I like watching movies and as I grew older, I find myself drawn to female-centric movies or movies with a
majority female cast because I felt represented and they told stories that I related to. The more I learn about
representation in media, the more I understand how important it is in cultivating the social culture and
influencing how stereotypes are enforced. It also made me wonder of where does Malaysia stand in terms of
gender representation and how has the Malaysian film scene progressed in the past 20 years?
In this project, female-majority movies are represented by yellow bubbles and is defined by the female-to-male ratio of the first seven cast
credited being more than 50%, and vice-versa for male-majority movies, they are represented by red bubbles and defined by the male-to-female ratio
of the first seven cast credited being 50% and more.
If you ever want to find out more about a movie, just hover over it and a tooltip should appear.
(Data was taken from FINAS & Wikipedia)
In this section, movies are clustered based on their genre. There are 16 genres altogether.
We can see that female-majority movies do not dominate any particular genre. However, they are
more prominent in Romance, Comedy, Romantic Comedy, Drama and Thriller. Other genres are dominated
by male-majority movies but have a significantly lower number of movies in comparison.
Here, we have clustered the majors based on the broader category, of which there are 16 in total. The size
of the bubbles represent the median salary of graduates from the major.
When sorted like this, it's quite clear that engineering majors of all kinds have generally above-average median salaries.
On the other end, it appears that majors in the field of psychology on average have the lowest graduate salaries.
Box office sales is a significant indicator of the success of a movie. The size of the bubble represents the scale of its number as noted above.
The amount has been adjusted to inflation based on Malaysia's annual Consumer Price Index (CPI).
We can see that male-majorit movies giants over female-majority movies. Not only that, they also get more box office sales.
If we rearrange all the data points based on the year they were released, we can see a significant increase in movies produced starting 2010. However, the number of
female-majority movies seem to be stagnant throughout despite the increase in movies produced.
The movies are also sorted by date of release from bottom-to-top, so we can see a pattern of high-grossing movies being released by the end of the year.
In conclusion, male-majority movies dominate the Malaysian film scene but do not necessarily perform better than female-majority movies in correlation with the budget received. I hope to see more quality movies produced in Malaysia with a more diverse set of genres beyond rempit and horror as those are notably well-received. I hope the film industry gives more opportunities for movies with female narratives and a female-majority cast for better gender representation.