Want to make a hit movie in 2026? Look to the leading lady, not the male star

Whatever happens this evening at the Bafta awards in the Southbank’s Festival Hall, Hamnet will be a winner.

Director Chloé Zhao’s Elizabethan drama has already seen off the competition from the other best film nominees – American big-hitters Sinners, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value and One Battle After Another – by becoming the best performer at the domestic box office. Takings for the film about the tragic family life of William Shakespeare, based on the prize-winning novel by Maggie O’Farrell, topped £17.5m in its first four weeks in Britain and Ireland.

Charles Gant, awards and box office editor at Screen International, sees the film as part of a trend favouring stories led by women. “We’ve had some very female-driven hits,” he said. “We’ve gone from The Housemaid and Send Help to Hamnet and Wuthering Heights. Before that, we had Wicked for Good. And, in 2023, Wicked Little Letters did surprisingly well.”

This pattern, Gant thinks, might even break the self-perpetuating cycle in which male-led films tend to be written and directed by men, as well as financed and then watched by men, creating a market where there are more powerful male filmstars than females with a fanbase big enough to get a film greenlit. Gant suspects that Jessie Buckley, a best actress contender at both the Baftas and Oscars for her performance as Shakespeare’s grieving wife, Agnes, is playing a major part in the film’s domestic box office dominance.

He tips the Irish actor – who we’ll next see in The Bride!, a gothic horror next month – as the next Judi Dench or Helen Mirren. “Buckley’s previous box office figures meant that even the film’s backers had slightly underestimated her appeal,” he said.

Hamnet producer Pippa Harris agrees that Buckley’s moment is here. “She is rightly adored by audiences, even in this very complex, gruelling role, because she has brought such humanity to it and a sense of redemption.” Harris also recognises the growing, “overdue” draw of female talent generally, including Wuthering Heights star Margot Robbie and director Emerald Fennell. “People are going to see that film at least as much for them as for Jacob Elordi,” she said.

The stewardship of Focus Films looks like another key factor in Hamnet’s success. The British film production company is involved with at least two of the other widely nominated films this year, Song Sung Blue and Bugonia, and its back catalogue now stretches from last year’s Conclave to box office hits such as Nosferatu, Anora, Tár and Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, and even the Downton Abbey films.

“No company has the Midas touch, though,” said Gant, “and Focus has had some box office failures too. Its film The History of Sound, with Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, has not done as well as expected. And Anemone, Daniel Day Lewis’s comeback film, didn’t do that well either.”

But Hamnet is not only a hit in Britain and Ireland. It has made $80m worldwide so far and was clearly not difficult to export, unlike other British box-office successes, such as Marching Powder, starring Danny Dyer. “It’s got much more of what foreign audiences want to see,” said Gant. “And it helps in the US that it has been a part of the awards conversation.”

The film, made on a $34m budget, could surpass $100m globally. And coming up next is another female-led costume drama from Focus: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.

Photographs by Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features, Alamy