It Turns Out Young Men Prefer Strong Female Characters in Movies

We’ve been so worried about the state of the young male mind (side note: watching Adolescence doesn’t help) that this news caught us by surprise, pleasantly. According to a new report by the audience intelligence platform DiO, which analyzes movie trailer reactions, younger male viewers engage more favorably to movie trailers and other screen content that showcase character development and narrative depth over “high-octane action scenes.”

Per Deadline, DiO utilized facial coding, biometric and cognitive data across 37,000 viewers to make some startling conclusions. Another big takeaway is that younger men appreciate female characters who are strong and independent. “This data points towards a shifting perception of masculinity and an evolving appetite for richer, more grounded storytelling,” says DiO CEO and founder Ade Shannon.

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This is good news, although the methods for achieving these results are, well, interesting. DiO claims they “map emotions and experiences to outcomes” while gauging the “audience’s subconscious emotional response to content, using facial coding and advanced wearable technology, to produce highly accurate and actionable insight.”

The UK-based company’s findings were already utilized by an independent movie company True Brit in the marketing for Marching Powder, a film revolving around football hooliganism and its aftermath. That studio’s head of theatrical distribution credited DiO’s report for a successful first weekend at the box office, noting that “detailed analytics” provided by DiO helped “identify the specific moments, characters, lines and gags from the trailer that resonated most strongly with the two distinctly different audiences that we were targeting.”

Um, hooray? But don’t let marketing jargon take away from the idea that young male viewers are into more than just Marvel films and Fast & Furious sequels.