In many of these instances, people are clearly masking pain – pain that in some cases may spur development of disordered eating, potentially leading to conditions such as anorexia. “Regardless of gender, weight, and body image, one thing is clear: The big screen simply serves to magnify the weighty conversations that occur in everyday life. It may be a common reality, and indeed we draw humor from it regularly, but it”s fundamentally tragic – not comical – that anyone would feel compelled to joke about their weight to dodge public scrutiny and derision. Does that mean it happens so often I have become immune to its frequency?ī concludes their study with some closing thoughts: The most shocking part about these statistics is that I don't remember a single time any of these actors made references to obesity, fatness or any kind of body size. Brian Cox came in at 6.71 weight references, Tom Sizemore made 6.33 mentions, and Tom Cruise made 5.83. Billy Murray ranked the highest, with an average of 7.67 weight-related mentions per script. Lastly, they ranked all of the actors who had lines in those scripts, and totaled who said the most about body size.

They also categorized which film genres discuss weight the most, and comedies came in number one. Isn't that movie about cars and not body size? “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” came in second, which makes sense, considering the presence of a character named “Fat Bastard”. That means weight was brought up every three and half minutes.

The study also broke down which films mentioned weight the most, with “Drive Angry” coming in at 31 mentions in its 104 minute script. That puts 707 size mentions out of 1,223 scripts right around %58 - that's more than half of every script they read. The study discovered that out of 1,223 film scripts studied, “ 707 contained at least one of the following terms: fat, fatty, chunky, big boned (combined with big-boned), chubby, husky, obese, overweight, plump, portly, and stout.” They scanned each script looking for mentions of weight, size, and any characters whose names had to do with their body type. These statistics from, whose staff read though 1,223 scripts that spanned the last 90 years of film making. But who defines which body images should be praised and which images should be ridiculed?Īccording to a recent study, which was featured on RunWayRiot, weight is mentioned in more Hollywood scripts than you would think. Hollywood is an industry built on body image.

A Winter At Broken Spur by Blaire Brand