The industry will likely point to recent wins like The Substance's awards success and claim progress is underway. Studios may emphasize their 'diverse slate initiatives' while conveniently ignoring that most leading roles for anyone over 50 still go to men.
Insiders know the truth: actresses over 50 face a near-complete pipeline shutdown at major studios. When they do get work, it's often as comic relief grandmas or one-note supporting characters—never the complex leads their male counterparts command well into their seventies and eighties.
Analysis of 100 top-grossing UK films from 2023-2025 found only FIVE centered on women over 60, while SIX starred someone named Chris. Films are FOUR TIMES more likely to feature a talking animal lead than an actress over 60. Emma Thompson directly criticized the industry: 'Where are the stories about us?'
This isn't a pipeline problem—it's institutional discrimination dressed up as box office logic. Until studios stop treating half the population's stories as niche, we'll keep watching Chrises save the world while women their mothers' age disappear entirely from multiplexes.
If you needed proof that Hollywood's ageism problem has metastasized beyond a mere controversy into a full-blown systemic crisis, here it is: according to groundbreaking research released this week by the Centre for Aging Better as part of the Age Without Limits campaign, moviegoers in the UK are statistically more likely to see an actor named Chris headline a film or watch a talking animal carry a movie than witness a woman over 60 take center stage.
The numbers don't lie, and they're damning. Analyzing the 100 highest-grossing films across 2023, 2024, and 2025, researchers found that just five films centered on older women made the cut—while six films featured someone named Chris in the lead role. That's right: your odds of seeing a protagonist named Chris, Pine, Pratt, Hemsworth, or Friedel were literally higher than watching an actress over 60 carry a blockbuster.
The disparity becomes even more grotesque when you factor in talking animals: movies proved four times more likely to feature CGI cats, dogs, or animated creatures as protagonists than to trust an older woman with the same narrative responsibility. The five films that did manage to center women over 60? Allelujah (2023) starring Jennifer Saunders, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (2023) with Nia Vardalos, Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023) featuring the late Diane Keaton, The Substance (2024) led by Demi Moore, and Freakier Friday (2025) with Jamie Lee Curtis.
Meanwhile, Chris Pratt alone accounted for three of those six Chrises—anchoring The Super Mario Bros Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and The Garfield Movie across just two years. The math isn't subtle: one man named Chris appeared in more top-grossing films than all actresses over 60 combined. Oscar winner Emma Thompson, a vocal supporter of the Age Without Limits campaign, didn't sugarcoat her reaction to the findings.
'Women are half the population and we get older,' Thompson declared. 'So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are.' Her frustration echoes what advocacy groups have been screaming for years: older women don't need permission to exist on screen—they already exist in the world; cinema just needs to catch up.
But catching up requires admitting there's a problem, and for an industry that greenlit five different Chris-led franchises in three years while giving five older women roughly the same number of leading roles total, that admission seems conveniently absent. Box office grosses sourced from Box Office Mojo confirm these films weren't financial afterthoughts either—several cracked major revenue thresholds. Yet the message is clear: when studios need a reliable star to anchor a franchise worth hundreds of millions, they reach for a Chris.
When they occasionally remember that women exist past age 40, let alone 60, those roles often arrive as supporting players in someone else's story—or, apparently, require sharing billing with an animated sidekick. The Centre for Aging Better's research isn't just documenting an industry trend; it's holding up a mirror to an entertainment system that has decided, consciously or not, that certain names and demographics simply don't sell tickets the way talking animals do.
