Speaking on the red carpet at the world premiere of his new animated film “Early Man”, the British star was asked about reports of a significant pay gap between Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams for reshoots on “All the Money in the World”. “It’s incredibly important and I think that it’s been a long time coming, and I think the fact that last year three of the top films were female-led films is showing there is change but there is a huge amount of change needed yet. It’s sort of systemic I think,” Redmayne said.

"Movies don’t just emerge fully formed from the ether; they’re the result of the labor of hundreds and often thousands of people. Most of those people are men. For example: The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative looked at 900 movies released over nine of the past 10 years and found that only 34 women had worked as directors on those films. If women aren’t in key creative roles — say, if they’re being drummed out of the industry by pervasive, top-to-bottom sexism — then it’s not surprising that the resulting work is skewed. In other words, for every gratuitous sexualizing shot of a woman in a film, there is (almost always) a guy deciding to shoot it that way."

Patrick may have ended her career in obscurity, but her Gill-man went on to become a horror movie icon “that was immediately and forever associated with the 1950s,” writes Steve Kronenberg in Universal Terrors. Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro became obsessed with the Gill-man after he saw the movie as a boy. “I would draw the Creature riding on a double bicycle with Julie Adams [the film’s bathing beauty] having an ice cream, a triple-cone ice cream,” del Toro said in an NPR interview..

In a year in which the entertainment industry was rocked by harassment scandals, women’s stories have become more important than ever before. But even as waves of claims exposed destructive male behavior, toppled long-protected gatekeepers and finally, desperately insisted that women be believed, the slow but necessary shift toward greater representation of female voices took several important steps forward in 2017 with a wellspring of films featuring challenging, complex heroines who demanded to speak their truth without caring whether audiences liked what they had to say, or how they said it.

They found that male characters tend to be portrayed in higher positions of power and with more agency than female characters. Even after controlling for the disparity in number of roles, screen time, and quantity of dialogue between males and females, males consistently scored higher across all genres. Interestingly, this bias held true even for movies with female casting directors and screenplay writers.

The three most popular movies at theaters in the United States and Canada in 2017 — “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Wonder Woman” — were each driven by female characters, something that has not happened in at least 37 years, as far back as full box office data is available.

Called Time’s Up, the movement was announced on Monday with an impassioned pledge of support to working-class women in an open letter signed by hundreds of women in show business, many of them A-listers. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times, and in La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper. “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly,” the letter says.

Movies like Wonder Woman and The Force Awakens have laid groundwork for equality in how action stars are presented—and clothed. As Hollywood's post-Weinstein reckoning continues, those efforts matter even more; as Michael Kaplan, costume designer for The Last Jedi, said this month, “There’s wonderful strong women in this film, much more than we’ve seen ever before in a Star Wars film. And I think it’s reflecting what’s going on [in the news].”

“I think that her character resonates in a remarkable way that frankly I don’t think any of us could have really seen coming. She is a feminist icon, but it is her own brand of feminism,” he said.

These images are not usually rendered by women, and they’re not usually rendered by women of color. There is no black woman director who’s done a sci-fi fantasy epic, where people are hopping planets, flying on things, and a black girl saves the universe. It’s not been done. So I can’t say with total confidence, 'Oh, that’ll work.' I have to step into the fear of it and say, 'You know what? It’s worth a try. And I’m worthy to be the one in charge of it.'

For equality to happen, we have to rebalance the scales, which means more women calling the shots—telling their own stories, controlling the narrative, joining and, yes, even dominating the conversation. After all, the problem isn’t that we don’t know women exist. The problem is that women’s lives and worth are still controlled and defined by men. It’s men who decide which issues matter, who counts as a “great artist,” whose story is worth listening to.

What stands out about 2017's crop of women-led films are the ways in which they amplify voices and portray journeys we've rarely heard or seen at the multiplex. Less and less are women on screen just manic pixie dream girls, damsels in distress or psycho ex-girlfriends. Less and less are they simply there to advance the plot for their male counterparts. Thanks to the visions and efforts of female writers and directors — with stellar acting by incredible women, to boot — the future of cinema is looking increasingly, refreshingly female.