Women directed 13% of top-grossing films in 2025, down from 16% in 2024

Women directed 13 percent of the top 250 grossing U.S. films in 2025, according to the 2026 Celluloid Ceiling report from San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. The figure marks a 3 percentage point decline from 2024, when women directed 16 percent of the top-grossing films.

The regression reflects three structural problems that persist in Hollywood: studio consolidations that concentrate hiring decisions, a systemic bias toward allocating lower budgets to female directors despite their stronger financial performance, and political momentum against diversity initiatives that once provided industry leverage for change.

How studio consolidation narrowed the hiring pipeline

The film industry’s ongoing consolidation has reshaped the decision-making apparatus that determines which filmmakers get work. Over the past decade, major mergers and the broader contraction of the studio system concentrated green-lighting power into fewer hands. This concentration appears to have reinforced existing hiring patterns rather than challenged them.

The anti-DEI political environment has accelerated this trend. As researcher Martha Lauzen at San Diego State noted in the report, “Hollywood has never needed permission to exclude and diminish women, but now it has it.” The studio system faces political pressure to abandon diversity initiatives that had begun to create pathways for women filmmakers.

The result is visible in how major studios distributed directing work in 2025. According to a related USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study of the year’s top 100 grossing films, Walt Disney Studios attached three women directors to top-grossing films, while Universal Pictures and other distributors together attached two. Paramount, Warner Bros., and Lionsgate did not feature a woman director across their top-grossing releases.

The 2026 Celluloid Ceiling Report
Published by San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, the annual Celluloid Ceiling report tracks employment of women behind the scenes on the top-grossing U.S. films. The 2026 edition examined 2025 film releases and found women directed 13% of the top 250 grossing films, down from 16% in 2024.

The budget paradox: Women earn higher returns with less money

One of the most striking findings in recent film research is that women-directed productions generate superior returns on investment while operating on smaller budgets. A 30-year analysis examining nearly 200,000 films from 1994 to 2023 found that productions featuring both a woman director and a woman screenwriter achieved about the same return on investment as male-only productions while operating on roughly half the budget.

This pattern extends beyond dual female leadership. Films with female screenwriters but no female directors achieved 34 percent higher median profits than films with only men in those roles, despite similar overall budgets. The return on investment for such films reached 1.1 compared to 0.88 for male-only productions—a 25 percent difference.

Despite this evidence, studios continue to withhold capital from women directors. Among the top 1 percent of production budgets analyzed in the study, 39 of the 44 films were male-only productions, and none of the highest-budget films involved a woman director. Researchers attribute this to decision-makers favoring familiar approaches and uncertainty aversion, even when financial performance suggests otherwise. As one researcher noted, “routine inclusion of women into hiring, greenlighting, and budgeting practices” could change the pattern—but it has not happened at scale.

The ripple effect: How female directors open doors for other women

One of the report’s clearest findings is that women directors hire women. When films feature at least one female director, women comprise 71 percent of writers. On male-directed projects, that figure drops sharply to 11 percent.

This disparity extends across all behind-the-scenes roles. The 2026 Celluloid Ceiling report found that 71 percent of the top-grossing films employed five or fewer women in key roles spanning production, editing, cinematography, and writing. Yet only 7 percent of top-grossing films employed ten or more women in such positions. Female directors dramatically shift those ratios, making the absence of women directors a bottleneck that depresses hiring across the entire creative chain.

The research reveals a compounding problem: The spectacular successes of high-profile women directors like Greta Gerwig, Jane Campion, and Chloé Zhao have not translated into broader opportunities for other women. Visibility for a few has not generated employment for many. Without systemic change to hiring and budgeting practices, even a single female director remains an exception that does not dismantle the broader pattern of exclusion.

When films feature at least one female director, women comprise 71 percent of writers—compared to 11 percent on male-directed projects.

Women of color face sharper barriers

The gap for women directors of color is even steeper than for white women. Over the 18-year period from 2007 to 2024, women of color comprised only 1.7 percent of directing positions in top-grossing films. The most recent data shows no meaningful improvement in that trajectory.

This compounds the overall problem. At a moment when directing opportunities for all women have contracted, the barriers for women of color remain nearly insurmountable. They face not only the structural barriers facing women generally—studio consolidation, budget bias, anti-DEI backlash—but also the additional filtering effects of industry networks and greenlight decisions that have historically excluded people of color from the highest-profile projects.

What the data does not explain

The 2026 Celluloid Ceiling report documents the current state of women’s representation and traces its recent decline to studio consolidation and anti-DEI pressure. But the report’s scope is limited to employment data. It does not attempt to measure whether other factors—such as whether women filmmakers are pitching fewer projects, whether there are demographic changes in the pool of working directors, or whether barriers other than hiring decisions are at play—might also explain the trend. Those questions would require additional research.

What is clear from the available evidence is that the financial case for hiring women directors is strong, the historical pattern of exclusion persists despite high-profile exceptions, and the structural factors driving that persistence have intensified rather than softened in recent years.

Photo: Nullcron · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons