Let me tell you something that will make you either laugh or reach for something stronger than tea.
In the 100 highest-grossing films of the past three years, there were more lead roles for a man named Chris than for women over the age of 60.
Six actors named Chris. Five women over sixty. The Chrises – Pratt, Pine, Evans and the rest – comfortably outnumbered the Cates, Myrels, Emmas and Helens of the world.
And if that isn’t extraordinary enough, films were four times more likely to feature a talking animal as the lead character than an older woman. Paddington Bear. Kung Fu Panda. An animated dragon. All considered more commercially viable, more relatable, more worth the investment than a woman who has actually lived a life.
Think about that for a moment. Hollywood would rather hear from a Peruvian bear in a hat than from a woman who has raised children, navigated loss, reinvented herself, built something, survived something and come out the other side with something genuinely worth saying.
In 2025, women aged 60 and older accounted for just 2 per cent of all major female characters in the top-grossing films. Men aged 60 and older comprised 8 per cent of all major male characters. So it’s not simply that older people are underrepresented – it’s that older women are dramatically more invisible than older men, and the gap is not closing.
Women over 50 make up 20 per cent of the population but are portrayed on television just 8 per cent of the time, and their stories, when they do appear, overwhelmingly revolve around motherhood.
Mothers. Grandmothers. Wise mentors whose job it is to usher younger, more interesting people towards their destinies. The occasional alcoholic. The occasional ghost. Rarely the protagonist. Rarely the woman making choices, taking risks, falling in love, getting it wrong, figuring it out.
The percentage of top-grossing films with female protagonists fell from 42 per cent in 2024 to 29 per cent in 2025 – a drop so significant it would be alarming in any context, let alone the context of an industry that keeps telling us things are getting better.
Dame Emma Thompson, who is 67 and whose career shows absolutely no signs of requiring the industry’s permission to continue, has said what many older women have been thinking for years.
“Women are half the population,” she said, “and we get older. So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are. I want to see more films centre ageing women. We are compelling, relatable and overdue for centre stage. Older women don’t need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world — cinema just needs to catch up.”
She is, of course, correct. And she is in good company. When Michelle Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress at 60, she looked into the cameras and said: “Ladies, do not let anyone ever tell you you are past your prime.” The audience roared. They roared because it needed to be said, and because most women in that room had felt the chill of it personally – the moment an industry, a room, a conversation begins to look past you rather than at you.
A survey found that 80 per cent of all women had experienced gender-based ageism. Among women between 59 and 64, that figure reached 88 per cent. Nearly nine in ten women in their early sixties have felt it – the dismissal, the invisibility, the sense that their most interesting years are somehow being edited out.
More than half of US adults aged 50 and over believe that audience preferences for younger actors are the biggest barrier to better representation. Nearly 42 per cent say the industry is simply biased in how it portrays older actors.
But here’s what the audience data actually shows. A poll of 4,000 people found that one in six said they would be more likely to see a film if it featured a woman over 60 as its lead character – almost twice the proportion who said it would make them less likely to attend. The audience appetite exists. The commercial case exists. The industry is simply choosing not to look at it.
Up to one in five UK cinema attendees are aged 55 and above, spending hundreds of millions of pounds every year. In Australia, the over-55 audience represents 33 per cent of the population and controls a disproportionate share of household wealth. These are not fringe consumers. These are the people buying the tickets, streaming the series and telling their friends what’s worth watching.
The industry is leaving money on the table in pursuit of a demographic that watches everything on its phone for free while also sending seventeen texts simultaneously.
The frustrating thing is that the evidence is right there, if anyone cared to look at it. Maggie Smith at 74 anchored The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel to surprise box office success. Helen Mirren at 65 broke age and gender stereotypes in action films. Morgan Freeman at 67 led The Bucket List. Glenn Close at 71 won critical acclaim with The Wife. Every one of these films made money. Every one of them proved the audience was there.
Emma Thompson’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande – in which she played a widow hiring a younger sex worker to help her rediscover physical intimacy – earned her BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations at 63. It was, by any measure, a brave, funny, honest and commercially viable film about a woman navigating desire and agency in later life. Exactly the kind of film the data says audiences want to see and the industry keeps deciding not to make.
Cinema is not just entertainment. It is how a culture tells itself what matters, whose stories deserve to be told, which kinds of lives are considered worth the investment.
When a woman turns 60 and switches on the television or goes to the movies and cannot find herself anywhere – when the options are Paddington Bear, a talking panda or a man named Chris – the message received is not subtle. It is: you are no longer a person whose story is interesting to us.
For women who are, in reality, navigating their most complex, liberated and hard-won years – raising grandchildren, managing health, finding new purpose, renegotiating relationships, discovering what they actually want now that everyone else’s needs have finally moved to the background – that message is not just wrong. It is an insult.