Happy New Year, Hollywood. We’ve got some bad news: Women-directed films have hit a seven-year low, according to the annual study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at USC. In 2025, only nine of the top 100-grossing films were directed by women, the lowest since 2018. This year, women accounted for 8.1 percent of the top 100-grossing films, a steep drop from last year’s 13.4 percent and still higher than 2018’s 4.5%.
The study shows that opportunities for women behind the camera were vanishing even before Trump returned to the White House and made killing DEI a cornerstone of his presidency. “The 2025 data reveals that progress for women directors has been fleeting,” the study’s founder and author, Dr. Stacey L. Smith, tells THR. “While it is tempting to think that these changes are a result of who is in the Oval Office, in reality these results are driven by executive decision-making that took place long before any DEI prohibitions took effect. Many of these films were greenlit and in pre-production before the 2024 election.”
It’s worth noting that, in 2024, many people, including establishment Democrats, particularly after that Biden debate performance, were already preparing for and expecting Trump’s return to office. At least that’s why The Apprentice never found solid distribution. The overreaction to MeToo and Black Lives Matter that led to Trump was clearly already making headway in the year leading up to his election. If it weren’t, he wouldn’t have won. Still, the DEI initiatives designed to make for a more equitable playing field in male-dominated fields clearly weren’t going far enough. “After several years of steady progress, 2025 reveals that the film industry has returned to old patterns,” the study concludes.
“In a moment when DEI is dead on arrival and the film industry is grappling with consolidation and a waning theater-going audience, a report like this can easily be ignored,” it continues. “However, while it may be tempting to blame these numbers on federal policies or cultural shifts, the trends in this report are evidence of an industry that stopped working for change before it became politically expedient.”
Check out the study here.
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