The 100 top-grossing movies of the past three years were four times more likely to feature a talking animal than a woman over 60, a new study has revealed.
First reported by The Guardian, the survey by anti-ageism campaigners Age Without Limit looked at the 100 highest performing films released in the UK between 2023 and 2025 and discovered that while roughly twenty films featured animals who could talk, only five starred a woman over 60.
The five movies starring an older woman were “Allelujah” (2023) which featured Jennifer Saunders, at 65; “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” (2023) Nia Vardalos, at 60; “Book Club: The Next Chapter” (2023) Diane Keaton, at 77, Jane Fonda, 85, Candice Bergen, 77 and Mary Steenburgen, 70; “The Substance” (2024) Demi Moore, 61 and “Freakier Friday” (2025), Jamie Lee Curtis, 66.
Shockingly, six movies in total starred a male actor named Chris; with Chris Pratt leading three of the movies: “The Super Mario Bros Movie” (2023), “Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3” (2023) and “The Garfield Movie” (2024). The other Chrises were: Chris Pine, “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” (2023); Chris Hemsworth, “Transformers One” (2024); and Christian Friedel, “The Zone of Interest” (2024) – apparently, Friedel is known only to his friends as Chris.
These male actors ranged between 41-45 years old at the time of the release of their movies.
Dr Carole Easton, chief executive at the Centre for Ageing Better, said that since up to one in five UK cinema attendees are aged 55 and above, it is “absolutely ludicrous to think so few films have been made in recent years that have an older woman at the front and centre.”
“This age group spends hundreds of millions of pounds every year on cinema,” she said. “The representation of older actors in major film roles is so disproportionate to the proportion of older women in the cinema-going audience, the lack of representation is insulting, frankly.”
“Sadly, it is not just in cinema where this happens,” she added. “In many forms of media, in many different employment sectors and parts of public life, the input of older women is minimised, marginalised and ignored. We must all push back against ageism, and its intersection with sexism, by telling the cultural gatekeepers that we want all aspects and stages of life represented in the things we watch, listen to and read.”
Harriet Bailiss, co-lead of the Age Without Limits campaign said that by failing to properly represent older people, and older women in particular, the film industry is “actively participating in the pushing of older people to the margins of society.”
“For many older people who have come to question their value through internalising the ageism they see around them every day in society, this lack of representation will reinforce the idea that older people matter less as they get older,” she said.
“No wonder so many women talk about feeling invisible as they get older when they don’t see themselves reflected back in popular culture or advertising.”
Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning actor Emma Thompson commented on the survey, saying: “Women are half the population 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 on 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.”
The Centre for Ageing Better, a UK-based independent centre of excellence on ageing and demographic change, also conducted a study of over 4,000 people, revealing an appetite amongst the British public for more films led by older female actors to be made.
Over a third of participants said they felt insufficient films were made starring women over 60.
The latest analysis builds on the Centre for Ageing Better’s 2023 Cast Aside report, which found that only one in three speaking characters in popular films were aged 50 or older. The study looked at more than 1,200 characters across nearly 50 films released between 2010 and 2022 and found that female characters aged 65 years and over were more than three times less likely than men of the same age to be featured in UK films over the last decade.
Female characters over 50 were found to speak 14 per cent less than older men in the sample of films studied by researchers. The study also found that older women on screen were frequently portrayed in limited ways — as passive or pitiable figures, mocked for ageing, and often sidelined from the main story.
Ageism in Hollywood is not new, and neither is the campaign against ending it. In 2015, Oscar winner Helen Mirren criticised the film industry for its sexism and ageism against older actresses, calling it “outrageous.”