UK Top Films: Chrisses Beat Women Over 60 for Leads
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- Centre for Aging Better analyzed the 100 highest-earning UK films across 2023, 2024, and 2025 and found only 5 centered on women over 60, versus 6 featuring a lead named Chris.
- The Age Without Limits campaign, billed as the UK's first anti-ageism campaign, calculated that films are 4 times more likely to feature a talking animal as a lead character than an actress over the age of 60.
- Emma Thompson, a campaign supporter, said: "Women are half the population and we get older. So where are the stories about us?… Older women don't need permission to exist on screen. They already exist in the world; cinema just needs to catch up."
- The 5 older-woman-led top-100 films over the three-year period were Allelujah (2023) with Jennifer Saunders, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (2023), Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023) with the late Diane Keaton, The Substance (2024) with Demi Moore, and Freakier Friday (2025) with Jamie Lee Curtis.
- Chris Pratt accounted for 3 of the 6 Chris-led top earners — The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, and The Garfield Movie — and voiced the talking-animal lead in two of the three.
- The remaining Chris-named leads were Chris Pine (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves), Chris Hemsworth (Transformers One), and Christian Friedel (The Zone of Interest), with Friedel counted because his first name is Christian.
- Box office figures used in the study were sourced from Box Office Mojo for the British box office.
Why it matters: The UK's first anti-ageism campaign now has a concrete benchmark — 5 top-100 films over 3 years led by women over 60 — to pressure an industry that over-indexes on younger, male-driven leads. The buried wrinkle: Chris Pratt voices the talking animals in two of the three Chris-led blockbusters, so the "Chris vs. older women" and "talking animal vs. older women" stats measure overlapping leads, not independent gaps.
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