Leading Men Age, Leading Women Don’t | Vulture
There are more charts if you click through.
I’m not surprised by the results, but I like the methodology and the charts. It makes me want to write a script to do something similar across all IMDB entries — I think look at all movies that made over $X and have a top-billed male and female lead (though they wouldn’t always be romantically involved). Then I’d compare age of male lead (x axis) with average age of female lead (y axis). Meaning that you could look and see the average age of the female lead when the male lead is 56, e.g.
The Vulture graphs are compelling, but it would be way more compelling to see the aggregate stats for A LOT of leads. And then we could do things like look at if/how the pattern has differed over time (e.g., was there less of an increasing age gap back in the 50’s and 60’s).
Mind you, I’m not actually likely to do that any time soon — I already have several major fandom stats projects on my plate, and figuring out how to get data from IMDB isn’t at the top of the list (plus, it would be difficult — their undocumented API doesn’t appear to return age info, so it would be another scraping project).
Anyway, neat, if depressing, charts! 🙂
Friendly reminder that Jeremy Renner is 43, Scarlett Johnansson is 29