Box office hit films are four times more likely to star a talking animal than a woman over 60, according to a new survey by Age Without Limits.
The anti-ageism campaign studied the 100 highest performing films released in the UK in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and found that while five starred an older woman, about 20 featured creatures who chat.
Meanwhile six starred a male actor called Chris – of which Chris Pratt accounted for half.
However, while two of the remaining Chris instances (Pine and Hemsworth) headlined big budget blockbusters, the sixth – Christian Friedel – was co-lead in an acclaimed arthouse film: Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2024). Friedel is known only to his friends as Chris.
The five films starring an older woman that made the top 100 chart in the UK over the three year period were Allelujah (2023), My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (2023), Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023), The Substance (2024) and Freakier Friday (2025).
Lower down on the box office chart, a number of titles starring older women – including Hard Truths, I’m Still Here and Thelma – further suggest that such movies can also be critical successes.
The second highest-grossing film of 2025 in the UK, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, would have made the cut had its star, Renée Zellweger, been three years older.
The time period also coincides with a period marked by the death or retirement of a number of popular female British actors, such as Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright and Glenda Jackson, as well as Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave.
Jackson’s final film, The Great Escaper, appears not to have made the cut as she was the co-star, opposite Michael Caine’s lead.
Commenting on the survey, Emma Thompson, 67, said: “Women are half the population and we get older. So where are the stories about us? The older we get, the more interesting we are. I want to see more films centre on ageing women, we are compelling, relatable, and overdue for centre stage. Older women don’t need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world, cinema just needs to catch up.”
Thompson won rave reviews for her leading role in noir drama Dead of Winter (2025), but this made just $112,006 in the UK. She also starred in 2022 drama Good Luck to you, Leo Grande, which took $1.3m in the UK, despite cinemas then still struggling in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.
Charity the Centre for Ageing Better, which is running the Age Without Limits campaign, also polled 4,000 members of the public to gauge audience appetite for such stories.
One in six said they would be more likely to go and see a film if it featured an older female lead, while 33% said they felt insufficient films were made starring women over 60. Three percent of people believed too many films were made starring women over 60.
Dr Carole Easton, chief executive at the Centre for Ageing Better, said: “It is absolutely ludicrous to think so few films have been made in recent years that have an older woman at the front and centre. Up to one in five UK cinema attendees are aged 55 and above, this age group spends hundreds of millions of pounds every year on cinema. The representation of older actors in major film roles is so disproportionate to the proportion of older women in the cinema-going audience, the lack of representation is insulting, frankly.”
She added: “Sadly, it is not just in cinema where this happens. In many forms of media, in many different employment sectors and parts of public life, the input of older women is minimised, marginalised and ignored. We must all push back against ageism, and its intersection with sexism, by telling the cultural gatekeepers that we want all aspects and stages of life represented in the things we watch, listen to and read.”
Previous research conducted by the charity sampled 1,200 speaking characters across nearly 50 popular films released between 2010 and 2022 to find that only one in three was aged 50 or over.
The study, authored by academics at the University of West London School of Film, Media and Design, found that female characters aged 65 years and over were more than three times less likely than men of the same age to be featured in British films over the last decade.
Women characters over 50 were also found to speak 14% less than older men in the sample of films studied by researchers. The researchers were also critical of the film industry’s attempts to improve representation over the past decade, flagging in particular the paltry number of women in their 70s and 80s on screen.
They also found the characters played by women over 60 were usually not empowered or active but “passive, pitiable, ridiculed for failing to act their age and often irrelevant to the main plot”.
“By failing to properly represent older people, and older women in particular, the film industry is actively participating in the pushing of older people to the margins of society,” said Harriet Bailiss, co-lead of the Age Without Limits campaign.
“For many older people who have come to question their value through internalising the ageism they see around them every day in society, this lack of representation will reinforce the idea that older people matter less as they get older. No wonder so many women talk about feeling invisible as they get older when they don’t see themselves reflected back in popular culture or advertising.”
New research published in March found that while the Academy Awards have traditionally given most of their acting awards to older men and younger women, Michelle Yeoh’s historic victory aged 60 in 2023 appears to have paved the way for better representation.
Only seven women over 60 have won the leading actress Oscar, with just two – Jessica Tandy and Katharine Hepburn – doing so aged over 70. The BBC found that while the average age of a best actress nominee was 33 in the 1940s, it rose to 36 by the 1970s and 40 by the 2000s. So far this decade, it stands at 44.
Older women who might be in contention for an Oscar next year include 65-year-old Julianne Moore (for Jesse Eisenberg’s untitled musical comedy), Marion Bailey, 75, for Mike Leigh’s latest film and 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn for Place to Be.
Meanwhile, 76-year-old Meryl Streep’s sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is No 4 in the chart of the highest grossing films in the UK, trailing Michael, Project Hail Mary and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie – which stars both Chris Pratt and talking animals.