Women still make up the majority of moviegoers, prefer female superheroes

By Katie Rife | March 27, 2014 | 5:51pm

Aux Features Film

Suggesting that “chick flicks” means “pretty much all movies”, the MPAA presented its latest data on cinema attendance at CinemaCon in Las Vegas this week, and for the fourth year in a row, women made up the majority of movie audiences in 2013. It’s a slim majority—52 percent of moviegoers last year were female, just slightly outpacing women’s 50.8 percent share of the U.S. population. Women also accounted for 50 percent of movie tickets sold in 2013. But what are these women seeing? Surely half of all films released last year didn’t concern the romantic misadventures of an architect who dreams of opening her own cupcake shop.

As it turns out, women also like splashy, action-packed superhero movies, though they prefer them with female protagonists. The MPAA’s analysis of the five top-grossing films of last year—Iron Man 3, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Despicable Me 2, Man Of Steel, and Monsters University—showed that, while females accounted for only 40 percent of the audience for Man Of Steel, and 42 percent of the audience for Iron Man 3, they made up 54 percent of those who paid to see The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in theaters. In conclusion, can we have that Wonder Woman movie now, please? (A Black Widow movie would also work.)