According to 157 film-industry professionals surveyed recently by Forbes magazine, actors are far more reliable than actresses when it comes to the one measure Hollywood values most: money.
The publication set out to determine the most "bankable" actors and actresses in Hollywood; that is, who's perceived to be best at attracting money to a project, who sells tickets once a picture is released, and who keeps the cash rolling in afterward from DVDs and the like.
The magazine asked film people to rank 1400 actors and actresses on their moneymaking power.
The result: men vastly outnumbered and outranked women by a wide margin.
Only four actresses - Angelina Jolie, tied for No 2; Julia Roberts, No 11; Meryl Streep, No 16; and Nicole Kidman, No 22 - ranked among the 30 most bankable.
Just 28 women were among the top 100, and only 185 were in the top 500 (the Hollywood suits rated Will Smith as the most bankable of all).
All told, male stars were almost twice as likely to be considered bankable by film-industry types as their female counterparts.
It's tempting to dismiss this result as another example of Hollywood sexism.
That is, since men run the movie business, it's no surprise that movies reflect the tastes and preferences of men.
But it's not that simple.
Since Hollywood is also acutely sensitive to the whims and shifting desires of its customers, sexism couldn't pay without the audiences' complicity.
As it happens, the survey says a few things about the movie business but much more about moviegoers.
For one, Hollywood has changed since the days when Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Shirley Temple were the most popular stars on the studio lot.
Back then, says Patricia Aufderheide, a communications professor at American University, the studios cranked out many inexpensive movies primarily for domestic consumption, featuring stables of contract players.
But since the 1960s and '70s, the studios have evolved into financiers and marketers of films that earn most of their money abroad.
This has radically altered the kinds of movies that get made, and who stars in them, she says.
Because the most reliable cross-border films are big-budget action movies - car chases and shoot-'em-ups speak the same language in Dubai as in Dubuque - men have a built-in advantage for these heroic leading roles, she says. Thus, the male-centric action genre all but guarantees full employment for stars such as Smith, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Tom Cruise.
The only actress who has consistently broken into this men's club is Jolie, says Anne Thompson, a film blogger and former editor of movie magazine Premiere.
In hit movies such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mr & Mrs Smith and Wanted, audiences have accepted Jolie as a gun-toting, butt-kicking spitfire - a track record no other actress can claim, she says.
A few women - Sigourney Weaver in the Alien films, for example - have occasionally pulled this off, but only when the plots call for them to protect a child.
Jolie, on the other hand, isn't dependent on this story device.
"I don't think the culture was ready for this before," Thompson says, referring to Jolie's action-heroine status.
"It wasn't able to accept women with guns."
But this raises a question: since not every film is an action pic, wouldn't women be as important, as "bankable", as men in other kinds of movies, such as romantic comedies? Don't women, more so than men, flock to movies such as Sex and the City and Mamma Mia!?Yes, but the market for these films is far more limited than comic-book blockbusters such as The Dark Knight and Iron Man.
Romantic comedies tend not to open with the same box-office numbers as the latest action, sci-fi or horror movie, and don't play as well outside the US market.
Romantic comedies also carry a dreaded label: "chick flick".
This is where the sociology and gender psychology of moviegoing comes into play.
A couple choosing which movie to see play a subtle game of dominance and submission, says Ann Kaplan, director of the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University in New York and co-editor of Feminism and Film.
More often than not, she says, the woman gives in and the guy gets to see what he wants.
"Women will go where the males want to go," Kaplan says.
"If he says, `I want to go to I Am Legend', she's not going to say, `I won't'.
"After all the strides of the women's movement, after all the efforts to bring women to parity with men, it's still a question of power and pleasing your male."
