Paramount has accepted Time’s Up and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s #4PercentChallenge. Paramount Pictures, Paramount Animation, and Paramount Players are committing to announcing a project with a female director on a feature film in the next 18 months. Paramount Pictures announced the news via a tweet.
First mentioned during Sundance’s “Making the (In)visible: Radical Transparency in the Data-Driven Age” panel last month, the 4% Challenge asks producers and actors to commit to a woman-helmed project within the coming year and a half. It’s part of Time’s Upx2, the Time’s Up initiative striving to double the number of women in leadership and other spaces where they are underrepresented.
Other studios have already boarded the challenge: Universal Filmed Entertainment Group (Universal Pictures, Focus Features, and Dreamworks Animation), STX Entertainment, and MGM Studios. Walt Disney Company Chairman and CEO Robert Iger addressed the #4PercentChallenge on Twitter, and claimed that 40 percent of Disney Studios’ upcoming movie slate is being directed by women.
Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, and Tessa Thompson are among the individuals who have agreed to the challenge.
If four percent seems low to you, you aren’t alone — women make up half of the population, after all. Bear in mind that the Challenge isn’t about hiring women for at least four percent of gigs. The figure refers to the abysmal numbers of women behind the camera over the last decade: about four percent. These commitments are meant to ensure that the numbers will never again be four percent — or lower. These are commitments to hire.
An Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study of the top 1,200 films from 2007 to 2018 found Paramount Pictures to be the “least female friendly” distributor. Of 125 films distributed, just three were directed by women, or 2.4 percent. Zero of their 2018 offerings were helmed by women. Paramount Pictures’ 2019 slate includes Reed Morano spy thriller “The Rhythm Section.” Blake Lively stars in the pic, which is set to bow in November.
