Every scored feature film in the WhatSphere catalog carries four relative appeal indices, one each for Young Men, Young Women, Older Men, and Older Women, normalized so the four average 50 and sum to roughly 200. Adding the two male spheres gives a male share and the two female spheres a female share; a perfectly even film reads about 100 and 100. Adding the two young spheres against the two older ones gives the age axis the same way. An earlier study read those axes across release decades. This one asks a question the catalog is unusually well placed to answer: does the country a film is made in change who it is built for?
The figures below cover 2,782 scored feature films carrying a recorded primary production origin, released between 1895 and 2026; sixteen countries have at least twenty scored films each. The short answer is that the raw country differences are real and sizeable, and that most of them turn out to be a different variable wearing a national costume.
The raw picture: every origin leans male, and the United States is not the extreme
Pooled by primary production country, the male share sits above 100 for all sixteen origins with a usable sample. Not one national mean reads female-leaning. What separates them is the size of the lean, and the ordering is not the one these debates usually assume. The United States, by far the largest sample at 1,391 films, reads 127.2 male against 72.9 female. The United Kingdom, the third-largest at 213 films, is more male-skewed still, at 134.7 against 65.4. France, at 243 films, is the closest to even of the large samples, at 113.6 against 86.5.
The age axis spreads the countries wider than the gender axis does. Denmark at a 79.0 young share, South Korea at 80.1 and Italy at 81.5 anchor the older end; Hong Kong at 113.3, China at 106.4 and Japan at 101.8 the younger. The United States sits near the middle at 104.1.
Audience skew by primary production origin
| Origin | Films | Male share | Female share | Young share | Older share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 1391 | 127.2 | 72.9 | 104.1 | 96.0 |
| France | 243 | 113.6 | 86.5 | 86.1 | 114.0 |
| United Kingdom | 213 | 134.7 | 65.4 | 99.0 | 101.1 |
| Germany | 190 | 119.2 | 81.0 | 95.6 | 104.5 |
| India | 68 | 118.2 | 81.9 | 93.9 | 106.2 |
| Canada | 61 | 110.9 | 89.3 | 87.0 | 113.2 |
| Italy | 50 | 116.2 | 83.9 | 81.5 | 118.6 |
| Japan | 48 | 122.1 | 78.0 | 101.8 | 98.3 |
| Spain | 45 | 123.6 | 76.4 | 90.1 | 110.0 |
| South Korea | 31 | 115.0 | 85.0 | 80.1 | 120.0 |
| Hong Kong | 29 | 140.3 | 59.7 | 113.3 | 86.8 |
| Australia | 26 | 117.5 | 82.7 | 97.3 | 102.8 |
| Denmark | 25 | 119.5 | 80.7 | 79.0 | 121.2 |
| China | 24 | 139.3 | 60.7 | 106.4 | 93.6 |
| Austria | 24 | 109.7 | 90.3 | 99.2 | 100.8 |
| Mexico | 22 | 115.5 | 84.6 | 94.6 | 105.6 |
Why those numbers cannot be read as national style
The catalogs being compared are not the same kind of catalog. Among scored American films, 498 of 1,391, or 36 percent, fall in action, horror, adventure, science fiction or animation. Four of those five sit at the male-skewed end of the genre range, and animation is the most youth-skewed category in the whole catalog. Among the 682 scored continental European films, those same five categories account for 89 titles, 13 percent, while drama and comedy alone account for 427, or 63 percent.
That matters because genre separates films far more sharply than origin does. Within American films alone the male share runs from 61.8 for romance to 162.2 for action, a range of roughly a hundred points, against a spread of about thirty points across all sixteen national means. Any comparison of national averages is therefore partly a comparison of genre slates.
There is a second, related reason for caution. Foreign-language films largely enter an English-language catalog by traveling, through festivals, awards runs and arthouse distribution, and that route selects for adult drama over domestic comedy, family film and local blockbuster. The non-US rows are not a sample of what those countries make. They are a sample of what reached this catalog.
The control: hold genre constant
The cleanest way to separate the two effects is direct standardization: recompute the non-US average using the American genre mix as the weights, so the two groups are compared as though they had released the same slate. That single adjustment is the finding.
United States vs non-US, before and after controlling for genre
| Measure | United States | Non-US, raw | Non-US, genre-standardized |
|---|---|---|---|
| Male share | 127.2 | 119.3 | 127.7 |
| Female share | 72.9 | 80.8 | 72.4 |
| Young share | 104.1 | 92.7 | 100.1 |
| Older share | 96.0 | 107.5 | 100.0 |
On the age axis the gap survives but shrinks by about two thirds: the raw 11.4-point difference in young share falls to 4.0 points once genre is held constant. On the gender axis the gap does not merely shrink, it reverses. Raw, American films look 7.9 points more male-skewed than non-American ones. Standardized, non-US films read 127.7 male against the American 127.2, a half-point difference that in a dataset this size is indistinguishable from none.
Like for like, across genres
The same result appears without any weighting at all if you simply compare genre to genre. Across the ten largest genres the American and non-American male shares track each other closely, and neither side is consistently the higher one: the United States reads higher in four of the ten, lower in six.
Male and young share by genre, United States vs non-US
| Genre | US films | US male | Non-US films | Non-US male | US young | Non-US young |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | 302 | 109.9 | 540 | 105.5 | 72.8 | 68.6 |
| Comedy | 202 | 110.8 | 258 | 112.1 | 119.4 | 116.9 |
| Action | 191 | 162.2 | 110 | 168.7 | 123.8 | 119.5 |
| Horror | 98 | 137.1 | 51 | 137.3 | 107.2 | 104.4 |
| Adventure | 80 | 143.4 | 51 | 147.2 | 134.1 | 131.1 |
| Crime | 77 | 150.3 | 53 | 145.6 | 61.9 | 64.5 |
| Documentary | 72 | 132.5 | 86 | 123.9 | 87.5 | 80.0 |
| Science fiction | 70 | 146.9 | 21 | 144.9 | 115.2 | 100.1 |
| Animation | 59 | 112.2 | 32 | 114.1 | 159.3 | 143.4 |
| Thriller | 44 | 140.5 | 30 | 140.9 | 86.6 | 82.3 |
Individual films still vary enormously inside each cell. Korean horror in Train to Busan reads 173 male, well above the 137 horror mean, while British horror in Shaun of the Dead reads 150 male and an unusually high 146 young share. Spirited Away reads a 159 young share, close to Finding Nemo at 172 and Toy Story at 173, and animation behaves like animation regardless of where it was drawn. Older-skewing drama looks much the same from either side of the Atlantic or the Pacific: In the Mood for Love at a 58 young share, The Lives of Others at 63 and Cinema Paradiso at 82, against an American drama mean of 72.8.
Reading this responsibly
Four caveats. First, and most important, this is a catalog rather than a census, and the route a film takes into an English-language catalog differs by country, which is the likeliest single explanation for the older skew on the European rows. Second, the origin field records one primary country, so international co-productions are collapsed to a single flag. Third, sample sizes are wildly unequal, 1,391 American films against 22 Mexican ones, so any country below roughly fifty titles should be read as directional only. Fourth, these are relative indices describing the shape of appeal, not claims about literal audience composition.
With those stated, the honest summary is a narrow one. There are real differences between national means in this catalog, and part of the age difference does survive a genre control. But the headline gender difference does not: once an action film is compared with an action film and a drama with a drama, a film's country of origin tells you very little that its genre had not already told you. That is a modest conclusion, and it cuts against reading a national average as a national temperament, in either direction.
