In 2013, Failing the Bechdel Test Was Bad for Your Movie’s Bottom Line

Not all that glitters is gold

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Ahh, it’s good to see The Bechdel Test used where it is most applicable: as a lens through which to expose a misrepresentational trend in modern film overall rather than specifically. Vocativ took nearly fifty of this year’s top grossing blockbusters, sorted them by whether they failed or passed the test. Turns out movies that passed were significantly more financially successful than not.

This is merely correlation between having movies make sure that their female characters, even the secondary ones, are shown to have thoughts and feelings that revolve around something other than male characters. What’s much more likely to be the causation, though, is that effective writing means you get good female characters, and effective writing produces successful movies.

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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.