The Future of Film Is No Longer a Boys’ Club

If you’ve spent any amount of time scrolling through Instagram or TikTok this summer, you’ve surely come across clips from Lena Dunham’s latest press junket promoting her new Netflix series, Too Much. The love story, loosely based on her own life, unfolds over 10 episodes and stars a delightful Meg Stalter as a 30-something New Yorker who decamps to London to sort herself out.

This “girl, so confusing” sort of premise might sound familiar to you: Too Much dropped just as Gen Z is reexamining Dunham’s breakthrough show, Girls, which premiered on HBO in 2012 and ran until 2017. It explored the trials, tribulations, and humiliations of a group of upper-middle-class white women in their 20s living in Brooklyn and was both visionary and exceptionally well-written. But due to its subject matter—and both the age and gender of its creator—Girls was widely met with criticism for being out of touch, its lack of representation, and the characters’ solipsism.

More than a decade ago, it was rare to see a 20-something woman leading a major project; even more so, thriving as a young woman in the male-dominated world of entertainment production significantly shaped how her work was judged and perceived. But in the last year or so, a new class of writer-directors has emerged, subverting genre and centering women’s stories, depicting pure female friendships, and evolving the traditional rom-com trope for the dating app age.

One of the summer’s most talked-about films is Celine Song’s sophomore effort, Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson as a high-end Manhattan matchmaker torn between two love interests—a wealthy client and an ex who’s a starving artist. Sophie Brooks’s second feature, Oh, Hi!, co-written with Molly Gordon, hit theaters last month, and tells the tale of a romantic weekend getaway with a situationship gone awry, veering into horror movie territory. The same can be said for Cazzie David and Elisa Kalani’s debut feature, I Love You Forever—which they co-wrote and directed—and is now streaming on HBO Max. The film explores an emotionally abusive relationship dynamic that is common among young people today, but rarely portrayed onscreen.

Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in Bottoms.

On the television front, talented zillennial multi-hyphenates are also in high demand. Rachel Sennott, who had a generational run of breakout roles in Shiva Baby, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Bottoms, and the one-season wonder The Idol, just wrapped filming the still-untitled TV show she created and starred in for HBO. Ayo Edebiri, Sennott’s Bottoms co-star, directed season 3, episode 6 of The Bear, titled “Napkins,” and subsequently scored an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. (It’s worth noting that both Shiva Baby and Bottoms were directed by Emma Seligman, who was just 24 years old when she wrote the former.)

Despite this impressive lineup of titles, women still face a long road ahead when it comes to getting their projects greenlit compared to their male counterparts. According to a report released by Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University earlier this year, women accounted for just 16 percent of directors and 20 percent of writers working on the 250 highest-grossing domestic releases. “When I look at my contemporaries from film school and in my same age group, boys just statistically had a better shot at making a second and third movie than girls have,” Brooks tells ELLE. “There seems to be something there.”

David echoes this sentiment, and her experiences in the industry are similar. “I think there have been times where Elisa and I have turned to each other after seeing a very mediocre white man make something mediocre and get insane opportunities after, just one after the other,” she says. “You can’t help but think that would never happen for a woman. I think you have to achieve an insane level of success as a woman in order to get another opportunity.”

Because of this, young women often have to “prove” themselves in a more substantial way to secure the go-ahead for a larger feature. David and Kalani, for example, co-created a popular web series, 86ed, in 2017 before working together on I Love You Forever. The web series-to-studio project pipeline is popular among young women in entertainment, as it serves as effective proof of concept; aside from Dunham, whose Delusional Downtown Divas hit the internet in 2009, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s Broad City also began as a web series.

Elisa Kalani and Cazzie David teamed up to co-write and co-direct I Love You Forever.

“In the early stages of any project you’re doing as a woman, your work gets critiqued and looked at in a completely different way than if you were a man,” David adds, noting that she and Kalani have found it particularly challenging to pitch projects featuring complicated or cynical female leads. “It’s really hard for older male gatekeepers to understand why anyone would relate to that character—because they can’t.”

This issue often manifests in less overt ways, even after a project is well into production. “On the set of I Love You Forever, all of the men who were older than us were calling us ‘the girls,’” Kalani recalls. “We didn’t realize it was condescending, because we are so conditioned to accept it.” David adds: “They wouldn’t ever refer to the Safdie brothers as ‘the boys.’”

With all of the female-led projects coming down the pipeline, it does appear that things are progressing in a positive direction. But why now? “I do think that Greta Gerwig’s movies being consistently so successful is really wonderful and helpful, and Materialists doing so well is great for rom-coms, as well as for female directors,” Brooks says. “A high tide raises all ships, which is really exciting.” Kalani notes that while there happens to be a lot of visible progress now, it has been decades in the making. “It’s not just this current generation of filmmakers that’s made this possible for women,” she explains. “Step by step, we’re finally making more space for ourselves in every industry, but with the film industry, the world is watching.”

In the wake of Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster hit Barbie, there’s been a steady stream of acclaimed original storytelling by women. Two of 2024’s most buzzed-about films were Helina Rejin’s Babygirl and The Substance by Coralie Fargeat. The 2025 edition of Sundance featured Bunnylovr by writer/director Katarina Zhu, Atropia directed by Hailey Gates, and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You by writer/director Mary Bronstein, due out from A24 in October. We’d be remiss not to mention that Sundance also saw the premiere of Sorry, Baby, the directorial debut of Eva Victor, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/she pronouns.

Eva Victor steps behind the camera for Sorry, Baby.

The types of stories these creators are telling clearly resonate with audiences, particularly those about supportive, true friendships and the bleak state of dating culture. “When I think about the female directors that I love who focus on female protagonists, those were the most exciting movies to me when I was a little girl,” Brooks says. “Those were what I wanted to see.”

In Oh, Hi!, a very pure female friendship is central to the plot—and sits in direct opposition to the “mean girl” dynamics that often played out in movies in the aughts—because Brooks wanted to show young people what a healthy friendship looks like. For many, especially Gen Zs who value more non-traditional support systems, your best friends are usually among the great loves of your life

In a similar vein, David wanted to portray the realities of heteronormative relationships, stressing that the fairy tale expectations we learned from the movies as young people can actually be quite sinister. “We were all looking for this thing that we were shown, and when you get out into the real world and you find that, those are the red flag relationships,” she explains. “The things that are closest to the movies we were shown to aspire to—these are the people who are going to ruin your life.” She and Kalani hope that by watching I Love You Forever, young women can learn what toxic men are like, what dating is like, and the tools not to enter an abusive relationship.

As for why a project like Girls has reentered the zeitgeist, David believes it’s because a strong voice like Dunham’s is lacking in the industry right now, due to the powers that be taking less of a chance on new writers. But by hoping lightning will strike twice and emulating something that has already done well, execs are severely limiting the output of great original storytelling. “It works every time—when you gave Phoebe Waller-Bridge a chance, when you gave Michaela Coel a chance, it’s always a huge success, and they can’t really seem to remember that that’s the thing,” David says.

Lena Dunham on the set of Too Much.

“Everybody is obsessed with IP, it’s harder to get original ideas made,” Brooks says, noting that Gerwig’s next film series for Netflix is based on C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. “Something like Materialists or Ladybird getting made…it’s scary to think of losing money, so it’s safer to go with something they know has a built-in audience, but then you miss out on original stories and original ideas. I hope that these ones that work out [will] open up the door.”

While statistics highlight how few female directors and female-led stories there are, the demand is growing stronger—as is the community working behind the scenes to uplift them. “Having support is essential,” Brooks continues. At long last, “it feels like a really lovely moment to be a woman in film.”