The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialog by Gender: 2,000 Scripts, 25,000 Actors, 4 Million Lines

Fascinating research and data visualizations by Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, for Polygraph:

But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?

To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.

★ Monday, 11 April 2016