Over the last 25 years, evolutionary science has reinvigorated not only the human sciences but also literary criticism and film theory. Drawing on models of human behaviour advanced by evolutionary psychologists Bernard et al., Lövheim and Zuckerman et al., we propose that the application of an evolutionary framework will illuminate our understanding of film protagonists and their associated audience appeal. We report the development of a new instrument to assess differences in film protagonists’ emotions, motivations and character traits across 34 scales: the Assessment of Protagonists’ Traits, Emotions and Motivations Questionnaire (APTEM-Q). The results of a preliminary study comparing protagonists in 100 popular, recent American and Chinese films indicate that the questionnaire is comprehensive and that four protagonist motivations and emotions predict whether a film is preferred at the American or Chinese box office. Using this four-factor model, we found cross-cultural consensus in the way these psychological attributes are perceived. These findings are consistent with evolutionary theories, which would suggest that screen characters’ traits, motivations and emotions are writers’ emulations of universal adaptations to evolutionary selection pressures, reshaped through aesthetic and cultural processes.