerald Fennell, Chloe Zhao, Lulu Wang, and Regina King all making successful, acclaimed films. In fact, Gerwig made Barbie, the biggest movie of 2023.
However, the number of women hired as directors in Hollywood still lags significantly behind male directors – and there is one genre where the disparity is absolutely glaring. Seven women were represented in a 2021 article about the best action movies helmed by women according to Rotten Tomatoes scores. Still, only four could be considered to be working regularly today. Peeling back the onion even further finds that only Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Blue Steel, K-19: The Widowmaker) has a strong association with the genre, even if several of her efforts like The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty would be classed as action-adjacent.
The four primary female action directors plying their trade today are Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Cathy Yan (Birds of Prey), Elizabeth Banks (Charlie’s Angels, Cocaine Bear) and Gina Prince-Blythewood (The Old Guard, The Woman King). When you compare that to the litany of men regularly hired to helm blockbusters and action spectaculars, it makes you wonder if Hollywood still considers action a “boy’s club” – and why.
In a 2022 interview with IndieWire, Prince-Blythewood admitted that it was an extremely tough task to convince anyone in Hollywood that she could direct an action film. She said, “I’ve always seen myself here, but the industry has not seen me here.” Prince-Blythewood revealed that she had to direct an episode of the 2017 Marvel series Cloak & Dagger to prove that she had a handle on directing action because, before that, she was resolutely ignored by action producers. She lamented, “The hellishness of it is, you can’t get in the room if you have no action experience. But how do you get action experience?”
Sadly, a woman trying to pitch herself as an action director in Hollywood has always been an uphill battle. In The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, Naomi McDougall Jones explained that a damaging preconception exists in the industry. She claimed the prevailing wisdom is that “women are only equipped to direct dramas and maybe comedy, and so are rarely hired for lucrative genres, such as action films or thrillers. Males, in contrast, work across all genres.”
This woeful perception is why so much extra onus is placed on the financial performance of any action film that defies all odds by being shepherded to the screen by a woman. These films are seen as representative of a much larger movement instead of simply one film directed by one person. For example, when Elizabeth Banks’ Charlie’s Angels disappointed at the box office, many industry insiders likely thought, “Well, that’s why women shouldn’t direct action movies” – an opinion that would never be thrown around if a male director’s movie flopped.
In truth, as depressing as it is to consider, a female action director appears to some as something of a niche within a niche. There are already fewer women directors, to begin with, so the pool of talent for this one genre – which has historically been associated with masculinity – is always going to be smaller. For there to be more female action directors, the important work of fostering more spaces for female directors in general needs to continue.
After all, as Heather Rabbatts of Time’s Up UK told the BBC, “People tend to recruit in their own image”, meaning men in positions of power in Hollywood are more likely to hire men, and directing “has not been a role where women have seen many other women role models” through the years.
Let’s hope Prince-Blythewood and others like her can keep fighting in the coming years to ensure more women get their chance to direct action movies.
