Number of leading ladies in film falls, study suggests

Emma Watson, Gal Gadot and Daisy Ridley featured in 2017's three top-grossing US films

Female-led films may have topped last year's box office rankings, but the number of movies with women in the lead roles fell last year, a study has said.

Last year's most popular films in the US were Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Beauty and the Beast and Wonder Woman.

But the number of films with sole female protagonists fell from 29% in 2016 to 24% in 2017, The Center for the Study of Women in TV and Film found.

The organisation based its research on the top 100 grossing US films.

You're still most likely to see younger women in films

The report said: "Overall, audiences were almost twice as likely to see male characters as female characters."

In the top 100 films, 58% had a male protagonist - defined as the character from whose perspective the story is told. That's more than double the 24% figure for women. The other 18% of films were classed as having ensembles.

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The study also found that 45% of protagonists were female in films with at least one woman director or writer.

But films with exclusively male directors and writers ended up with females accounting for just 20% of protagonists.

Women are more likely to appear in a comedy or drama than an action film

The study also found that female protagonists were "much more likely" to appear in independent features (65%) than big-budget studio features (35%).

It was the other way around for men, though, with sole male protagonists more likely to appear in big-budget studio movies (54%) than in independent ones (46%).

Female characters are still younger than their male counterparts.

Male characters were most likely to be in their 30s (31%) and 40s (27%), while more female characters were in their 20s (32%) and 30s (25%).

Live-action Disney remake Beauty and the Beast was the UK's most popular 2017 film

Women were given 34% of all speaking roles, a rise of two percentage points since 2016. They also accounted for 37% of major characters - the same as 2016.

The researchers also found that, among all female characters with speaking roles, 30% were women of colour - up from 25% the previous year. Sixteen per cent were black, 7% were Latina and 7% were Asian.

There were differences between men and women when it came to genre as well.

Women were more likely to take a leading role in a comedy (30%) or drama (30%), followed by action (17%), horror (13%), animated features (4%) and science fiction(4%).

Male protagonists were most likely to appear in action features (38%), followed by comedy (20%), animation (18%), drama (13%), horror (7%) and science fiction (4%).