Is Hollywood finally realising that older women want younger men?

When Sandra Bullock played leading lady to Channing Tatum in The Lost City no one questioned their 15-year age gap. A 57-year-old woman headlining a film with a handsome 42-year-old man just made sense.

There has been a sea change in Hollywood in casting, after decades of older men romancing younger women as experienced actresses were ignored by studio executives.

Channing Tatum, 42, and Sandra Bullock, 57, star in The Lost City.Credit: AP

In Thor: Love and Thunder, Natalie Portman is three years older than Chris Hemsworth. Emma Thompson, 63, is matched with Daryl McCormack, 30, in Good Luck to you, Leo Grande. In Cha Cha Real Smooth, Dakota Johnson has an ambiguous decade over Cooper Raiff, although, in reality, it is seven years.

It wasn’t always like this.

Research has shown the leading man in blockbuster Hollywood films is at least 10 to 15 years older than the female love interest. In the 1999 film Entrapment, there was a 39-year age difference between Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery.

But now there is Bullock and Tatum, their 15-year age gap striking in a comedic gender reversal that we are not used to seeing on screen. Channing plays model Dash, desperate to prove he is more than his appearance to author Loretta Sage, portrayed by Sandra Bullock.

Natalie Portman as Mighty Thor and Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Thor: Love And Thunder.Credit: Jasin Boland/Marvel

The old joke that movie love interests were young enough to be an actor’s daughter can now be gender-flipped to a son. Is Hollywood equalising the age-old norm?

“This is not the first time we have seen these types of reversals,” Monash University associate professor in film studies Belinda Smaill says. She said the 1967 film The Graduate was a cultural phenomenon linked to the changing sexual culture of the 1960s.

“(Dustin) Hoffman is supposed to be the same age as Ann Bancroft’s children, but in fact, they are only six years apart,” she said.

“Quite telling – they didn’t think an older woman could carry that... (however) now we are seeing films where it is part of the film, but it’s incidental.”

Smaill said the shift was almost certainly driven by demographics and money.

“I think there is a greater awareness now that women go to the movies and they don’t necessarily go with men. And that older women are a big demographic for films, if we are talking about theatrical release rather than television,” she said.

“Maybe they want to see more complex characters having different kinds of experiences. And the kind of ‘old man/younger woman’ is pretty hackneyed as a plot device.”

Dating site OKCupid got attention in 2014 when it polled thousands of its users and found that women under 30 are attracted to slightly older men, but by the time they reach 30, they begin to reverse their attraction age-wise. So, 40 to 50-year-old women are more physically attracted to men younger than them, not older. At the same time, men of all ages rated women as most attractive in their 20s.

Hollywood has always paired much younger women with older men. Are these recent film releases a sign of a shift in attitude? An equalisation of objectification?

Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in ‘The Graduate’. She turned 36 just a few weeks after it was released. He was 30.

Nicky Clark is an actress who found herself struggling to find work as she aged, so she started the Acting Your Age campaign to push for more representative casting. She said seeing Bullock and Tatum’s cinematic romance is a step forward.

“It’s so refreshing to see a woman over 50 paired romantically on-screen with a younger man as we’ve become so used to the reverse which is presented to audiences as routine and mundane,” she said.

Smaill said there have always been older women in films, but they have taken on different kinds of roles.

“Ann Bancroft, I think she was 36 when The Graduate came out, was younger than Natalie Portman (is now) and she was (meant to be) this ‘mature age woman’,” she said.

The shift is clear in pop culture and society too. Reality television star Kris Jenner, 66, matriarch to the Kardashian clan, has a 41-year-old boyfriend, Corey Gamble. French President Emmanuel Macron is 24 years younger than his wife Brigitte Trogneux, who was his teacher at high school when they met.

Smaill says Hollywood executives appear to be rethinking the types of films they are prepared to fund, and it’s opening up roles and romantic leads for women who never had that chance before.

“I think an interesting point is that men wouldn’t (traditionally) watch female-led films. But now maybe films can appeal to both men and women,” she said.

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.