Edit for readability:
Lower ranking is better, as in “rank 1” would be the best movie rated by that group.
The top section shows movies highly ranked by women, but lower for men. The bottom section is the reverse.
Just about all the movies in the women’s list feature either a female protagonist or prominent female characters. Quite a few of the movies on the men’s list have no major female characters.
There’s also virtually zero overlap in genre. The men’s list is full of war movies and westerns, the women’s list is predominantly kid’s / family / young adult stuff, with some historical drama. (Brokeback Mountain is about cowboys, but I don’t think it would be considered a western in the traditional sense)
The women’s list is almost all relatively modern, the men’s list is mostly from the previous century.
The women’s list is entirely American (I think) and exclusively in English. The men’s list has a fair number of movies from other countries and in other languages.
A third of the women’s list is Harry Potter. I feel like that’s gotta skew the data a bit. The closest to that kind of trend we see in the men’s list is that there are two Kurosawa movies and a remake of a Kurosawa movie.
The deltas are higher on the women’s list than on the men’s list. At a glance it looks like the women’s list represents movies that are closer to number 1 than the men’s list, but I’m not getting to deep into analyzing the numbers here.
There’s also virtually zero overlap in genre. The men’s list is full of war movies and westerns, the women’s list is predominantly kid’s / family / young adult stuff, with some historical drama. (Brokeback Mountain is about cowboys, but I don’t think it would be considered a western in the traditional sense)
This is a solid observation and I think that the women’s rankings favor movies where the main focus is on overcoming conflicts within close relationships (family/romantic) and mostly lean towards a happy ending to the resolution that will lead to further positive interactions and the men’s ranking favor the main focus being on violent conflict against outside groups or opponents. The men’s movies will have some camaraderie and some shallow romance too, but the main focus is on the conflict itself.
Brokeback doesn’t stand out on the women’s list to me because it is focused on a relationship, which seems to have more impact than female leads even though the latter is certainly a factor. The Harry Potter series main conflict is family based (loss of Harry’s parents) and there are tons of interactions with friends of the family and the connections the family has.
I think it’s fair to say that the women’s list has a lot of focus on relationships, but I don’t think that difference in the nature of conflicts is quite as clear between the two lists.
Harry Potter has the loss of family as a part of his motivation, but the actual conflict in the series is with the external threat that he and his friends need to overcome, generally starting as a conflict between students and faculty and ending in a forceful struggle between our heroes and actual villains. That plus Wonder Woman and Hunger Games makes a fairly sizable portion of the list where the conflict is a more direct fight.
On the other side of the equation Rashomon is a murder investigation that’s about conflicting stories rather than a direct conflict between characters. Seven Samurai is far more focused on the tension between the samurai and the villagers than the fight with the bandits. Rocky isn’t about the conflict with his opponent, it’s about struggling to follow a dream, finding self worth, and living up to your potential with a romantic relationship in there for good measure. Casino isn’t about an external conflict, it’s more of a “rise and fall of” story, where the authorities aren’t really characters at all, just an inevitable consequence of the choices the main characters made, and the fallout from their relationships with each other crumbling. Lawrence of Arabia is set during a war but is about Lawrence and the relationship he forges with his Arab allies. The Great Escape has conflict that is all about avoiding violence, I don’t think there is even a single instance of the heroes solving a problem through violence. And that’s just the ones I know off the top of my head.
I’m not saying there’s nothing to the observation, just that I don’t think it’s clear cut at all.
The Harry Potter films are very much British, not American, so the women’s list isn’t entirely American.
Obviously they are very British in nature, but it was produced by Warner Bros. which would classify it as an American production.
Heyday Films, which also produced them, is British. And they were filmed in the UK with British producers and predominantly British actors and crew.
They’re definitely not 100% British but I‘d argue, they’re more British than American.
I’d like to see the list of movies with the smallest difference
I was curious and found some more info on five thirty eight.
These are supposed to be the closest to 50/50:
Also, wow. I guess it’s not surprising, but men seem to be much louder about their opinions. Movie ratings in general are skewed heavily toward what men think of them due to this:
I have hereby ruined the rest of your day’s productivity by once again linking to TV Tropes. Sorry about that.
Fight Club? I’m surprised. That’s like the ur-masculinity movie, even if it is a critique.
When you hug onscreen with a guy called Bitch Tits and sob your heart out, I can easily imagine many women are going to be mesmerized by such a strange glimpse into the mysterious male dynamics of it all.
Fight Club may be a lot of things, but it most certainly is NOT a macho, Lawrence Of Arabia or Michael Bay-style testosterone ride.
I suspect part of this is that your classic “film buff” is probably significantly overrepresented here, and that that demographic skews male.
That would certainly explain a lot about the two lists. The women’s list is much more modern and mainstream popular movies, while the men’s list has a lot of classics that I think it’s fair to say the average person today is far less likely to have seen. The type of person who watches a lot of old classic and foreign movies is probably likely to be the same kind of person who has a lower than average opinion of most mainstream movies coming out today.
I’m surprised to see Return of the King on there, tbh. Much as I like LotR, the severe lack of female characters is pretty pronounced.
It appears that the movies men prefer are generally older movies as well
It’s not about movies that men prefer. They might prefer other movies that are liked by women at the same time. It tells us that these older movies are those men view more favourably than women. But their real favourites might be different, those that women like too, like Shawshank redemption and Godfather (which are older too).
damn blade runner 2049 is for the people. ryan don’t deserve to be caught up in this
Seems like men prefer movies that fail the Bechdel-Wallace test.
15 Movies from the lower list fail. 5 movies pass: Dangal, Unforgiven, M, Blade Runner 2049 and Double Indeminity.
From the upper list, 19 movies pass. Brokeback Mountain fails.
American Pie 2 passes that test, for anyone who thinks passing it actually means anything, lol.
The lower list was women preferred, though…
EDIT: No, sorry, higher number means worse lol mb
It’s not women prefered, it’s women liked much more than men. It’s not about real preferences, it’s about the greatest differences.
Its not that they preferred it but that they (definition of the term preferred) it.